EPISODE SUMMARY
Chewing glass is what Solana developers do. Introducing a new series on the Solana Podcast, Chewing Glass! Chase Barker (Developer Relations Lead at Solana Labs) talks shop with the most interesting builders in the Solana ecosystem. It’s for devs, by devs. Today's guest is PaulX, a Solana developer who invented the Solana Escrow program (lovingly referred to as the "Solana Bible") and core contributor to Anchor. 00:40 - Intro / Origin Story 3:58 - How did Paul X find out about Solana? 7:43 - Motivation behind creating the escrow program 14:13 - Framework, using Anchor in Solana 21:08 - How can folks transition from web 2.0 to web 3.0 29:00 - Advice to other developers 00:39 - Intro 01:51 - pencilflip’s background03:30 - Working at facebook vs. web 3.0 07:31 - How pencilflip got into crypto 08:52 - Views on NFTs 10:45 - Getting into Solana 15:29 - Experience working in lower level 17:56 - What was his method to learn Solana? 21:01 - What’s the hardest concept on Solana? 23:53 - How fast did he move from Rust to Anchor? 27:35 - Building on Solana 33:24 - Advice to people moving to Web 3.0 DISCLAIMER The information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.
EPISODE NOTES
Chewing glass is what Solana developers do. Introducing a new series on the Solana Podcast, Chewing Glass! Chase Barker (Developer Relations Lead at Solana Labs) talks shop with the most interesting builders in the Solana ecosystem. It’s for devs, by devs.
Today’s guest is PaulX, a Solana developer who invented the Solana Escrow program (lovingly referred to as the “Solana Bible”) and core contributor to Anchor.
- 00:40 – Intro / Origin Story
- 3:58 – How did Paul X find out about Solana?
- 7:43 – Motivation behind creating the escrow program
- 14:13 – Framework, using Anchor in Solana
- 21:08 – How can folks transition from web 2.0 to web 3.0
- 29:00 – Advice to other developers
- 00:39 – Intro
- 01:51 – pencilflip’s background
03:30 – Working at facebook vs. web 3.0 - 07:31 – How pencilflip got into crypto
- 08:52 – Views on NFTs
- 10:45 – Getting into Solana
- 15:29 – Experience working in lower level
- 17:56 – What was his method to learn Solana?
- 21:01 – What’s the hardest concept on Solana?
- 23:53 – How fast did he move from Rust to Anchor?
- 27:35 – Building on Solana
- 33:24 – Advice to people moving to Web 3.0
DISCLAIMER
The information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.
chase (00:38):
Hey everybody, and welcome to Chewing Glass, the show where we talk to Solana developers who have been building in the Solana ecosystem. We talk about the good, the bad and the ugly. Today, we have our very first and very special guest, Paul X. Paul X is actually the creator of the escrow program. The Solana escrow program, this program actually saved a lot of lives over the months. Back of the day, all that existed was docs.solana.com and the Paul X escrow tutorial, sometimes referred to as the Solana bible. How’s it going, Paul?
Paul X (01:15):
Yeah. Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, I’m doing great.
chase (01:20):
Yeah, it’s really great to have you. Just for context, Paul and I met probably about six months ago, or five months ago. When I first joined, I was writing a Getting Started blog post. I found out about the escrow tutorial. I wanted to talk to Paul to get some feedback and really just kind of get my bearings about me for what’s going on in the Solana ecosystem. Also more recently, had a chance to catch up with him in Lisbon unexpectedly. That was pretty great. I guess we’re just going to dive right in. I guess the first question I’ve got for you, Paul, is when did you get into blockchain?
Paul X (01:57):
First of all, I really enjoyed Lisbon as well, and seeing you there. Very cool. Just in general, the whole conference. It’s really quite an experience, I think. I’m an undergrad in computer science, I’m in my second year right now. So, last year I was in my first and I felt like I wanted… I had been working for a year already, or actually two, I think, just part-time next to university, but regular full-stack engineering, but I got bored. I wanted to do something more challenging and I knew about crypto, so I thought that would be an interesting area to explore. So, that’s what I did. I explored.
chase (02:52):
That’s kind of me, I dove in about 2017. My first crypto purchase started building around 2018. Just out of curiosity, what was the first crypto that you ever purchased? The people want to know.
