Meet the Solana engineer who defected for his own L1

Welcome back to The Gwart Show! Today, Liam from Through (formerly Fire Dancer engineer) joins us to talk about building a high-performance L1 blockchain from scratch. We dive into why Solana has structural limitations, his leaderless consensus design, proof-of-burn mechanisms, and why economic security is overrated. Plus takes on trading, Fire Dancer's progress, and the future of DeFi. Subscribe to the newsletter! https://newsletter.blockspacemedia.com NOTES: • Fire Dancer has ~10% of Solana network • Through team is only 5 people currently • Testnet launching in 1-2 months timeline • SDK support targeting July release • Solana chain halts if clients disagree • Economic security was higher than ETH Timestamps 00:00 Start 00:12 Liam's background 02:18 Early trading 03:13 Firedancer experience 03:58 What's Unto? 05:40 Solana L1 limitations 08:07 Applications 09:51 CLOB wars 11:58 Proof of stake flaws 18:23 Multiple concurrent proposers 21:38 Burn design 25:27 Improvements in trading 27:47 Commodities on chain 30:08 Onto chain performance 32:52 Performant L1 chain competition 35:38 Desired apps 38:00 Firedancer progress & marketshare 42:10 Decentralization & price discovery 45:57 The value of a market 50:10 MEV on Solana 53:56 L1 token value 1:01:28 Through updates 1:03:42 Wrap up The Gwart Show is sponsored by Ellipsis Labs. Ellipsis Labs is building Atlas, the blockchain purpose-built for verifiable finance. You may know of Ellipsis Labs by their first product Phoenix, a fully on-chain orderbook DEX that’s done over 50 billion dollars in unincentivized volume.They are one of the strongest teams I know in crypto. If you’re interested in working for a mission-driven company, Ellipsis Labs is hiring engineers passionate about crypto and finance to work on Atlas. You can learn more and apply on Ellipsis Labs’ Twitter “at Ellipsis_Labs”. Don’t forget to check out Atlas too, @atlasxyz on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices