Lucas Bruder: American Crypto, MEV, Solana, and Jito

Lucas Bruder (@Buffalu) is co-founder and CEO of Jito Labs, a pioneering force in Solana's blockchain ecosystem. Under his leadership, Jito has grown with Solana through MEV innovations and liquid restaking solutions, with the Jito Block Engine now processing 94% of network stake. Jito has generated an additional $750m in revenue for validators in the Solana network. Jito tips accounted for around 50% of revenue on the network in 2024.

Transcript

Tristan Yver (00:01.102)
Hello everyone, welcome to the Y-axis pod. My guest today is Lucas Bruder, also known as Bufalu. He is the co-founder and CEO of Jito Labs, a very proud American crypto company in these days where that's a good thing and I'm really happy we're able to lean into that. They are essentially the base layer for MEV infrastructure on Solana. They've built the block engine, they've built the Jito agave validator, they have...

the GeoLiquid staking token, quite a variety of different things that I'll actually let Lucas himself dive into. But a lot of people tend to see the product level things in crypto and perhaps not the deeper level infrastructure. And this is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the entire space. So it's really good to have you all Lucas.

Lucas Bruder (00:43.771)
you

Lucas Bruder (00:48.081)
Thanks, quite the intro, I appreciate it.

Tristan Yver (00:50.946)
Yeah, no problem, no problem. Lucas is also a good friend and hopefully we'll able to hang out in person soon. But to kick off, I don't really want to jump into Jito right away. I actually would love to know a little bit more about the preconditions that allowed you to become a founder or that gave you the desire to become a founder in the first place. It's something that I think is perhaps not talked about enough, which are what are the things that give people the courage to set off on this race? Because it really is something that...

you have to dedicate your entire life to and every last bit of your energy. And so I want to know kind of like what was the young Lucas that fed up into that?

Lucas Bruder (01:26.865)
Yeah, it's definitely an obsession. Yeah, let's see, I'd say that the most impactful thing is probably my dad owned his own construction business. So doing a lot of like super hard manual labor, like installing these windows and remodeling houses and things like that. So I grew up with that and my mom would kind of help them out with some of the office related things like accounting and operations.

And so yeah, I would say that that's kind of like what led me into becoming a founder. It took a while. Let's see, I started GEDO when I was 28, I think, or somewhere around there. yeah, growing up around that, that was super impactful. And then I was a swimmer as well. So I started swimming and I was like five. So a lot of like early mornings, we can travel.

around the Midwest to go swimming, swim in college for a few years as well. And yeah, super bullish on like athletes. And I think athletes make really good founders. yeah, you just gotta, teaches you a lot of good lessons, teaches you like about winning, about losing, what it takes to win, the lessons you learn when you lose. And yeah, I would say that like the, just growing up in a household with like,

parents that worked super hard, their own business, then just kind of like dedicating that to swimming and then eventually school and kind of what happened after school.

Tristan Yver (03:05.25)
And did you have a sense from earlier on that this would be something you'd pursue or was it not perhaps like conscious until it actually happened? And by that I mean starting a company, not G2 obviously.

Lucas Bruder (03:15.713)
yeah. Yeah. I would say it's something that had been in the back of my brain. I always loved startups. So, yeah, when I was in college, I did an internship at Tesla working on the Model X and that was like, it was a big company at the time, but that was kind of my first like real startup experience where it was just like, you got to get shit done. And like some people will, maybe there's like a little help, but like no one's coming to save you. And

After that, went and worked at a small like 40 person company and then was like the fourth engineer at another robotics company. And I always loved the early stage stuff. There's a lot of ownership. You get to decide like what direction to take it in. And yes, I would say that it was always on my brain. And yeah, I was just like going through the cycles and

getting that muscle and learning how to do zero to one multiple times. And then I did a brief stand at like a larger company and I was like, okay, I think it's time for me to do my own thing. I'm ready to feel like now's the time to take the risk.

Tristan Yver (04:29.646)
I was going to ask when you did do the stint at the larger company, was it a bit grating on you to have sort of the organizational structure that you were in that had been pre-established, pre-set, perhaps the way you would like to do things yourself? Was that something that was gnawing on you, or was more so just so that you wanted to start something?

Lucas Bruder (04:49.121)
I would say both. I wanted to start something and the, was like a product that was mostly built. I was kind of working in like one corner of it that like it was important for the product, but it was like one of the tiny pieces in this like much bigger system. And it was kind of like, I want to build more customer facing features and work on things that people use.

And I mean, people use this thing a lot and it did a really good job at what it's supposed to do. you know, there's working on like the little piece of it. I always loved the early stage stuff. the, I would say the best job I had before Gito was working at this construction robotics company that it was, it was like the fourth or fifth engineer there. And it was kind of just like figure shit out. Kind of took some of my construction background with my dad that

You know, I had that kind of like construction hustle. And then it was like, okay, like second week I got there, second or third week, we got a bulldozer. It's like, all right, figure out how to like hook a computer into here. And that's like the zero to one stuff that I love doing. It's like, here's this thing and this like gnarly problem. Like, okay, we need to make this thing that there's typically a human sitting in the seat here. We need to like trick it to think that there's a human sitting in the seat and that humans like pressing the buttons and

the controls and like we need to add eyes to it and like make it drive itself and like do the job. So,

Tristan Yver (06:24.12)
So is that basically some form of hot wiring just because obviously the safety specifications of the machine, that's the last thing they want, right? That's pretty cool.

Lucas Bruder (06:30.801)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was like figuring out how, uh, like where's the wiring for the seat to detect if someone's in the seat and then like, where's the wiring for the steering and like the gas and throttle. And then you have like the bulldozer blade and you got to make it go up and down and twist and lean and, um, just figuring out like what those signals were. And yeah, you're basically like hot wiring it and it'll like throw, uh,

You like hook into it and you got your like oscilloscopes and you're looking at all these like the waves and everything and it's like throwing alerts because you're like giving it the wrong signal. So yeah, you got to kind of just figure it out.

Tristan Yver (07:13.806)
That intersection of hardware and software. think you touched on one really interesting point when you were talking about being within the system but only working on one discrete part of it versus having an approach towards the whole. And I think one thing I've seen is that most good founders, they think at a system level. They're trying to optimize each piece in the system and actually have the freedom to do so because they're the founder and CEO. Did you have...

Lucas Bruder (07:17.967)
Yeah.

Tristan Yver (07:43.36)
sort of an understanding of thinking at a systems level before starting GEDO? Or was that something that GEDO has allowed you to learn and grow into?

Lucas Bruder (07:52.033)
I would say both. I definitely had like systems level. think working in hardware for any like the firmware engineers or embedded systems engineers out there, I think you just have like a huge leg up. Cause it's like, there's like, yeah, there's just, you just have really gnarly problems when you're dealing with like physical like electrons and atoms that you don't necessarily have if you're like running your code in a server.

in Google Cloud somewhere. So just being able to tackle crazy problems and try to break them down into the sub pieces and how to figure out how to debug things I think was super helpful. But definitely learned a lot more starting Gita. I didn't know anything. Still don't know anything. I think, yeah, it's just like a muscle.

You're a big snowboarder and it's like you gotta practice. You're not just gonna read a book about like, Sean White and become amazing. It's like you gotta keep doing it over and over and make a lot of screw ups.

Tristan Yver (09:04.876)
I mean, and also now we know if any of your enemies drive their car into a tree or something, it might have been Lucas in the back doing some hot wiring. That makes a lot of sense. yeah, it's so true, right? You're just continually learning. There's no end to the process. And I'm sure that's probably part of what has you hooked, right? Is the fact that you get to keep updating your mental model and improving day by day. It's kind of like the athletic side of you, right? With the swimming, same thing.

Lucas Bruder (09:10.385)
No.

Lucas Bruder (09:27.962)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (09:31.291)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, just keep pushing and yeah for sure.

Tristan Yver (09:35.362)
You have to be kind of crazy. You have to be kind of crazy because it's such tiny incremental improvements each time, cycle over and over and

Lucas Bruder (09:44.993)
Yeah, yeah, you have to do that. then like every once in while, you have to zoom out and be like, I doing things right? Do I need to like make a big change here? So yeah, it's just like, it's a very humbling experience for sure. And yeah, you have to be psycho to do it.

Tristan Yver (09:58.22)
and going.

I actually, genuinely think so, like there has to be some...

irresistible itch that you just want to keep itching and itching and itching and if not, you're just not going to make it. But fast forwarding a bit, you worked, had these stints at these different companies that gave you different perspectives, got to work with it. actually one question before I go into the next one. Do you consider GEDO an intersection between hardware and software because you're working with so many validators that obviously have racks and physical infrastructure, or do you just see it purely in the software domain at this point?

Lucas Bruder (10:31.823)
Yeah, mostly software. is some, the level that Solana operates at, you are somewhat dealing with software or hardware. like we, don't know, undersea cables get cut or there's like a data center issue or like you have like a hard drive go out there or like when you really want to like optimize, you have to like think about the hardware, like the processor architecture and things like that. So yeah, there's still like

there's definitely hardware piece to it still.

Tristan Yver (11:05.134)
But it's majority software at this moment in time. Got it. And so what was going to say is, you had these stints at these different companies. You've sort of built up this itch that you want to do your own thing. You've seen your parents do it in the past. You knew it was something that was a possibility for yourself. How did you go from that urge to finding your co-founder to starting the company? And also, why GEDO, right? There are so many different things you could have gone for.