Paul X (03:07):
Bitcoin, most likely.
chase (03:14):
Yeah.
Paul X (03:14):
I don’t remember, but if I had to guess, it would have to be Bitcoin, I think.
chase (03:20):
If it was three years ago or longer, I think most people’s probably, really Coinbase, at least for us in the US was it. There was only three at the time.
Paul X (03:32):
Yeah. Oh, yeah! I actually remember how I bought them. It was actually done through… Not through an order book exchange, but just a message board in [crosstalk 00:03:47].
chase (03:47):
My Local Bitcoin? Was that the one?
Paul X (03:50):
Yeah, maybe something like that. Someone just posted, then you sent the money to their private bank account and they sent you the Bitcoin.
chase (03:58):
One of my friends did the same thing. I was like, “You did what?” I guess the next question, now that we got the “when you got interested in the space” out of the way, when and how did you find out about so Solana? Because being so early in writing the first tutorial, you were here before a lot of people. So I guess, how did you find out about it?
Paul X (04:29):
I don’t remember exactly when. I know that Serum hadn’t launched yet. I think it was about a month or two before Serum launched. Like I said, I wanted to explore the space. I’m an engineer, I want to build things, so I looked for platforms to build on. The obvious choice was obviously Ethereum. I wanted to build something that I could play around with and I couldn’t really do that on Ethereum because it still is so expensive. So, that just wasn’t really an option for me.
Paul X (05:16):
So I looked around and I… Layer 2s, also, weren’t a thing. They weren’t live yet. There’s only so many options, then, that are left, that are legit, right? Obviously, the 2017 chains, they’re still there, but wasn’t… I wanted to explore the new ones. Yeah, I just wanted to get started, so I basically just looked up which chains were there, and I looked for a chain that seemed to have a legit team, a legit tech, and something that was actually live and working. Solana was that, and yeah, that’s sort of how I got started.
chase (06:12):
Cool. What was the first thing you looked at when you found out about Solana? Was it the core innovation articles or was it just going straight to the documentation at the time?
Paul X (06:22):
It was the white paper and the articles, but the articles are not that detailed. There’s only an introduction and the white paper also isn’t that detailed, but the time, because I was relatively early, there weren’t that many people in the Discord. So, I could just-
chase (06:49):
How many?
Paul X (06:50):
[crosstalk 00:06:50].chase (06:50):
Just curious, how many [crosstalk 00:06:52] were in there?
Paul X (06:55):
I don’t have a number. I just remember that there were a couple of regulars that were asking questions. One of them was [Daffy 00:07:06] from Mango and Smith, but the point is, you could talk with the Solana team relatively easily in the DeFi support channel. You’d good answers quickly, so we just chatted. That’s sort of how I learned. That’s also how I got much of the knowledge to write the blog post and the docs at the time. The docs are better now, but still lots to work on. At that time, there was just, talking with the Solana team about the docs really, really helped.
chase (07:57):
Yeah. So, I knew Daffy was in there. I knew of these other guys. Everybody’s listening to you talk about the state of the documentation at the time. I’m sure there’s a lot of people who have a lot of words and a lot of grievances from back in the day, whenever there’s, at that time, really only the documentation. But one of the other big things that, the feedback since I joined, which I found out about Solana probably sometime in August, September, October, something of last year. Everybody I’ve talked to really just talks about how the dedicated support was really the way that they made their way through navigating Solana, just the Discord’s… It’s still that way today, we actually have some more developing relations in there outside of core engineering, but they kind of saved the day just to get some of those early movers like you over the hump. I guess-
Paul X (08:49):
Yeah. I agree.
chase (08:51):
… one thing I would really be interested to know is, so you found out about Solana, you’re in the Discord, you’re trying to play around, and then all of a sudden you were like, “I’m going to write this escrow tutorial based off of all this stuff.” Or was that how it worked out? What made you decide to do the escrow program in general?
