Aug. 28, 2023
Mad Lads: Building on Solana with Armani Ferrante, Founder of Coral
This week, Alex Kehaya talks with Armani Ferrante, Coral's founder and CEO, creator of Anchor—the first Solana framework, and the imaginative force behind the NFT collection, Mad Lads. Mad Armani shares his developer journey, shares advice for building apps, and the innovative Backpack wallet embracing the Solana xNFT standard.
Host - Alex Kehaya
Producer - Shawn Nova
Chapters
00:04 - Exploring Web 3 and Decentralized Future
10:48 - Crypto Wallets and Infrastructure Importance
21:34 - XNFTs and Tokenized Code Exploration
33:53 - Spam and Wallet Confirmation Signing
Transcript
WEBVTT
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Welcome to the Index Podcast hosted by Alex Kahaya.
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Plug in as we explore new frontiers with Web 3 and the decentralized future, hey everyone and welcome to the Index brought to you by the Graph, where we dive into the minds of trailblazing entrepreneurs shaping the future of the internet.
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I'm your host, alex Kahaya, and today we have a guest who's revolutionizing blockchain and decentralized applications.
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Joining us is Armani Ferante, the visionary founder of Backpack and creator of Anchorling in the slon ecosystem.
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Been dying to get you on the show and really happy to have you here.
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Thanks for being here today on Memorial Day.
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Happy Memorial Day.
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Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
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Happy Memorial Day to you as well.
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I really want to talk about Backpack and Anchor and all this stuff you're up to.
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But before we get into that, do you mind?
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Just for people who've never met you or don't know about you?
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Who are you, what do you do?
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How did you get here?
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Let's go through that whole part of this spiel.
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Yeah for sure.
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I think I have more or less a pretty typical story for a programmer that has made his way into crypto.
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So I studied computer science at Berkeley, started my career in the Bay Area, worked at Apple for a bit, worked on iOS and macOS applications and then in 2017, 2018, during that big bull cycle when Ethereum was taking over the world, this narrative of a decentralized, permissionless, censorship resistant world computer was making waves.
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I had, you know, read the Ethereum White Paper, fell in love with the concept and, you know, left my job at Apple and haven't looked back ever since.
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I didn't really have a job, or I didn't have a job lined up.
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I didn't really know what I was doing.
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I didn't really know how to, you know, program smart contracts.
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I knew a blockchain's worked, but that's about it and didn't have really a plan and just started committing to open source repos and eventually found my way into Ethereum land and got a job and have been bouncing around L1s and learning different projects and technologies ever since, most recently, I guess, over the past two and a half years at this point, have been in the Sony ecosystem, working on everything from wallets to DeFi to developer tooling and, most recently, this latest batch of work XNFTs Backpack and the MadLads.
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I know you're passionate about open source, just from talking to you and hearing from you on Twitter and whatnot.
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But where does that come from?
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Why do you like working on open source projects?
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It's honestly just like good fun, right?
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It's like your developer you want to work on cool tech.
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You want to be able to you know open PRs and be able to experiment with stuff and being able to like dive through source code to learn things or solve whatever problem that you want to do.
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I don't know.
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Open source is just more fun than closed source and it's really as simple as that for me.
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I don't think I have any purpose for my love for closed source beyond it just life's more fun as an open source developer than it is as a closed source developer.
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I'm not a developer, I'm more of like a BD guy, but I love working on open source stuff too.
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I like the idea of just building a business around open source software.
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The thing I always go back to is legacy and impact, and I just feel like if you're building something in the open, the whole goal is to help people, like help other developers and like make sure they have access to that software kind of forever.
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It's challenging to build a business that way.
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I mean there's a lot of fear around that, which I actually think is mostly unwarranted.
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I think it's mostly just about execution.
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I mean, saas businesses that are closed source are pretty easy to copy.
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But that is what's exciting for me is like the legacy piece of it and I got read by my business partner, brian Fox, who's the author of the Bash shell.
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You probably used Bash.
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He helped write the GPL licenses back in the 80s or whatever, or whatever those were written, and I think it was last year.
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Nasa used Bash on the quadcopter on Mars and it was because they needed something that they could update remotely.
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That would be like a really small program and Bash was the easiest thing for them to update.
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And so I just bring up that story because if you build something useful that's open source, you have no idea how big it can get and the impact it can have.
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Like, literally his software is on Mars and on every computer.
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So Bash is a big deal, so that is a super cool story.
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Yeah, Tell me about Anchor.
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That was the first.
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My first exposure to you was just kind of learning about Anchor and that framework.
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But can you walk us through why you worked on that and kind of how it came to be and what it is?
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Yeah, I mean, the story behind Anchor was quite simple.
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I joined the Salana network and started working on smart contracts and very quickly came to the realization, after writing my first program, that it was really hard to write secure smart contracts and to do it quickly.
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I think my first smart contract was definitely exploitable and if you look back at all of the developers at the time and all the you know up and coming projects during the first couple of hackathons, most of them were exploitable because the programming model is very unique.
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It's not something that people are used to, especially if they're coming from, you know, a web development background or even a solidity EVM background.
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Solana has this unique property where you have to actually specify the storage or they call them accounts on Solana that you are going to read and write upfront, and so what that basically means is that you're injecting data into your program and then your program is operating over that injected data and then immediately, this should be raising red flags.