Lucas Bruder (11:07.525)
Yeah, yeah.

Lucas Bruder (11:31.985)
Yeah, I fell down the crypto rabbit hole in 2017. And let's see, I graduated 2016, fell down the crypto rabbit hole in 2017. I kind of just stayed up with everything through the bear to like, would say the end of 2020, I discovered MEV and there was a lot of...

Tristan Yver (11:55.886)
Would you mind giving a little like how would you describe MEV?

Lucas Bruder (11:58.713)
Yeah, yeah, MEV is basically to explain like I'm five is it's high frequency trading. If you go another level deeper, it's basically trying to make the most efficient blocks on the blockchain that you can. So trying to make the most money for validators and stakers and just trying to like make the network run more efficiently. So yeah.

Tristan Yver (12:26.382)
And an example of that is that if there's like very inefficient transaction occurring, you optimize to make that less inefficient. Would that be a valid description?

Lucas Bruder (12:34.393)
Yeah, like there's like a bunch of price inbounds on exchanges. Yeah, there's a bunch of like price inbounces, like someone will swap on like an orca and now you have like a price inbounce on orca and radium. And so someone will kind of come in there and like arbitrage your price out. You have liquidations, you have like market makers and things like that.

So it's trying to like basically build the most efficient thing that you can. And the reason that it's inefficient is because there's a lot of spam in blockchains, especially on Solana where the fees are so cheap. you can try to like all the spam takes up, basically like waste block space because people are spamming these things and they like, they just fail. So none of the state, when transaction fail, like none of the state actually changes.

but it takes up compute. like if you have an arbitrage, an arbitrage will show up, a hundred bots will like fire their arbitrage transaction at the same time. And only one's gonna win. The other 99 are gonna fail. And those 99 failing, they just take up a bunch of space for normal users. So you can see this like, unfortunately we've had a few outages over the last year and you can see that the network, the number of failed transactions will.

increase a lot and like the throughput of the network goes down and yeah there's just like less revenue per block because it's the system is kind of like running less efficiently.

Tristan Yver (14:13.974)
So was this recent liveness failure on Solana, was that essentially this, where the blocks are just filled up with failed transactions, so people trying to do legitimate actions just aren't able to get their transactions through, or was it a different thing?

Lucas Bruder (14:26.257)
Yeah, that wasn't a live assailer. So the network was still progressing and moving forward. Essentially what happened is, I think it was, was it Trump or Melania? I can't remember. It's like, this is all a blur. One of the Trump or Melania meme coins launched and, okay. Yeah. And yeah, people just start spamming the validators with all these packets, all these transactions like the, you know, it's.

Tristan Yver (14:44.046)
I think it was Melania. Trump launched pretty smoothly, if I remember.

Lucas Bruder (14:56.099)
a race to get in first. They want to buy it first so they can sell it later for hire. So you have all these bots and users that are like spamming all these transactions and it kind of it massively overwhelmed our system. We've been working on scaling our system for like the past 12 months, but this is like something we've never seen. It was just like crazy, crazy spam. We were getting like 30 to 40,000 trades per second that we were trying to like

Simulating keep track of and everything the values are probably getting way more and so like our system Backed up one of the cues got backed up. There's a Jari saying it's like I'm gonna screw this up, but it's like you can Make people push slower or you can make your system pop faster and We couldn't pop fast enough, but our system went down what?

Tristan Yver (15:50.254)
pot fastest ability to really change the amount of input that's coming into your system basically, right? Very rapidly.

Lucas Bruder (15:57.649)
So yeah, it's like a queue, like people can, you can push stuff onto the queue and then you can pop it off. So people are, pushing their trades on and then the number of things that are being pushed on were much faster than we could pop off to like look at. So yeah, that queue got backed up and that caused some issues. And then Solana, there was some like scheduler kind of bottlenecks.

that I think have been worked out by now that were just causing the scheduler to not pack super full blocks on Solana. So the throughput, the transactions per second on the network went down. I think Fire Dancer slightly suffered as well. It did a little better. yeah, it's like this battle testing by meme coins is so bullish for Solana.

You could think of different scenarios to test for Solana and these blockchains all day and make synthetic loads. But when you have millions and tens of millions of dollars on the line, people do crazy shit. And that's just the best thing that can happen for Solana. I think totally so. It's better that than an IPO on Solana. This is just preparing us for that. So it's the best thing that could happen.

Tristan Yver (17:22.616)
No, I I...

I totally agree. mean, we've seen it happen in waves. Same thing happened during the whole NFT mania where the system really got stressed and tested. And that was just people trading individual NFTs and now they're trading hundreds of millions of different tokens. It's a completely different game. One thing I wanted to sort of go back to for a moment is you said that essentially these spam transactions, these transactions that are gonna fail reduce network revenue.

for that because if a transaction doesn't go through there's basically no fee paid for that transaction even though they made it into the block.

Lucas Bruder (18:02.309)
no, they, they can, they do pay and sometimes they can pay more than users, but it's just, there's so many of them that like, it's just filling up the entire block. Like there's 48 million compute units, which is like gas on Solana in like, you might have like 40 million of those be failures. So it's like 8 million left for like users in like the other bots.

And that just like, just makes every, it makes the whole blockchain expensive. It's like, it makes the user experience really bad because they are trying to like land a trade that succeeds. They want to swap and they want that. They want to like swap soul to Trump or whatever it is. And yeah, it's just like not the best user experience. And it also like, it's an insane load on the networking layer. Like you said, when the NFT craze is going on, it was like insane.

nation state level attack levels of traffic that we're hitting for some like JPEGs.

Tristan Yver (19:08.45)
Yeah, back then it was the mints, right? it's people trying to snipe these meme coin launches. yeah, actually, so just I'll put a pause on the sort of detailed infrastructure level stuff. I'll come back to it because there's actually a lot of stuff I'd love to speak about there. But let's rewind to this beginning of GEDO to your discovering of MEB in the first place where I displaced you from your narrative. What kept happening after that?

Lucas Bruder (19:11.248)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (19:37.135)
Yeah, so I fell down the med rabbit hole. I was working at that robotics job and it was just like that, like that itch that we were talking about earlier. Like, you know, if you have it, you can't stop thinking about it. So yeah, I'd work that job nine to seven. The CEO wouldn't let us leave until seven PM at that job. So stay there till seven, drive home to our condo in San Francisco, eat dinner and then

work on my bot from like 8 30 to like 2 in the morning and Yeah

Tristan Yver (20:13.934)
And when you say bot, you mean you were trying to trade the map space, right?

Lucas Bruder (20:17.689)
Yeah, yeah, I was doing MEV on Ethereum for a little bit, like end of 2020 to like early 2021. So yeah, that was kind of like, I'd been in crypto for a while, like from just like kind of monitoring assets and just like observing kind of like lurking crypto Twitter. That was my first time, like fell down the discord rabbit hole, met a bunch of really cool people online that I'm still friends with today.

was we were just like sharing tips, like helping each other get set up. It was kind of like the peak of like MEV, like people were making a lot of money. And the fact that like you could just do that, like it's like, okay, here's, I want to do MEV and you know, you got to break it down into all the problems. And the fact that like anyone could do that and just join was like pretty cool. Cause I had been doing like stuff completely different, not even financial markets. It was like, I was doing like robotics and

like a bunch of other random stuff. And I discovered this like financial market thing that anyone could participate in. I was like, this is like pretty cool. It's definitely a really big nerd snipe. And it was like super competitive. Like you could, yeah, like everyone's like trying to tweak their bot and make it better. And yeah, there's just super, super competitive. So it was a bit much like working at startup.

and then doing that on the side. So I ended up kind of putting that aside for a little bit. I think I discovered, I discovered Solana. It might have been from SPF's tweet, the $3 tweet. Maybe there was something else. But I ended up doing like the first Solana hackathon that I think is Ignite. And yeah, I worked a lot with Armani.

on that, I kind of wrote like the first version of AnchorPy. I don't think I ever released it, but he was like super helpful. And yeah, I used that in my project. And then let's see. Yeah, I kind of just fell in love with it. I think everyone remembers our first time using Solana where it's like, is this actually like a blockchain? Like you go like, I think at the time is, is it Solette? How do you say it? Solette or Sole?

Tristan Yver (22:40.566)
Yeah, so- no, no, either- it's probably solid. We used to say solid at least. Solid.

Lucas Bruder (22:46.653)
Yeah, yeah, so he'd go and saw it and like it was so janky. But whenever you hit, it was so janky. I think that was another thing that attracted me too. It was like the chewing glass. Like everyone was just like, was just, everything was just kind of janky. I was like, there's a lot of work to do here, but it's like Greenfield. Like it's a lot of zero to one stuff. Like kind of like going back to like what I liked to do earlier where there's like a ton of.

Tristan Yver (22:52.6)
So Jakey...

Lucas Bruder (23:16.129)
stuff to work on.

Tristan Yver (23:18.072)
It was an exciting time, for sure. I found a video on one of my old computers the other day of doing one of the first serum transactions with Solit, and just realizing how much improvement and advancement there's been was actually felt very nice, because sometimes you think that there's not much happening, and you're kind of just seeing the same protocols over and over again, and the same things happening, but that's not the case.