Paul X (09:08):
Yeah. It turned out to be a little bit of a bigger project than I thought in the beginning. I think it took about one or two months to write, and I still updated it regularly. So, that was one reason. I thought it wouldn’t be that large, so I could just write something rather quickly. But also, it’s just an effective learning method: if you want to learn something, explain it to someone else.
chase (09:46):
Right.
Paul X (09:47):
That’s a good way to learn. So, that’s what I was thinking.
chase (09:54):
Yeah.
Paul X (09:54):
I think that was basically it. Yeah. I didn’t expect it to be what it became, to be honest.
chase (10:08):
It became a lot, it’s actually still, probably, one of the most accessed tutorials that we have. I guess maybe for the smart contract side, there are some people just like you that learn by doing and learn by teaching, so we’re escalating lots of new content being built. We just launched this thing called The Solana Cookbook, which is lots of code snippets for type script, the CLI and Rust.
Paul X (10:36):
Excellent.
chase (10:36):
We just did that two days ago and there’s already so many contributors, and a lot of these guys-
Paul X (10:41):
Yeah, pretty cool.
chase (10:42):
… “I want to try this, but I don’t know how to do it.” We’re like, “It doesn’t matter. This is where you learn. You learn by teaching.” I think we’re super lucky to have people like you exploring new tech, writing things for other people, because I don’t… Like you said, you had no idea in the beginning what this would turn into. In all reality, that document’s probably been accessed tens of thousands of times at this point, definitely thousands. Probably into the-
Paul X (11:12):
It’s maxing out my Netlify personal plan.
chase (11:15):
Oh, is it?
Paul X (11:16):
I’ve got 100 gigabytes. I have 100 gigabytes a month and it’s very close to the limit now.
chase (11:25):
That’s [crosstalk 00:11:26].
Paul X (11:26):
So if you know how big a website is, and you have 100 gigabytes, then you know how many views. You can sort of calculate how many views it gets each day.
chase (11:39):
That’s actually incredible. I had no idea. I knew it was a lot. Again, I think a lot of people are going to thank you. Whenever I finally found out about the escrow program, which was when I actually ended up reaching out to you, it was a little bit later after I started, I somehow hadn’t seen it. And I started sharing it with somebody who was like, “I need to make some sort of escrow program.” Then I shared the tutorial and this ecosystem Telegram group I was in and everybody just jumped in. They were like, “That’s the Solana bible.” And I was like, “Everybody knows [crosstalk 00:12:12] all know this.” They were like, “This is how we all got started in Solana.” The thought about what would have happened if you hadn’t written that? Think about this. There might have been a pretty decent number of people that started building, never made it to the Discord, your tutorial didn’t exist and they just never ended up building… It could be somebody that’s actually a live protocol with billions or millions of dollars of [TDL 00:12:38]. I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s kind of cool to think about that. You might have had that sort of… Well, you have, in a lot of ways.
chase (12:46):
What was the most painful part? This is a question I have to ask. Did you know Rust before you-
Paul X (12:55):
No.
chase (12:56):
You didn’t know? You…
Paul X (12:57):
No.
chase (12:58):
No Rust at all? So what was the most painful part of this? Because I always thought it was Rust when I first started, come to find out, for a lot of people it’s not Rust. It’s actually Solana, it’s a understanding accounts, PDAs and CPIs, a lot of things that, especially coming from E don’t make sense because you can’t compare the two, because they’re completely different. Just curious on your thoughts on that.
Paul X (13:26):
Right. I knew C from university. That helped with Rust, but also not that much. I do think it’s true, I don’t think Rust is the difficult thing about Solana. Mostly because most Solana programs just don’t use a lot of advanced Rust features. It’s just the setting values. Probably the more comp… Anything with math is probably a little bit complicated, but you don’t have to really think about multi-threading in a Solana program or anything like that. The Rust you use for Solana program is pretty simple. So yeah, I would say that programming model for Solana is the difficult part.
