Permissionless Machines

Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar from Hampden-Sydney College, is credited with discovering the source behind the ubiquitous filler text. In seeing a sample of lorem ipsum, his interest was piqued by consectetur—a genuine, albeit rare, Latin word. Consulting a Latin dictionary led McClintock to a passage from De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (“On the Extremes of Good and Evil”), a first-century B.C. text from the Roman philosopher Cicero.

Today I’m excited to share Multicoin’s investment thesis in Solana, alongside the fact that we led an $20M investment in Solana. Here's Solana's press release.

Developers building smart contracts don’t want to deal with layer 2 and sharding. Or cross-shard application state and logic. Or cross-shard latency. Or security models in side chains. Or liquidity routing in state channel networks. Or how they might run computations off-chain using zero-knowledge proofs.

Liquidity routing in state channel networks.

Not Application Specific

The entire point of having a smart contract chain is that the chain itself abstracts all of the lower-level complexities and economic system necessary to deliver trust-minimized computation, allowing application developers to focus on application-logic. Indeed, when Vitalik unveiled Ethereum to the world in Miami in January 2014, this is precisely what he emphasized: the point of the world computer is to abstract everything that is not application-specific!

While there are many types of scaling solutions being worked on, each of them create idiosyncratic forms of complexity for application developers, users, and the ecosystem as a whole. The last of these forms of complexity - what I call “creating ecosystem baggage” - is particularly challenging to deal with. For example, wallets need to know where user assets are across many chains and state channels; users need watchtowers; liquidity providers need to provide liquidity; liquidity pools are broken; latency is introduced in all kinds of weird places; etc.

Lower-level complexity chain

Heterogeneous Scaling Solutions

Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar from Hampden-Sydney College, is credited with discovering the source behind the ubiquitous filler text. In seeing a sample of lorem ipsum, his interest was piqued by consectetur—a genuine, albeit rare, Latin word. Consulting a Latin dictionary led McClintock to a passage from De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (“On the Extremes of Good and Evil”), a first-century B.C. text from the Roman philosopher Cicero.