Lucas Bruder (23:21.263)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (23:28.237)
Hehehehe

Lucas Bruder (23:42.671)
Yeah, man, a, come a long way.

Tristan Yver (23:47.83)
Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, so you're saying that you're having this janky experience, you're enjoying the chewing of glass, because it was true glass chewing back then.

Lucas Bruder (23:55.875)
Yeah, well the user experience was like really janky, but like as soon as you hit the button, it was like a second. It's like your transaction has been confirmed. It's like, okay, there's like definitely something here. The team was like really good, like Anatoly, Raj, Steven Ackridge, Trent. I guess I didn't know a lot of those guys at the time, mainly watching Anatoly talk, but yeah, watching him talk about like using hardware to its fullest potential.

really resonated with me in my background. So yeah, I did the hackathon and then I was like, okay, I want to build something on here. Kind of toyed around with a few ideas. And then I think met like you pretty early Armani. Talked to like Koolene at the Solana Foundation, Alex Golding, kind of like refining, was like working on like refining ideas.

And then I was like, wait, there's like this mev thing on Ethereum. I kind of saw what was happening with like flashbots at the time. This was early to mid, I guess early 2021. So I was like, okay, there's, and BSC and like Polygon were pretty hot at the time. And there was just so much spam on there. I was like, okay, if this Solana thing's successful, there's probably going be a lot of spam, economic activity going on.

they're gonna need like some software to try to make it a little more efficient. yeah, I was like, okay, that was kind of the, like the inception and like the light bulb for me. And then, yeah, I think I put out a tweet said like looking for high performance engineers. And then this guy named Pohnlard69, it's like, hey, there's this guy's seg fault doctor, you should talk to him. Yeah.

Tristan Yver (25:47.318)
you

Lucas Bruder (25:51.717)
It's such a crypto story. Yeah, Pwnlord69. yeah, Zano and I met up or yeah, we had like a few video calls and we're kind of like, you know, sussing each other out. It's kind of weird like meeting someone random online, but I think we hit it off pretty fast. It's like, okay, like he's like a pretty normal chill dude like myself.

Tristan Yver (25:57.294)
169, yep.

Lucas Bruder (26:20.529)
It seems to be pretty grounded, not like crazy. It seems to be pretty smart. So like, let's just, let's do it. So yeah, we quit our jobs, formed the C Corp, got a term sheet in August, 2021, or yeah, got that in 2021. And then, yeah, just started kind of figuring out how this, it's like, goes back to the zero to one thing I was talking about, like.

You have this bulldozer, you gotta get it to like drive. How do you do that? Break it into these like little pieces. like, okay, we have this like salon about your client. How's it work? I don't really know that much about blockchains. So just like start reading through code and breaking it down into pieces and like build little demos. Like, okay, we got this piece done. Here's a demo and move on to the next one and so on.

Tristan Yver (27:13.126)
I really like how it was first principles that set you off on building this in the sense that you saw there was a problem in a similar type of environment. You saw that the salon environment could become something like that. And then you realized that you could be a solution to that problem in a new environment. Do you think that helped you raise? Whereas if you had gone and tried to do a flashbots competitor or something on BSC, it would have been harder versus a brand new space? Or did it make it harder to raise?

Lucas Bruder (27:44.337)
Yeah, it was... Yeah, I think the FlashSpot stuff was pretty inspiring for me. And they seem to really be picking up traction very fast on Ethereum. And to me, Solana felt Greenfield, and it felt like the evolution. There was a little less like... How do I say this?

Lucas Bruder (28:16.497)
Anytime you talk about scaling the Ethereum, it's like the L2s come into play. There's not that much in scaling that one. I've always felt that was like a weird thing, where it's like the like, anytime you talk about it, it like turns into this long conversation. None of that really resonated with me. Or like on Salon, it's like, let's go, let's see how fast we can go and like do it all in this and like more like first principles thinking.

And so yeah, like that was something we were more excited about. Yeah. Yeah.

Tristan Yver (28:51.852)
riskier too right? Because Solana wasn't, I mean it had grown, it was doing a lot better but it was having the down times around that time you were raising. It wasn't proven.

Lucas Bruder (29:01.209)
Yeah. for sure. but I think that's why we liked it. It's like, there's a lot to build and I tell my team this all the time. It's like, we don't just want to build on Solana. We don't want to like make it better. And we should make it better than what it is if like we weren't here. And that's kind of like the mindset that we took pretty early on. Like we found like a lot of bugs in the code base and got some bug bounties and we're like,

making PRs to the code base when we were looking through it. And yeah, it was like pretty rough for a while there. And then yeah, like 2021 was just crazy. And then yeah, we raised, we got a term sheet in August. I think the peak was like November or something. It just took super long to close that. It was like six months. think partially everyone was super busy, but also like we didn't really know. Yeah.

Tristan Yver (29:57.56)
first round, the first round is just pain and suffering. You don't realize the entire dynamic. It's such a dynamic. It is such a dynamic. think after the first one, it becomes a lot more actionable on how you actually close these things faster and go through the steps.

Lucas Bruder (30:05.669)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (30:16.441)
Yeah, it's a lot of like, no one, you don't really know what you're doing. You can like, if you have an advisor, you can like lean on them. But it's just like, you just gotta go through it.

Tristan Yver (30:25.378)
Well, it's just about, yeah, and you can't give too much time optionality to people. You need to put time constraints on things. You need to have people either in or out. There's a whole game to it, and I would advise any new founders that are raising, that have never raised, to go and talk to folks like Lucas and myself or anyone who has gone through a fundraise process because it'll help you a lot. Sorry to derail there, but I think that's kind of important.

Lucas Bruder (30:32.965)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Bruder (30:37.445)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (30:45.221)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (30:49.923)
Yeah, no, yeah, no, it's a good addition. Anytime like any work is relying on someone outside of the company, it just slows down massively. Everyone has their own priorities. So yeah, just like you have to bake that in and you gotta be a squeaky wheel for sure.

Tristan Yver (31:13.206)
Yeah, and if you think about it, for the investor, it's so much better for them to just be able to watch how you do for long periods of time before saying yes or no and seeing, it's just a free call option. So you've got to be really mindful of that. What was the first iteration of GEDO? What did you guys come to the world with?

Lucas Bruder (31:23.653)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (31:28.337)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (31:33.201)
Yeah, we, I think the first demo was like us, it was like super simple. I think it was us sending, first we were sending packets outside of the validator. This was back when we had the mempool thing. So we were seeing if we could build a mempool. So we had that. Packets would go straight to the leader.

Tristan Yver (31:54.882)
What does it mean to send a packet?

Lucas Bruder (32:01.553)
straight to like the current block producer. So yeah, when it's your time to produce a block, it would basically get sent straight to the validator. So we were kind of just like echoing that back, like sending that packet back somewhere else, a copy of it, so we could kind of see what's going on. They're like, yeah.

Tristan Yver (32:20.686)
So let me confirm, so I'm one of the validators, I'm the leader for this block, I send the block to the other validators, which you guys were also taking that block and looking through it, looking at the leaders block every time.

Lucas Bruder (32:34.257)
No, so if you're the block producer or the leader right now, it's your turn to produce the block, to move the blockchain forward. If I want to make a swap, I would just send it to you. basically, we would add something so when you would receive it, it would just send a copy somewhere else, like somewhere over the network. So it's like, okay, this sounds pretty dumb, but it was kind of like the first demo.

Tristan Yver (32:48.174)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Bruder (33:03.833)
I think the first like, no, well, yeah, they were. I think the first like meaningful demo was us. What was it? yeah, we produced a block on test net and the block like, if you put all the transactions out, like all the signatures, you you're going like.

Tristan Yver (33:03.926)
And others weren't doing that. They weren't sending to the leader specifically.

Lucas Bruder (33:31.301)
the Solana Explorer and you look at all the signatures, it was like JITO, JITO, JITO, like the first character of every signature. And it was just like ordered nicely. Because at the time Solana didn't really have like a scheduler. was just like, it was basically just random. All the transactions were randomly sorted. So it was like, that was like kind of the first demo. Where was like, okay, we can like.

take these transactions and like sequentially execute them reliably. And that was kind of like the first big demo. I could probably find that block somewhere. That was like probably like mid 2022.

Tristan Yver (34:10.478)
But it just gave you guys the ability to know that you could get a lot of your transactions into the leaders block in a consistent manner.

Lucas Bruder (34:19.353)
Yeah, yeah, because at the time, there was like, going back to what said earlier, it was all random. So like, if I, and I don't even know if there's priority fees at the time. Yeah, I don't think there was. So it's like, I could send a trade before you. And like, there's a chance that yours might end up before mine. And so when you have this like randomness, it's like, okay, my probability

Tristan Yver (34:31.438)
I don't think so. I think those before priority fees.

Lucas Bruder (34:48.689)
of landing is like kind of random. So I'm just going to send the same thing 100 times to increase my probability of landing. And so like for the first probably until what was it? They added priority fees like end of 2022, and then the first like real scheduler was like I could be getting my dates wrong here. I think it was like 2023 maybe. No.

Yeah, end of 2023 maybe.

Tristan Yver (35:21.038)
Okay, you're gonna hate me, but give me like a really high level Solana how the blockchain was working pre-scheduler and post-scheduler.