Paul X (14:32):
And also thinking about program architecture and related things, that’s a difficult part. Yeah, specifically, it’s a little bit far away now. When I remember that time, I pretty much remember a feeling of joy. It was a lot of fun. It’s like…
chase (15:11):
I did it! I’ve made it!
Paul X (15:14):
Yeah, it’s like you are thrown into a really difficult challenge and doing that, it’s fun. Even not just the process of it is fun. But yeah, for sure, PDAs were a little bit tricky to wrap your head around. But yeah, you just put in the work and over time you’ll understand.
chase (15:49):
Yeah. It has to be rewarding. At the time when you created that escrow program, probably one of the first external people ever to do that with only probably a handful, like 10 to 20 people in the world, that even knows what Solana is, let alone how Solana works, is pretty cool. I guess another one of the things that we hear a lot about, and honestly, it’s of been solved so we’ll talk about how that’s been solved in a way, which is serialization and de-serialization. Most people that build on Solana still have no idea how to do it. There’s never really been a… Obviously, people use Bosch, but there has been no like guidance to say, “This is what you should use.” A lot of people bring that up, but this is a feature, not a bug. Nobody wants to tell you, but this leads us into the next thing, which is there is a framework out there that has very strong opinions on how this thing work, and it’s called Anchor. I guess, number one, are you still developing on Solana, and number two, have you used Anchor?
Paul X (16:55):
Yes to both questions, but I’m not building any bigger programs right now, but I’m actually helping build Anchor now.
chase (17:10):
Oh wow, switched sides other there.
Paul X (17:17):
Yeah, I think Anchor is great. I think it’s really important for future developers and developers that are on Solana that we improve the framework. I took like little bit of a break in 2021, but when I came back, Amani asked me whether I want to help build stuff. And we sort of thought that it would be a good idea if I come help with Anchor, so that’s what I’m doing now. It wasn’t really entirely my intention to work on it that much, but it’s a lot of fun, so I’ve just been working on it all the time and thinking about what else we can do to improve it.
chase (18:18):
Yeah, people love Anchor there. There’s actually Anchor Maxis out there at this point in time. I’ve spoken to a few of them.
Paul X (18:26):
Yeah. I saw the talk at the conference.
chase (18:31):
It’s a strange thing, and not really a strange thing, but I’ve had a lot of these conversations. Working at Solana labs, one of the big things that I think about is there’s just so many things going on right now and different paths to be taken. What’s the right one? Where does labs and all these different people that are building out some… Which path should people be taking? Yes, I understand in order to scale and grow, developers, you’re going to need something like an Anchor to be able to onboard people quickly because it takes away having to add all these accounts to every single transaction.
chase (19:18):
Actually, I’m not sure that Anchor abstracts that portion away, but it does abstract a lot of the underlying work, like the serialization and a lot of these things-
Paul X (19:25):
Serialization, yeah.
chase (19:26):
You don’t have to think about a lot of the hard stuff, which is great. Frameworks are great.
Paul X (19:31):
Right.
chase (19:32):
But also, on the other side of that, you still need these like base layer engineers that can understand what happens underneath so that they can actually come and help fix Anchor. Because I’m assuming if you never did what you did, you wouldn’t be very effective helping build Anchor right now, if you hadn’t suffered through the pitfalls of just building Rust on the native. Maybe I’m wrong.
Paul X (19:58):
Yeah. No, this is something that I’ve been thinking about as well. I do think that if your plan is to deploy a protocol and you expect it to handle hundreds of millions of dollars, you should have people on your team that could write the same program in just regular Solana code. And if you can’t do that, then you should probably not deploy right now, but go back and study it a little bit more. But that said, sure, it helps helps people. Raw Solana programming helps people understand Solana, but then they should move away eventually. I can’t tell you what you should do, but I do think it would be a good idea to move to Anchor, but it depends on your specific use case. There are cases when maybe a raw Solana program is better, but for most programs Anchor will work fine and it will take a lot of work.
Paul X (21:18):
It will do a lot of work for you so you can focus on the things that really matter to your application, right? Like, if you don’t have to think about… There are different kind of exploits. Sure, right? There are exploits that are sorts of Solana specific where you forget to check an owner of an account and that’s something that’s very Solana-specific. And that thing, Anchor can prevent for you. But what Anchor can’t prevent is more complex interactions with other protocols and maybe there’s something wrong with your tokenomics or generally your actual idea that’s independent of Solana, so it allows you to spend more time focusing on that, which I think is very good.
chase (22:20):
Yeah. I guess the takeaway from that is that if you are managing tons and tons of money, your core engineering team should probably understand how all this stuff works. I know that some of these other bigger protocols like Saber and SI Options, they all started out, well, Solana native because Anchor didn’t exist, but over time starting to add more features and features using Anchor, probably saving them lots of times. I’ve heard the term that Anchor, once you learn it, you can probably 10X your development speed or capacity. Obviously, that’s subjective, depends on who you are.
Paul X (23:04):
Right.
chase (23:04):
But your recommendation would be, if you’re coming onto Solana, you’re not building this big protocol and you just want to start working and not worry about all these exploits and things, you just want to build something really cool and a lot faster than normal, than jump onto Anchor and get started. And if you decide to become a big protocol, maybe think about finding somebody who actually understands Rust and some of the base knowledge.
Paul X (23:33):
Right, and I mean, I think this is more or less true with any programming language or framework. If you want to be an okay, or close to good, engineer, just do the framework; but if you want to do great things and you know what want to know what to do when something goes wrong, and you want to know how to de-bug that, you can really only do that if you understand what the framework actually does for you.
chase (24:04):
Yeah. I think a good analogy for a lot of people who are probably watching this, because you’re on the back-end side, I don’t know if you do much of the Web 3.0 or the front-end stuff, but you can make the analogy, maybe it’s not one-to-one, but JavaScript, you don’t necessarily want to try to go start building React applications unless you understand how JavaScript works because when you get some errors and you don’t understand some of the low-level JavaScript stuff, you might have a really painful experience trying to figure out what is actually wrong. I’m sure React is probably intuitive enough now to help get you through that. But if you know JavaScript, you’re probably going to get things resolved a lot quicker. It’s kind of the same thing, I think.
Paul X (24:52):
Right. Even if you cannot go deeper than that, you’re going to have a better time overall if you know what the actual computer is doing underneath, what lies below that, if you understand what the computer is actually doing for you. Like, what is a stack, for example. That’s not really necessary to get started with JavaScript or Rust, even, but if you want to really understand things more deeply and learn how to fix things when they go wrong, it’s probably a good idea to also learn how a computer works.
chase (25:36):
Yeah. There’s actually been people recently that, I spent a lot of time on Twitter just banging the drum about Solana, trying to get people to FOMO out of their Web 2.0 jobs to Web 3.0. There’s people that have zero development experience that’ll reach out. They’re like, “How do I start developing on Solana if I have no development experience?” Almost like not even trying to jump from nothing to React, they’re trying to jump from nothing to Solana, and my response is, “Honestly, if you don’t learn so architectural basics and just building programs, or like learn a JavaScript or a Python, you almost have a 0% chance of success rate of building something on Solana. And if you are successful, it’s probably not going to be very safe.”
chase (26:24):
So it’s kind of irresponsible to tell somebody to go from zero to Solana and skipping everything in between. Like I said, I don’t think that you’re going to have to be some sort of giga-brain to ever even make that leap. It’s probably possible in some world, but…
Paul X (26:39):
Yeah, if I were to start from zero, I don’t think I would try to launch my own protocol one month into my learning journey. Don’t think that’s a very good idea. But if I’m really interested in this space, then I can start, I still start doing work, I can still contribute from very early on. Not everyone needs to, your don’t have to launch your own protocol to start learning and to start contributing. There’s a ton of work to do on the open source projects in Solana, or maybe you can have an internship somewhere where you don’t work on the core code, the actual program, but you can get sort of familiar. You can get acquainted with the industry and the people. That way you can build up the knowledge and already be in the ecosystem and without touching critical code. Over time, you’ll be able to do that as well.
chase (28:03):
To that point, the Solana… It’s not even just Solana, there’s other blockchains as well, but I’m more familiar with the Solana community. It’s super welcoming, especially the developer community. And if you want to get involved and you’re a developer and you find a protocol that you really like, go into their Discord, start asking questions, then start helping people, then start thinking about maybe going and fixing a syntax issue and a GitHub repo. It doesn’t matter. It can be the tiniest thing in the world.
