The Block: Why FTX’s collapse is a ‘crucible moment’ for Solana

Episode 125 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block's Frank Chaparro and Solana co-founders Raj Gokal and Anatoly Yakovenko.

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Solana co-founder Raj Gokal has referred to the FTX crisis as a "crucible moment" for Solana's ecosystem.

The amount of value moved on Solana has decreased dramatically since Alameda declared bankruptcy in November, data from The Block shows.

In this episode of The Scoop, Solana co-founders Raj Gokal and Anatoly Yakovenko discuss how Solana initially became intertwined with FTX, and when they first started to notice that Sam Bankman-Fried’s ambitions diverged from the crypto ethos.

While Bankman-Fried and FTX were focused on building a centralized exchange, the Solana co-founders were focused on building self-custody solutions. As Yakovenko explains, “FTX became a much bigger brand and started going in a very global direction … but we were focused on building stuff for self-custody users.”

Despite the setback FTX’s collapse has had on Solana’s ecosystem, Gokal says the focus on self-custody has led to real user adoption:

“It's pretty exciting now to see that focusing on self-custody users and open-source software has created this huge boom — it's what captured most of the users and active addresses on Solana.”

During this conversation, Chaparro, Gokal and Yakovenko also discuss:

Solana Breakpoint conference and overall developer activity; How Solana is positioned to support an NFT ecosystem; Why centralized exchanges are a temporary feature of crypto. Disclaimer: Beginning in 2021, Michael McCaffrey, the former CEO and majority owner of The Block, took a series of loans from former FTX and Alameda founder Sam Bankman-Fried. McCaffrey resigned from the company in December 2022 after failing to disclose those transactions.

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