Lucas Bruder (35:29.837)
Yeah. yeah. I'll keep it high level and we can like go down because I love to nerd out about this shit. But yeah, basically, you can imagine it like a, let's say you like a toll bridge or like a toll that you need to go through and there's like four lanes that are going on. So there's like four lanes to go.

through this toll. Basically, if you were to send a transaction, it would land in one of the four lanes randomly, and then different gatekeepers at each lane of the toll would process things faster. And so sometimes you would have a super short lane, but you would randomly get assigned the really long lane. it was just total chaos. Packets were going through.

to like all these four lanes randomly, each like lane keeper was like processing things at different speed. So it's like, you wanna like lane your transaction fast. It's like, you don't know what lane you're gonna get into. Like you could get into the long one, you could get into the short one. So like, and it's only going into one lane. So you might as well just send the same thing like four times. But even then it's like, those four packets might end up in the same lane. So now like, it's like.

It was basically like free, like 5,000 imports is like basically free. So people are just like spamming. It's just like the like.

Tristan Yver (37:02.486)
the gatekeepers are the validators here that are sending these or broadcasting transaction or who what is that part of the process

Lucas Bruder (37:11.067)
That's kind of like the old like execution. They call it banking stage in the validator, but that was kind of like the old scheduler, but wasn't actually a scheduler. was like the, like you have a bunch of transactions. You need to like execute them in some order. And like the order that you were getting them in was the order is determined by the toll bridge in this example.

So like, yeah, some of the, some of the links.

Tristan Yver (37:40.411)
How come they couldn't just take the timestamps of each transaction and order it by timestamp at that time?

Lucas Bruder (37:49.081)
Yeah, there's a lot of, I think it was just like lot like time, like engineering time. I think, I think when you're a startup, there's a lot of things that you realize you could do better, but there's probably like more important fires going on. So I think, yeah. Yeah, it's like, we got to keep this thing stable and online and like, yeah, the scheduler is not ideal, but like the network being online is more important. Yeah, yeah.

Tristan Yver (38:04.716)
It was just a prioritization thing for Solana at the time. Got it.

Tristan Yver (38:15.278)
It works. Technically it works. Yeah. OK, so this is the first model. And then what do they change these these toll keepers to or the lines to?

Lucas Bruder (38:24.081)
So yeah, guess we, when we were building G2, I'll do a quick side track. When we were building G2, that was like, it was like, everything was like kind of completely random. And so we added like another toll lane that we applied very heavily, heavy filtering to. And that lane kind of just went, it was very filtered and like, we knew stuff there would like be successful.

Tristan Yver (38:31.789)
Yeah, yeah.

Tristan Yver (38:45.39)
Hmm.

Lucas Bruder (38:54.425)
So, like successful in that the transaction succeeds, it pays a lot. yeah, we kind of just like, and basically whenever, whenever we would like, there'd be like a bunch of cars in our toll lane, we would let them through fast, like faster than the other lanes, because it's like, if there's this incentive for people to do it through this one lane super efficiently, versus like spamming a hundred times.

then this is kind of a path out for people that, for the professional users, like the arbitrageurs and the traders, users aren't gonna spam their transaction 100 times. You're not gonna go into Solette and click the button a bunch. But yeah, for the professional users, here's this lane. So yeah, they had that, and then I think 20, 23, Andrew, and think Tao,

formerly Solana Labstow-Allenza wrote this priority graph scheduler. So that one was much better with those priority fees and essentially like respected the ordering of priority fees. So yeah, basically it was a, how do I say this?

You can think of it like, how do I use a car analogy again? I guess you can imagine it like there was someone before the toll bridge that was standing there and like looking at other cars and is like, okay, who wants to pay? Who's going to pay the most to get through the fastest? And there'd be some car there. And then the person would look at that car, how much they're going to pay and look at the four toll lanes.

Tristan Yver (40:22.99)
Sort of who that?

Lucas Bruder (40:45.595)
Be like, this one's empty. Instead of sending you to a random, random lane, I'm going to send you there. And then like you do the next one and so on. And like, if one of the lanes got shorter, then it would like send more to that lane. So they're all kind of like equal in length. That was the priority graph scheduler that's been running for like, I guess a year and a half now. There's a newer one that came out, like two weeks ago called the greedy scheduler. I'm not.

super familiar with that work. I think it just, it's just a greedy algorithm. So it just like, it, the other one respected the sequencing and within like some set of accounts and then the greedy one, I think it ignores that.

Tristan Yver (41:34.382)
pure financialization, whoever is the highest bidder will get through first. Is that live on mainnet or is it still on testnet? optional, okay. When you say optional, that means like a validator. Okay, got it.

Lucas Bruder (41:37.903)
Yeah. Yeah.

It's optional. Yeah. So when you start up your valid area, you can choose.

So yeah, I think the default is this like priority graph one. And then this newer one is you can just say you wanna use that one instead.

Tristan Yver (42:00.814)
So, you you guys were working when it was randomized, you were able to create your own lane, which started driving traffic through you guys. What was the representation of that traffic? Like, what was the system like at that time? How did people know to use the Gito lane?

Lucas Bruder (42:14.671)
Yeah

Yeah, it was a, there's like a big chicken and egg problem at first. You have a two-side market. So you have, you have validators on one side, basically validators and stickers. They want to make more, they want to make more money essentially. And then you need them to run the software and like the other side you have like traders. So at the time is mainly arbitrageurs. We released a client.

I think right before Breakpoint 2022, and that was like kind of like deep Solana bear at that time. So DeFi was like pretty dead, but there's still people kind of using it. think we had like four to 5 % of stake and then it was like 7%, 8%. The more stake you get on, because we had like the special stage that searchers and like traders could send to.

The other side was like the the traders. So like basically the special lane was running at like five or ten percent of the time. So it's kind of like hard to get people to use it and like to get the flywheel kind of going. And then yeah over 2020, 2023 we probably started the year

maybe like 15-ish percent of stake. I might be screwing the numbers up here. Yeah. Yeah, so block producers get to produce a number of blocks equal to their like pro rata share of stake that they have relative to the stake of the entire network. So if there's like 100 million sole staked and your validator has 5 million sole on it, then you have 5 % of stake.

Tristan Yver (43:47.726)
does that mean when you say you have 5 % of stake, 15 % of stake?

Lucas Bruder (44:15.025)
So you get to produce 5 % of blocks on the network. our code, it's a part of the block production process. So it really only runs relative to how much of the time the software is producing the block. So yeah.

Tristan Yver (44:32.418)
And at that time, did this have to be steak that Jito itself accumulated, or was it something that other block producers could add to their process and their steak would be aggregated?

Lucas Bruder (44:41.559)
Yeah, so yeah, we, it's just a different version of Validator software. So we started, we're like, okay, if we're gonna make, if we're gonna know, if we're ship Validator software, we need to know how they run. So we contact some of our investors, got some stake kind of early on to like figure out how to run a validator, provided us like cycles to iterate so we didn't have to lean on others.

there was like a lot of crashes and stuff like that. So we were able to iterate fast. And then, know, was 5%, 10%. We would like just contacting every validator. It was like me, Zano and Brian. And it's like, hey, we have this software that has the potential to help your validator run more efficiently and make more money. Do you want to try it? And there's like, obviously like, you could kind of look at Ethereum for like the path.

on like where things were kind of going, where it's like, there's like this whole Mev ecosystem on Ethereum. They made a bunch of money in 2021, in 2020 from DeFi Summer. Like we think that this could potentially happen on Solana. We have the software that will kind of help make the chain run more efficiently. And there's like a ton of like trust building in those early days. A lot of like small validators trusted us a lot, like Lane and Ben from Kojunkrypto and...

a bunch of others that I can't remember, but yeah, we got a lot of trust in shipping reliable software. Then had to go do all the institutional due diligence and a lot of the main use cases were arbitrage. And yeah, that just kept growing and growing. I think at the end of 20, the JETO airdrop was 2023, December. I think we had like 50 % of stake at that time.

or 60. And then after that, like, if you look at the MEV charts on Solana, like the GEDO tips, it's basically like a vertical line from that point. And then like, that was kind of like the beginning where there's like, people trading memes and Telegram bots and all that stuff. And like, once there was like, more stake running on it, then like people and users used it more. And that kind of like really got the flywheel going.

Tristan Yver (47:06.786)
Essentially these these validators would add your code because it was an extra revenue source for them Where did that is that right? It was it was more money for the validator They could choose to keep that or give it to the stakers on their validator. Where was that money coming from? What's the evolution of Gito that gave them that money?

Lucas Bruder (47:18.277)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (47:22.947)
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we created these, what you hear, like, we created GDOTips and those were for a few things. One is that when we created those, there wasn't really priority fees. So there was like some mechanism for prioritization. Another one was that at the time Solana priority, no, maybe there was priority fees. I think there was.

Yeah, it feels like ages ago. But yeah, there's like 100 % of the fee went to, right, it's 95%, GDOTA Labs would take 5%, but the 95 % would go to validators. And we built this whole system to distribute that revenue to stakers. So like you see a lot of the people talking about like, my validator has like med rewards and tips and all that.

there's still no way for those tips to, or the priority fees to go to stakers on Solana, even today. So it's like, we care about stakers, stakers give the block producers power to produce the blocks, because Solana's delegated proof of stake. Like validators can bring their own stake, but others can stake to them. So it's like, these guys, stakers are giving block producers the ability to produce blocks, they should earn percentage of the fees.