Paul X (28:37):
Right.
chase (28:37):
Just keep doing that, next time a little bit like stronger. But when people reach out to me from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, like, “Hey, I want a job. How do I get into the space?” Get involved, write, make a tool that everybody wants to use, give to the community, go contribute to a repo. Now my go-to is going to be, “Go write a recipe in the Solana cookbook and I’ll help you out here.” I’m kind of just joking here. But anyways, the people in this space, it’s different. They’re not looking on LinkedIn. They are looking for people that just go out and just get shit done. That’s what everybody’s doing and it’s kind of incredible.
Paul X (29:16):
Also, if you really want to do this, and you start from zero, of course you can’t take an entire degree in one or three months, but there’s so much you can learn from online and just so many courses that you can take for free, and you can basically learn really all the time in your first six months. You are going to be fine. At least get a job somewhere, I think, in crypto.
chase (30:03):
Yeah, for sure-
Paul X (30:03):
If you really put in the work.
chase (30:05):
It’s really just about passion and motivation, and persistence, and you keep going at it. If you really want it, you’re going to eventually get it. I think that’s the point that I keep trying to make to people. Everybody working in this space, it didn’t happen by chance. They weren’t just lucky. It’s because they were like, “I want that job. I want to get in here.” And they did it. I get messages that make me feel really good about what I do, is I’ll get messages, I’ve gotten a couple from at least one from Phantom and some other places. I’ll get a message down the line a month later, it’s like, “Thank you so much. I just got hired at Phantom.” And I was, “I’ve talked to thousands of people. When was this conversation?”
Paul X (30:46):
Nice.
chase (30:46):
And then I would look back and I’m like, “Oh my God, man, I’m so happy for you.” It’s great because those people took the advice. I know that they listened to what I said, took the advice, just hammering it down, started contributing. And then the next thing you know, they’re working on, in my opinion, the greatest UX wallet there is.
Paul X (31:05):
That’s pretty good.
chase (31:08):
It’s pretty good. So yeah, it’s been a wild experience for a lot of people. Things are not slowing down anytime soon. We just had 530-some people in our latest hackathon. If the next one’s any more than that, I don’t even know what I’m going to do with myself doing [inaudible 00:31:29] but as our content gets better and things get a lot… Compared to two hackathons ago when there was not hardly anything, basically Paul X and then a couple resources, now to having a lot more community content, people were asking less questions in Discord. Anchor is actually taking a lot of people out of the Solana Discord and plucking them into there, which has been much relief.
Paul X (31:50):
We’ll thank them.
chase (31:51):
Thank you Armani. That’s been beautiful. But then there’s just a lot more people. The more people that you help get over those big humps of Solana, the more people that they help out. And then it just keeps growing. I can’t even put a number on it, but the Solana developer community has been super. It’s huge. I guess the final question that I wanted to ask you is probably, I wanted to do this show specifically to talk about people’s experiences, where they came from, where they are, how they got there, just so that people out there watching can get some inspiration and motivation to make the jump. There’s a lot of people that are literally right there on that cliff of Web 2.0, just every day being, “I’ve got to do it, I’ve got to do it,” and then they don’t do it. So hopefully, talking to people like you, maybe Armani, wink, wink, at some point in time. That they’ll just make that jump.
chase (32:55):
So you’ve already did a lot of work with the escrow tutorial. Hopefully, this interview also has a similar impact. I guess, do you have any words of advice for Solana devs that are just getting started? Just something. You made the jump into the space, you were in university, you were like, “I’m kind of bored with like this stuff. This thing looks cool.” Any word of advice to some younger developers out there?