So yeah, those.

Tristan Yver (48:54.222)
And the other side of the marketplace are traders and projects that want higher success rates for the transactions, essentially.

Lucas Bruder (49:01.027)
Yeah, so there's that. And then we could, you could tip the leader dynamically. priority fees, you like set the price. It's like, you know, kind of how much is going to get paid per unit of work upfront. And with tips, you could do it dynamically. Like in, during execution, you could change like, I want to tip this much or this much.

So that was valuable for arbitrageurs at the time. And that's like majority of who's using it, kind of like pre 2024. There was like some market makers, but yeah, I think we like realize we originally built the system for like MEV, like the traditional MEV. It's like the arbitrages and liquidations and stuff like that. But then 2024 like,

There's so many people trading meme coins and turns out our system was like pretty good at landing meme coin trades pretty fast. So validators started using that or not validators, the telegram bots and users started landing that so they could like land their trades fast.

Tristan Yver (50:19.884)
Right, because it was a selling point for them to be like, yeah, if you use us, you'll likely get your trades through. That makes a lot of sense.

Lucas Bruder (50:23.985)
Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, you only pay if the transaction succeeds. So like, you could pay a lot more and you would be, it would either land or it just wouldn't land at all. So you wouldn't have to pay. So yeah.

Tristan Yver (50:42.688)
And I don't know you want to go into it, but I'd love to hear a little bit about this whole Mempool thing that went on on Solana where there was a Mempool. I'm assuming akin to the Mempool on Ethereum. There was a lot of MEV going through that. You guys made the decision to shut that down. What was happening? What was the evolution of that?

Lucas Bruder (50:51.643)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (50:55.205)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (51:01.967)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that was our first product in like the thought process. Yeah. So yeah, on Solana, the transactions go straight to the leader. And essentially, like, what the leader could do is like run special software inside this to like capture this. Like, these are like unconfirmed transactions, and they're not they're like visible.

Tristan Yver (51:07.51)
Or sorry, sorry, what is a mempool? What is a mempool? Let's see. Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (51:32.271)
So, like, people can like, you can like run more efficient algorithms on those if you know what's gonna happen versus kind of responding to what already happened. So like, the thought was like, okay, we, there's a lot of arbitrage that's gonna happen. It would be way more efficient if you could like take the arbitrage transaction and then, or take the user's trade that like causes an arbitrage opportunity.

and then traders could see that and then insert their trade right behind that to arbitrage it and pay the validator. That would just be like way more efficient.

Tristan Yver (52:11.267)
So basically there's a pre-execution environment versus everything just being post-execution.

Lucas Bruder (52:16.867)
Yeah, yeah, kind of, yeah.

Tristan Yver (52:20.79)
I'm just trying understand, making sure I grok it, yeah.

Lucas Bruder (52:22.255)
Yeah, They could basically like take what the user sent, simulate it and like figure out what the state of the world would be as if their transaction had already executed. And then they can kind of like bundle their, the user's trade and that trade. And that's like what most people are using it for, for like 2023. There's always like this like kind of, you know, we...

We knew what could happen with this thing. And I think it like happened in 2024. We're like, especially with all these meme coins, have low liquidity meme coins. The state on Solana is changing so fast that like, you know, the price is going up and down a lot. Users want to trade these things. So, you know, if you put like a normal amount of slippage, like Sol isn't going plus or minus 20%, like a bunch. But with meme coins, it's like way different.

So these like meme coins are spiking up and down a lot, the prices are. So instead of using like 1 % slippage, people would start using like 10, 20, 30 % slippage. Because otherwise like you press like swap on like, you know, shit coin A and it would fail. Like the price went up too much. Then you'd like do it again, it would fail. And again, it'd fail and it's like, okay, I'm gonna like bump my slippage up. I'm okay, like eating a little loss.

And then, yeah, there's just like a lot of sandwiching going on. And yeah, we had been talking about it internally for a few months at that point. We had talked to like other teams as well. It's kind of just like the realization that like, yeah, we could like keep this going. That would be like the easy path. That's like what others, I guess like kind of what Flashbots did.

You know, there's like precedent for this to just like let it happen. But we kind of just like zooming out. There's basically like infinite block space that's here now, like SWE, Aptos, all these L2s. Mainly, I was mainly concerned with L2s. So like base, optimism, Arbitrum, all the other ones.

Lucas Bruder (54:49.169)
L2s are not going to sandwich their users. They want like the best user experience possible. And like, I felt like Solana had this like spark, especially in the beginning of 2024, where it's like, there's a bunch of meme coins on radium, pumped up fun was there. It was like really taking off. It felt like for like throughout throughout the entire bear, it's like, man, I really hope that Solana comes back. Like, I hope people start using it. Like, please like

We like bet the whole company on this thing. Like we had like 18 months of runway. and like we're hiring a bunch of people and then like when that stuff started happening, it's like, okay, like we have a very big responsibility here. And, yeah, we just felt like it wasn't super productive for that to be happening in the ecosystem. And so, yeah, we kind of just made the decision after there was a lot of internal debates for like many weeks.

and then talking to others and decided to turn it off.

Tristan Yver (55:55.064)
the voices for having the mempool? Were they mostly the traders that were really enjoying the opportunities there? Or were there other reasons for keeping it?

Lucas Bruder (56:01.841)
yeah, there's definitely like the searcher angle, like they were making a lot of money sandwiching people. and the other angle is like this decentralization narrative where it's like, if one, if like a few people can accumulate stakes super fast, then it's centralizing to the network. So we should just let everyone get screwed so that no one accumulates stake faster than others.

And then those are like the two main arguments as I see it. Yeah, it's like the centralization argument, like some parties extracting Mev faster than others, and then the trader angle as well. And like, there's definitely a lot of pushback. That was probably the most stressful time at G2 for me, maybe others on the team too, because it's like, there's a lot of money on the line here. And it's like, something like that could like potentially.

like make or break an ecosystem. And there's a lot of like second order consequences and because it's like, yeah, there's a lot of stakeholders, like literally stakers, validators, traders that are like sandwiching traders that are not sandwiching and they want like other activity to happen. You have the users, you have the applications. There's like

Tristan Yver (57:07.022)
That's so stressful. Because there are so many players involved.

Lucas Bruder (57:30.865)
Yeah, ultimately at the end of the day, it's all about the users. And like, if users are getting taxed like 10 or 20 % consistently, then like they're gonna run out of money or they're gonna leave. yeah, that's kind of like, it's like, okay, like we knew it was kind of a, it's like a stop gap in like, there was probably gonna be a cat and mouse game that came after that, but it felt like the right thing to do at the time.

No, still think it was the right thing.

Tristan Yver (57:59.384)
Yeah. I agree. I agree on the user focus. At the end of the day, I think the builders come first. They build good things. It brings the users. But if the users all get burnt, there's going to be no one there using the thing the builders build. And as you said, the ecosystem can dry up over time. How come when you guys shut the mempool down, another one just wasn't spun up? And what is the stake? There are some. They just don't have as much stake, basically, right?

Lucas Bruder (58:15.728)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (58:22.67)
There are some that are spun up. Yeah, Yeah, they don't have that. They have a small amount of steak.

Tristan Yver (58:28.713)
or

Tristan Yver (58:34.624)
and

Tristan Yver (58:39.022)
So does that mean them having less steak means that they produce less blocks such that less sandwiches are possible? Or why is it not as pernicious for these smaller ones?

Lucas Bruder (58:48.547)
Yeah.

Yeah, there's definitely less now than there would be. I think it's like single digit amount of stake that's doing this. And yeah, the numbers are like way lower than they would be otherwise. So from that standpoint, I think it's a win.

Tristan Yver (59:09.486)
And what does the, yeah, 100%, what does the...

As a user, say 100%, I know as a business, it was probably a really tough decision. As a validator, making a lot more money is a tough decision, but at end of the day, it's like, if you suck too much life out of your host, you're kind of fucked yourself. What was the environment post this Mempool? Did it go back to these tolls that you were describing earlier? Was there a change there? And then also, did GEDO evolve into other things?

Lucas Bruder (59:20.741)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (59:25.71)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (59:38.384)
Yeah.

Tristan Yver (59:43.152)
after this occurred or did it continue working on the same things?

Lucas Bruder (59:46.317)
yeah, we, like, I think we announced it Friday night. There's a lot of people upset about it. There probably are still a lot of people upset about it, but, you can't make everyone happy. But, yeah, like tips went down for a few days and, people are like, this is the end of GEDO. Like, there's going to be no tips. There's no MEV on Solana and, like,

What is Jito gonna be used for? And that was like March 9th, I think. Let me see, I don't know if I have, if my chart goes back that far. But.

Yeah, it doesn't go back that far. I don't know, we probably did like 10,000 soul tips that day or something, like at the peak. And then it like went down once we turned it off, because like people had to change their strategies and like find different information sources. And then, yeah, we, and then we just kept like, there's more and more people trading meme coins.

just like more financial activity on Solana. So it's basically just like all hands on deck for 2024. like scaling our system, making our like block engine work more efficiently, making the ValidAir client better. And yeah, I think at our peak, we did like, I think the peak GDOTips was 100,000 sole in one day. So it was like 10x.

that before the mempool, or just because our engineers like made our system way better than it was. And like the system was kind of in a rough state in March, but by like the end of this last year, it was like, it's like doing pretty good. So yeah, like that was kind of the main, the main theme of like 2024 was just like keep the lights on and try not to have an outage kind of similar to Solana.

Lucas Bruder (01:01:59.517)
cause yeah, like when you see the, when we saw our, like our system go out and like the Solana network runs slower in the amount of people that use like Judo to send it's like, this is like a big, like we got a lot of work to do to keep this thing running.

Tristan Yver (01:01:59.92)
And after the men pool...

Tristan Yver (01:02:16.718)
That's what I was going to ask. So these tips are going up even after the mempool closure. People are tipping for more efficient execution now with Jito? Is that where the tips are coming from? Or the reason people are paying the tips?

Lucas Bruder (01:02:25.177)
Yeah, yeah, it's just like landing fast. So yeah, the scheduler was like, there's still some room for improvement on the scheduler. They made a lot of good progress, but it still had some issues in it. So yeah, was like mainly like landing fast and yeah, which is kind of what we like. Yeah, it was like slightly different than what we envisioned originally.

Tristan Yver (01:02:48.942)
All right, so.

Lucas Bruder (01:02:54.225)
But we kind of like, it's like, okay, this is what people want to use this for. guess we'll just lean into this a little more.

Tristan Yver (01:03:00.96)
And then obviously you guys have the liquid staking token for Sol, GDOSol. How do you view that as a product? How does it fit into the system?

Lucas Bruder (01:03:05.498)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (01:03:10.129)
Yeah, so yeah, was a like, it goes back to the stake thing that I was talking about, where like, as a validator, you get to produce blocks that are, you get to produce blocks relative to like your total share of stake in the system. And so Judo Sol was created at the end of 2022.

The idea was kind of like to create this like flywheel for GDOS Alana. And so the GDOS sole stake pool would only stake to validators running GDOS Alana. So as that sole grew, it was like more enticing for validators. They're like, like if I run GDOS Alana, I can get stake from the stake pool and increase my revenue. So it's kind of this like flywheel that I got kicked off.

So yeah, think there's like 15.1 million sold. It's the largest LST on Solana today, like 40-ish percent of market share. Yeah, I kind of it as like the most reliable, trustworthy, and most decentralized LST, the deepest liquidity on Solana. it's like, others will like...

claim higher yield and all that, but it's like the liquidity isn't as deep or there's not as many integrations. It's like if you want to go do anything in DeFi, like use any app in DeFi, then you can use Judo Solider, where you can't really say that for every LST.

Tristan Yver (01:04:48.11)
The stake pool thing is pretty cool. So it allows you guys to not to use buzzwords, but like decentralize the network a little bit by distributing the stake across different validators.

Lucas Bruder (01:04:57.6)
Yeah, yeah, we have this pretty cool thing that I've written about a bit called StakeNet, which I think is pretty cool. It's basically like, it keeps track of performance metrics for validators and it stores that data on Solana. So like, it's like Solana is this cool database, it's like kind of cheap. So let's just like store all this information on every validator on Solana.

on here and then like, we have all this data. Let's like make the stake pool that looks at that data and like figures out how to distribute that stake.

Tristan Yver (01:05:38.574)
Before we go into current affairs, there's a couple of things I want to touch on there. What is next for GEDO? What are you guys working on right now? I know you've been growing the team a bunch. I know that you guys have accounted for an enormous amount of Solana revenue. I don't know the exact number. I don't know what it is now if you want to share it. holy shit. And that goes to, in part, to validators? What does that mean for network revenue?

Lucas Bruder (01:05:43.577)
Yep.

Lucas Bruder (01:05:49.467)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (01:05:56.305)
It's like a billion, over a billion.

Lucas Bruder (01:06:06.265)
Yeah, so yeah, it's Dan Smith from Blockworks has a chart. I don't have it off the top of my head, but there's been over, say what?

Tristan Yver (01:06:14.318)
Okay, I'll throw it up. I'll throw it up on the episode.

Lucas Bruder (01:06:19.117)
Okay. Yeah, it's, so there's a billion in GEDO tips since inception. GEDO labs takes 5%. And then the other 95%, the validators can basically, they like accrue GEDO tips to some account and they can set a MEV commission similar to like a normal validator commission. So they can say, I wanna share like 10 %

I want to share 90 % of my tips with my stakers. that was like, in the early days, that was like a pretty big, a lot of validators got a lot of stake from running Judo Salon earlier and setting like a really low commission. So yeah, the 950 million basically split between validators and stakers.

Tristan Yver (01:07:12.13)
That's awesome. And this is revenue that isn't causing inflation to the network, That's really sweet. And with the 5%, you guys must be one of the top revenue-accruing protocols in crypto right now. Are you guys in the top charts?

Lucas Bruder (01:07:16.369)
enough. Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (01:07:25.841)
Uh, yeah. I mean, a of the Telegram bots and like pumped up fun and other ones did. They did very well. We did. Yeah, dude. Yeah, they did really well. We did really well though. And like, we're such a small team. We're today we're 16 people. The beginning of this year, we were like 13. So yeah, it's like that. Spending a lot of time on like getting that back into the network.

Tristan Yver (01:07:32.162)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. With the fees.

Lucas Bruder (01:07:53.551)
and like trying to build cool shit.

Tristan Yver (01:07:56.622)
Yeah, I mean the beauty is that you guys can sort of have success off different types of things. If there's a ton of NFT activity that's good for you guys, ton of meme connectivity that's good for you guys, ton of major activity that's good for you guys, so it's not just dependent on one vertical. And what's next? What are you guys focused on right now? What matters for G2 over the next year?

Lucas Bruder (01:08:08.049)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (01:08:13.871)
Yeah. Yeah.

We are, I don't want to say too much here, but I can give you like my thought process around like some of the stuff we're working on now. I think like in the Mev world in Solana, there's a lot of like fixed pie mindset where it's like people are fighting over the same things and like it's not really like growing the pie. Like a lot of the stuff that is like going on behind the scenes is kind of like fixed pie mindset. So it's like.

Tristan Yver (01:08:23.011)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Bruder (01:08:49.841)
Whether it's like doing BD or other stuff, there's just like a lot of, there's a lot of energy being exerted to things that don't really make the network better. They kind of just leave in the same state and it's just like people changing customers and whatnot. And so like we want to build like things that other people can't build on Solana. We want to make Solana be successful.

So we're just like trying to align incentives and realign people to like working on making the network faster versus like having this fixed pie mindset behind like some of the more Mev related things. So yeah, that's what we like spend. That's what I spend most of my time thinking about is like, how do we, there's a lot of smart people that are,

There's lot of smart people that could be working on the Solana protocol, whether it's like the validator client or whatnot, like making better schedulers or building cool tools or cool things related to validators. And the incentives just like aren't really there for that. so yeah, it's like, how do we get people aligned and figure out the correct incentives so that we can like have everyone work on something that.

grows the pie and makes a lot of

See, I don't...

Tristan Yver (01:10:22.126)
How does, no that's fine, you don't have to give me the details. mean, it's gonna be fun to watch it evolve, but I'd love to know how Fire Dancer fits into everything you guys are doing. mean, it's a new validator that's joining the network. Are you guys doing any work there? How do you view it?

Lucas Bruder (01:10:25.297)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (01:10:32.069)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (01:10:37.041)
Yeah, they I think they just released the bundle stage like bundle code today, so I Need to catch up with validators that are running that but they just had support for bundles We like help them get it set up and everything but they've done the engineering work to kind of get that going and yeah

Tristan Yver (01:10:59.426)
But even more so for Solana, what does it mean that now there are sort of will a Govan fire dancer coexist? Will there be a switch over to fire dancer? How do you see that dynamic working?

Lucas Bruder (01:11:10.746)
Yeah.

that's a good question. I think that the coolest thing from my perspective is like, it's,

I think some of the network will switch over. The cool thing that I like to see is there's competition between, at least the Anza team. I think a lot of people have, maybe not a lot of people, but there are certain people that are like, oh, once Fire Dancer is live, 100 % of the network's gonna switch over. Agave won't be able to keep up, it's gonna be too slow. And a lot of Anza engineers are like, yeah, watch this. So you have Alessandro and...

Andrew and a bunch of other engineers at ANSA that are like going through and like finding a ton of performance optimizations and just like, you know, you they're basically building a plane while they're flying it. So there's a lot of like dumb stuff in there that you just do when you're in a rush. Everyone's done it. So I'm not not saying they're dumb, like, you know, there's just stuff in there. It's like, like I found this one thing that makes this part of the system run like

10 or 15 % faster. And there's just like a bunch of those. So it's kind of cool to see like Don's a team being like, yeah, like, we're not gonna like, we're gonna like, we want people to keep, yeah, yeah, it's like, Fire Dancer is cool, but it's like this competition between them. It's like healthy competition. It's not like, you know, screw these guys. Yeah, yeah.

Tristan Yver (01:12:34.38)
Roll over and die. This awesome, yeah.