Paul X (33:22):
The first and most obvious one is to just get started. You don’t have to go full time on this immediately. You can just get started with something so you can see whether that works for you, but get started. And I think once you do that, I’m not sure if I have really general advice for people, it really depends on the person, but once you get started, contribute to the ecosystem and talk to people, to anyone, to me, my DMs are open, Twitter and Discord, and many others you can talk to as well if you need specific advice that’s more tailored to your background.
Paul X (34:27):
But yeah, in general, the way I think about crypto in general is that it’s still quite early and we need a lot of experiments and we need experiments on all layers of the stack. So layer one, layer two, maybe the DOW layer above that [crosstalk 00:34:51].
chase (34:50):
Maybe design in UX.
Paul X (34:52):
[crosstalk 00:34:52] coordinate. Yeah, everything, right? We need to do those experiments. So if you have crazy ideas, now might be a good time to try and explore them because there’s lots of money in crypto right now. You can probably get funding and support from people because crypto is very welcoming. Experiments are really good for this space to push it forward because who knows where we will be in like five years. I don’t even… Just thinking about that, I have no idea, but the way we go, we push this thing forward, is to try a lot of different things. And again, I’m not even saying you should necessarily go to Solana, but you should at least, if you want to push the space forward, join an experiment that you think pushes this space forward. That will already be very good for all of us, and hopefully yourself as well.Paul X (36:07):
Solana-specific, it’s pretty much the same advice. Get started, talk to people, build programs as soon as possible to learn how it all works. And then again, if you think there’s gaps in documentation, write stuff or make a video or something like that. At least that has helped me understand the programming model much better. It also helps others, so that’s great. Really most of it is just putting in the work every day and grinding.
chase (36:51):
You mean eating glass and chewing glass and all that fun stuff?
Paul X (36:55):
Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, yeah. But get started.
chase (37:00):
I think you touched on something that I didn’t really touch on, which is actually huge and part of my job in general is just to help grow the community. The way that I do that is by opening up my DMs to everybody. I’ll literally talk to anybody if you’re interested in this space. I probably get about probably 80 to 100 every day. I wake up in the morning, I go through all of them, filter out the [crosstalk 00:37:23] drop-
Paul X (37:23):
100 every day?
chase (37:25):
I filter out the NFT drop requests, that’ll usually take about 30% of those. But anyways, this community’s welcoming. If you have a question, don’t be scared, reach out to somebody, follow a couple accounts that seem pretty active.
Paul X (37:40):
Yeah.
chase (37:41):
I actually created a list on Twitter called Solana Developers. All you have to do is follow that list and all the alpha is right there for you. Start DMing every single one of those people, including myself. Yeah, the community portion is huge. It’s probably one of the greatest superpowers that Solana actually has right now.
chase (38:01):
Getting involved. Like you said, YouTube videos, this NFT space has blown up. There’s people that aren’t devs, they’re starting podcasts. They’re just participating. It’s like this whole new world. We’re getting the chance to kind of reinvent, and my personal view, there’s probably some disagreement out there, we’re getting to reinvent the internet in a way, so you’re talking about these experiments. Get out there and experiment, and maybe you’ll come up with something that nobody else has thought about doing on blockchain yet. It could change your life, and I’m not talking about just financially. You could just go into this trajectory of where this is where you were meant to be the entire time. And I’ve seen a lot of people say that. They’re like, “We were unhappy until they actually got into Web 3.0 where we all work a lot, but we love it.”
chase (38:54):
But anyways, Paul, thanks so much for joining. I know that you’re a full time Anchor Maxi, I’m surprised you had [crosstalk 00:39:05] here. Just kidding. But, yeah. Thanks for joining. I really appreciate it. Thanks for the escrow tutorial. Thanks for building on Anchor and continuing that. Just generally thanks for everything and thanks to everybody for watching. We’ll just check everybody later. Bye.
Paul X (39:23):
Thanks for having me.