Tristan Yver (01:12:42.362)
that's great. that's great. It'll drive both teams. It'll drive both teams to be much better than they would be independently. One thing you touched on there, you talked about technical debt, essentially. You do dumb things to be able to move faster. As a CEO and also, obviously, an engineer at G2, how do you do that trade-off? How do you move fast versus make sure you don't have to come back and do a bunch of rework?

Lucas Bruder (01:12:50.842)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (01:13:03.77)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (01:13:08.933)
That's the hardest thing to do in a startup without a doubt because there's, the engineering is easy. It's like all the people issues that are hard and like trying to convince people to make those trade-offs and like convince yourself to make those trade-offs are really hard. How do I choose? I would say, yeah.

Tristan Yver (01:13:33.43)
or balance perhaps, not choose.

Lucas Bruder (01:13:38.629)
I think that...

Lucas Bruder (01:13:42.819)
Yeah, it depends on what it is. We just want to make our customers happy. So like anything customer facing, if there's enough people complaining about it, then we will like fix it. Or if it's like impacting the network negatively or like something else that's like really large, we'll try to fix it as fast as possible. And like there's a lot of stuff that's duct tape because of that.

Cause it's just like, build this feature, build this, fix this, fix this, fix this. And it's just like, go, go, go, go. Like all the time. At least it was until like two months ago. And now we're kind of working on something new. like, yeah, it's like, just make the customers happy. like, ranking stuff by severity is good. Whether it's customer or like, does this thing.

Can we get around by restarting the service once a week or once every two weeks to keep it running? Or is it like this weird thing happened that brought down the entire system? If we have a weird thing that happens and it's like, okay, get it back up and running first, duct tape whatever you have to, and then it's like, okay, we actually need to figure out what happened here and fix it permanently.

Tristan Yver (01:15:04.0)
I just realized how much ongoing pressure you guys have on everything that you're doing because you're working within a dynamic system. It's not like, this is how it's going to be and it's fixed in this state and we can just slowly incrementally improve on our products. It's like the ground below you is shifting as you build and you're kind of moving.

Lucas Bruder (01:15:19.728)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (01:15:23.799)
Yeah. Yeah. And then there's like so much money on the line that people like abuse the shit out of our stuff. And like, it's just like never ending. It's like kind of chilled out now, luckily. Which like, I don't mind because we can like focus on higher priority things. But yeah, it's a it there's a lot of pressure there for like, probably six to nine months where we were like,

making a ton of money but like pulling our hair out like is this thing gonna work?

Tristan Yver (01:15:59.15)
Yeah, that's why I saying you have to be a psycho to work on these things. Especially one thing that people forget about in crypto is that it's just 24-7. There's no off time where people aren't trading or people aren't doing things on the network. so guys like Lucas are just on call always. that's a hard way to live. It's doable, it's fulfilling, it's exciting, but it's a lot of work. So I got to give you kudos for that.

Lucas Bruder (01:16:02.842)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (01:16:12.112)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (01:16:24.721)
Thanks. Yeah, it wasn't a... I'm luckily off pager duty for a while now, but it's most... Yeah.

Tristan Yver (01:16:31.276)
Woo! How long did that, how long were you on PagerDuty?

Lucas Bruder (01:16:35.505)
Probably to like the beginning of 2024. But yeah, we have a kick-ass engineering team now. the alerts are much less and they know what's going on inside there more than I do.

Tristan Yver (01:16:50.094)
Yeah, I mean that's great. That's how a company has to evolve. You're the CEO. You have to have the 30,000 foot view. If you're always in the nitty gritty, you know, who's going to create that vision and direction? So that's great. I'm really happy to hear that, Lucas. And you know, the last few things I want to talk about are just sort of things that are happening in the world in crypto right now.

Lucas Bruder (01:16:53.423)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (01:17:02.33)
Yeah.

Tristan Yver (01:17:11.374)
We've seen this shift to what has seemed to be a very crypto positive administration in the United States. We're seeing American founders who are all about ready to leave the country now deciding to stay and lean into being an American crypto company. I know you've been somewhat involved. You went to DC. You've had conversations with people. You're working with the multi-coin guys who have been at the forefront of a lot of this. What is your sense on this change that we're seeing

United States towards crypto? Is it sea level change? it lake level change? Or, you know, what's going on?

Lucas Bruder (01:17:48.013)
It's a big change. mean, yeah, it's really cool. I'm like super excited about it. And it feels weird to like say that I can have a change in policy. Like previously that just felt so out of reach. And like now it's like, I feel like the doors are opening for like us and others to participate in policy. There's like the...

Yeah, I think we were the first crypto team to meet with that CC crypto task force, which is like super crazy going into that CC on your own terms. It's like, are we?

Tristan Yver (01:18:28.576)
Yeah, yeah. Without the expectation of a Wells notice, like two days later on your desk.

Lucas Bruder (01:18:34.807)
Yeah, yeah. It's like, yeah, we're all looking at each other like, we doing the right thing here? But yeah, it just feels right. Like, it's like, I think they want to listen. They, they do know a lot about the technology. And

Tristan Yver (01:18:52.65)
One note for the listeners, just so they know how crazy it is that Lucas went and had this conversation, is that up until January 20th or whatever in the administration change happened, the SEC supposedly had an open door policy where you could come in and tell them everything that you were doing and hope for some regulatory guidance to know how to do these things properly within the United States. But really what would happen is you'd come in, they would take all this information, write it down, and then hit you with regulatory enforcement versus guidance. So this is really

Lucas Bruder (01:19:22.139)
Mm-hmm.

Tristan Yver (01:19:22.594)
really really big that he's able to go in there and have this conversation.

Lucas Bruder (01:19:24.877)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was a super positive conversation. They're being super transparent. You can see all the meeting notes. You can see the memo that Rebecca and Greg wrote for our meeting. I think they are like, they are, what they do, they are set to,

basically killed a case against Coinbase in OpenSea, maybe Robinhood, I think I saw today as well. I've heard some other stuff that's pretty positive about just like SEC and crypto industry that hopefully will come out within like the next few weeks. just feels like on that, like, yeah, I think that all is super positive.

And like being able to have a voice as a founder that was like born and raised in America as entrepreneurial parents. Like I want to build here. I have a big team here. We make a lot of money. We pay a lot of taxes. We feed a lot of people. That's like, I want to have a voice and my attitude has kind of changed towards it where it's like, like we made, I started Cheeto.

like help make it happen. I have a bunch of team members that like made Jito happen. There's other founders in the US that like made their thing happen. And this just feels like another thing where you can like help make it happen and like get good policy in the US for not only the SEC, but like other things as well. Other areas of government related to crypto. So.

Tristan Yver (01:21:17.83)
It's also just inspiring for other United States folks who are excited about crypto, right? If they get to see successful, strong crypto companies being able to operate freely from the United States, it's just gonna bring more talent into our space. And I think that's probably the most important thing we need is more talent coming into crypto and building in crypto. I don't know if you agree with that, but I think that will bring the users, and it's the thing we're lacking right now.

Lucas Bruder (01:21:25.786)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (01:21:41.317)
Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. There's a lot of crazy smart talent that I think is like reluctant to get into crypto. And one of the reasons why is the policy. It's just been like pretty hostile. yeah, J.C. and I like talked about leaving the US a few times and I talked about it with Zana as well. And then now it's like, OK, we're like full steam ahead. Let's like now is the time to have a voice. Let's like.

use that voice to help other founders and people like bring the bring more crypto founders to the US or have them feel more comfortable to set up a business.

Tristan Yver (01:22:26.478)
do you update into that role? It's a very different position than just being a startup founder, than just managing employees, and just figuring out technical problems. How do you do that switch? Are you taking any sort of training? Is it just something that's coming naturally? What has that been like?

Lucas Bruder (01:22:34.032)
Yes.

Lucas Bruder (01:22:44.689)
yeah, Rebecca's helped out a lot. Rebecca Reddick is our new chief legal officer and she came. Yeah. Aave and more recently at Polygon and she's super bad ass and like, was very involved with policy, still is. And she's helped out a lot in like, helped me feel empowered to do this. And then you can do like the media trainings and stuff like that, but like.

Tristan Yver (01:22:50.552)
formerly Aave, right?

Lucas Bruder (01:23:13.083)
That's more for media, I would say. I mean, like, you just have to be a normal person. Like, you don't have to like, I don't know, like, you go talk to these people and like, they're all like normal people. have like, their like normal lives and you know, they wanna like do well and everything and like, people wanna like get to know you and you wanna get to know them and just like being a normal person and like.

Tristan Yver (01:23:21.96)
Yeah totally.

Lucas Bruder (01:23:43.121)
kind and all of that goes a long way. So yeah, like I met some, we did like the SEC thing and then I met some other like pretty cool people in DC. And yeah, it's just like, just normal conversations with normal people and you can share your story and hope that it's influential.

Tristan Yver (01:24:09.12)
And on the topic of bringing talent into the space, what's your sense on, there's been a lot of controversy lately in crypto, but specifically on Solana. I will say I think it's Solana because that's just where the financial activity is and the users are right now. So that type of activity ends up there anyway, more than.

But obviously we saw the Melania coin, saw the Libra coin, we're seeing just retail be kind of burnt out in many ways. Perhaps, perhaps. This is our assumption from Crypto Twitter that retail is burnt out. I don't know, I don't...

I don't talk to a bunch of people and get their opinions, but do you think this is unsustainable that we'll see a drop off in activity now that it's kind of gone through this many loops or where do you see this moving forward? Or do you think it's just good because it stress-tested the system? Like, what's your view on all this stuff that's going on?

Lucas Bruder (01:25:02.937)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (01:25:08.633)
I would say...

We probably need to take like a little breather. think the like, Leroy thing was like a big wake up call for a lot of people. Just because of like, the amount of money that was siphoned out essentially. And hopefully it's a wake up call for other like, degenerate gamblers that were just like gambling away all their money on meme coins. Like, this, I need to like, wake up. But.

These are like permissionless systems. like, I don't think you can really stop it. I think there needs to be, there needs to be like better discovery and more transparency on what's going on. And hopefully that will like help things be a little more sustainable where like, you have like, yeah, there's just a lot of like games being played behind the scenes that aren't super sustainable, but.

Tristan Yver (01:26:11.874)
Yeah, I it's hard if you're retuning. All you're interfacing with is a contract address and you have no idea who's holding how many tokens and whatnot. You're just kind of just going and you see a very simple swap interface which is like go from my dollars into this token. You're not even really looking at a chart or candles or what the price changes have looked like. So I agree with you on that. It's super hyper simplified which really potentiates kind of like that degen quick in quick out activity but you're lacking information.

Lucas Bruder (01:26:12.433)
it

Lucas Bruder (01:26:26.117)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (01:26:39.053)
Yeah. Yeah, and there's just so much knowledge. Like, if you want to be good, I guess if you want to be, it's, it's like really hard to be good at these things, maybe impossible. But if you want to be good, there's just so much like tribal knowledge that you need to know. Like, okay, like, hey, like, get my brother.

get them a phone, get them set up with a wallet and go on some of these meme coin trading apps. It's like, okay, here's this trending thing. I'm gonna buy $10. That's the surface level, the chart. And then you have the holder breakdown and the vesting and was it bundled at launch? And what's the distribution? And what's the liquidity?

Like if I buy like $10,000 of this, is there enough liquidity for me to sell? Like who owns the liquidity? There's just like so many different things that you need to be aware of when you're going into it that are like much deeper than this like surface level thing.

Tristan Yver (01:27:46.156)
Yeah, it's just one of the parts of crypto, right? Crypto is a financial system and everything gets hyper-financialized. It's like with NFTs, people realize you make a lot of money. They start just doing mints every single day and trying to extract as much as possible with meme coins. People realize there are a lot of money in these organic meme coins. So now you have tons of trading shops and more sophisticated individuals launching the tokens themselves versus these more immaculate conceptions, quote unquote, that had happened prior. it's almost, it's not really a meme coin anymore.

Lucas Bruder (01:27:52.101)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (01:28:11.441)
Mm.

Tristan Yver (01:28:16.174)
The basis for a meme coin is something that people attribute value to because they come together and they find coherence or community or some emotion that they link to this thing. And if it's just something being astroturfed by a trader who launches a coin and is willing to put in 300k to put some liquidity and also move the price so that it shows up on BirdEye and then people can come in and trade that. Yeah, it's just like every time something hits, it ends up hyper.

Lucas Bruder (01:28:26.811)
Yeah.

Tristan Yver (01:28:46.198)
financialized, it burns everyone out, you go into this lull. And then we kind of see this cycle over and over. Do you think that's just an inevitable state of building a financial system?

Lucas Bruder (01:28:52.719)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, hopefully it's like a little less cyclical in the future, but these are like permissionless systems. And so like this is just like one piece of it. And like, I think that it will get better over time. I think like the front ends can do a little better on like surfacing this information. And maybe there's like better tools for transparency or whatever it is, but.

Yeah, it's like the system's permissionless. So it's like, this is what people want to do for better or worse. No one's forcing anyone to do this.

Tristan Yver (01:29:29.806)
Yeah.

Tristan Yver (01:29:33.452)
Yeah, I think you touched on maybe the most important part and something to the listeners if perhaps they're newer to crypto is

You likely will have a hard time succeeding in the trenches as they call them if you don't have a ton of innate crypto knowledge You're following the right accounts on Twitter. You're able to map out more of the information that's lacking on the front ends you have a better understanding of what you're getting into not getting into and If you aren't willing to invest all of that time and energy into learning about these things You're much better off with Bitcoin and sitting on things for long periods of time And and that's kind of where I've gotten when people ask me crypto advice

Lucas Bruder (01:30:10.444)
Yeah.

Tristan Yver (01:30:12.536)
I don't tell them go and play with meme coins. I feel like in good faith it's not something you can tell someone unless they're willing to put hours and hours of their life into plugging into the system that we're in every day.

Lucas Bruder (01:30:25.585)
Yeah, yeah, I think I typically tell people not financial advice, but like, maybe you just stick to Coinbase and like, or like whatever your exchange of choices. And yeah, once you get off there, it's like, there's something lurking at every corner. And that's like, systems are permissionless and like, you take the cool thing is that you have full responsibility over it.

and it's totally permissionless, you can do whatever you want. yeah, there's a lot of education and there's a lot of education that needs to happen, but also hopefully the things are simpler and they have better tools for self custody and things like that that make it idiot proof.

Tristan Yver (01:31:18.062)
Yeah, I mean, and there's so much opportunity too. There is so much opportunity in this space. It's just, you have to understand there's no free lunch. And I think that's where people come with the wrong mentality. They show up, they think they can just make that billion dollars immediately and ride off into the sunset. But it's like any other space, even though there's all this opportunity, you need to actually invest the time to be able to see returns. So yeah, I think that's pretty important.

Lucas Bruder (01:31:26.363)
Yeah.

Lucas Bruder (01:31:38.937)
Yeah. Yeah. I think the best thing to do, especially if you're lurking, is just to build something that's the best way to contribute. Because yeah, I think...

Tristan Yver (01:31:52.492)
You know, I was gonna... Sorry, go ahead.

Lucas Bruder (01:31:55.313)
Yeah, it's easy to sit on the sidelines and just invest and things like that. And that's fine if that's what you want to do. But if you have that itch to build something, then now is a great time to jump in and do it.

Tristan Yver (01:32:12.578)
Well, that's a great segue into one of my closing questions, which is, what are some thoughts or perhaps advice you could leave with people who have had that thought of building something as you had when you were at the prior companies but have never taken the leap of faith? Do you have any advice for folks like that to do or not do it?

Lucas Bruder (01:32:29.905)
Yes.

Lucas Bruder (01:32:34.417)
Definitely do it. I would say at least do it on the side. Obviously, like, don't get in trouble or don't do it during working hours at your other job. like, yeah, you'll I think you'll know when it's time when you like can't sleep because you're thinking about this idea. And like, you don't want to go to bed because you're like so close to solving something.

that's like not your day job. It's like this like passion that you have. Those are the people that, do I still have you? Okay. Yeah, those are the people that I like to hire. The ones that have like the side projects and those are like the good engineers and good founders. It's like you have this passion, you wanna keep working on it past your like day job. Definitely do it.

Tristan Yver (01:33:12.194)
Yeah, I'm here.

Lucas Bruder (01:33:30.962)
I would say other advice, yeah, like ship fast, reply guy on Twitter to people, like ask people questions, don't be a dick. You'll get people like responding to you and you'll pick up followers and eventually like you'll have your own voice and you can write more longer form pieces. Getting a following and like a community on Twitter is super valuable.

There's still a lot of people that I met back in like 2020 and 2021 that I still talk to and are friends with What else I would say like try Just have like a long-term mindset to like I feel like it's easy in crypto that there's so many like metas that get played out and I've definitely been guilty of this or like

been tempted of this at times. But it's like, you have these like metas that last like a month or two or three at most. Or maybe sometimes longer and try to, you want to balance like building for that meta if you have a long term conviction, but also like build something unique because there's a lot of times where people are like, they're like, this like

There's this decentralized AI meta and like we saw all these like crazy tokens getting launched and like all this stuff. And now it's like, that's kind of dead. I mean, it's, you know, it's still going on. There's still like the hardcore people in there, but you have people that were like developing products for like two to three months to launch it. And then the thing dies like the next week. So, yeah, I would say like, be careful of like writing that each meta, try to build for the longterm.

Tristan Yver (01:35:30.19)
And my final question for you Lucas is, what is a life habit, a skill, something that you put time into that has allowed you to live a better life, perhaps be a better founder, better partner?

Lucas Bruder (01:35:51.225)
I would say either like working out or...

Lucas Bruder (01:36:01.457)
Like, I would say like talking, getting opinions from people on your team a lot on like how things are going and like directions to take and stuff like that. Like don't get disconnected from your team. do you, if we're like talking about something, it's like, do you think this is gonna work? Like how's this gonna fail? How am I doing as a leader? Like stuff like that. Like you don't wanna, it's,

especially in crypto, like it could be easy to like lose touch as a founder, especially like.

Yeah, it can just be easy to lose touch. There's people that are, some days they're excited about you online, some days they're super angry with you, some days you don't leave your house for a few days because you're just grinding something out and you need to stay grounded, whether it's hanging out with your family, working out, whatever it is, don't get lost.

Tristan Yver (01:37:09.774)
Cool. Thank you, Lucas, and thanks for coming on the podcast.

Lucas Bruder (01:37:13.103)
Yeah, thanks.