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So, like any experience like back in developers right, you know immediately think of, like sequel injections and untrusted form inputs and all these things that are known from the web world, but now applying them to a smart contract context where you have this adversarial environment and, you know, in the context of DeFi, in particular In NFTs, dealing with high value assets with, you know, people all around the world, and it's a very kind of hard problem.
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And this kind of, you know, unique feature of the Solana runtime is what gives it it's, or one of the things that gives it, an incredible performance its ability to parallel Lee, execute Transactions at the same time versus, like you know, some of these other systems like Ethereum or Bitcoin.
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They're all kind of single threaded, and Solana, on the other hand, you know, is it's multi-threaded, it's very fast, but it has this idiosyncrasy and, you know, in the early days, not a lot of people could really wrap their head around this.
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It was very new to most of us and the tooling at the time wasn't really prepared to deal with the massive growth that it was about to experience.
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And so I basically just came on to the network.
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I saw this stuff, I saw it was a big problem.
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I kind of came to the conclusion that I didn't think that Much of this would work at all and I didn't really see a developer community that was gonna rally behind this tooling Because it was just too hard and we saw it at the time with a lot of early projects that would like come see Solana.
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They would try it for a week and then they would leave because they're like, oh, this is like horrible, like I'm not, I'm not programming in this.
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I basically saw this and thought it was a big problem.
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And you know, I think at the time there was a bunch of other tools in the crypto world, right, I think, like parody had ink, ethereum obviously had solidity for EVM, and so, like, the ideas behind anchor were, you know, not necessarily innovative.
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It was just engineering work.
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And so I ventured into the Solana discord at the time and asked you know, are you guys gonna build this stuff?
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And I think Michael Vines responded, you know, saying like no, you know, I we're not gonna build it.
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We really hope somebody else builds a framework around for the programs on the network.
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And I said, well, I guess I'll do it then, because you know, if nobody's gonna do it, then you know nobody's gonna use this stuff.
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And and one of the kind of fun parts about being a developer and blockchain is that, well, all the problems become your problems.
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And so, yeah, just took it upon myself to to write the framework and I think the the proof was kind of in the, in the pudding, so to speak, and haven't looked back since and then you interesting I don't know how that story happened, like to get you guys building backpack together and X nfts, but maybe you can walk us through how you went from anchor to actually starting a company.
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So I built the anchor, I was working on the Solana network, but I was like very much like in my own world.
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You know, I was in California at the time just like kind of you know, working remotely, didn't have a team, just kind of like working on open source, and anchor was super successful.
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And, you know, had all these people reaching out to me basically saying, you know, armani, what are you doing?
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What are you doing Like, and basically kind of came to the conclusion that I should scale the team and build more cool stuff.
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That would continue to be impactful.
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So I thought, well, you know, I build this really successful public.
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Go to the anchor, let's, let's scale it up and and do more good stuff, right.
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And so the original kind of idea was like, oh alright, let's make a business around this.
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And that was kind of validated when you know there's people saying, hey, like you know, are you gonna do, you want to raise money, basically this kind of what happened?
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That was the original Motivation and so, you know, I think originally I was starting out thinking, well, what are the services that I can build around anchor and and, and you know how can I scale the anchor team right?
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And so we had a couple experiments, for example, like the anchor program registry was like another kind of public good that we kind of worked on for a bit, where I was kind of like ether scan verified contracts, but for Solana, right.
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So we'd build Solana's Rust programs inside of a Docker image, basically, and have deterministic builds and publish the source code to you know central repository that everybody can use and create some CLI tooling for folks like Dows and multi-sakes actually verify the upgrade binaries that were, you know, being sent to the network.
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Until we had a couple you know experiments around this Eventually started, you know, thinking through the idea maze, like, well, what are the big problems to solve in crypto?
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One of the first big things that you know, immediately after smart contracts was, well, it's just thinking through like incentives and this was like kind of its own side quest, where I was thinking through like things like rabbit hole, gg and things like what are the roles of tokens and what are the roles of NFTs and how do you get people to, like you know, coordinate with each other?
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This is like really the interesting part about crypto, you know, other than all of the payments infrastructure that's we all kind of love to talk about, it's really just global coordination of humans to work on problems together, right, I think open source is like just an incredible example of this, where, in crypto, it's like no coincidence that everything is open source and it's because everybody's incentivized to do it.
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And I think if you take out, you know Everything in crypto other than just like the open source.
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That is like a huge achievement in and of itself.
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And so I started thinking about these problems and thinking about protocols and thinking about you know all this stuff and basically came to the conclusion that it's gonna be really hard to build protocols, it's gonna be really hard to like build this type of incentives infrastructure until we have a wallet.
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Basically, you know, at the time, all the wallets were closed source, so it was really hard to work to get people's attention.
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Everybody has their own priorities.
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They had all experienced such huge growth.
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I basically came to the conclusion that, okay, well, we need to create a wallet, because this is the only way to create protocols.
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Let's break that down a little bit for people.
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Why does a wallet matter For a protocol developer?
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What does a protocol need a wallet for?
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Give us some examples and talk through the logic there.
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Yeah.
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So the wallet is more or less the gateway to crypto.
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It is the central point of contact that everybody must interact with.
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The reason is because, well, it controls the private keys.
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And then you might ask yourself the question why does it control the private keys?
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Different apps have different logins.
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Why don't you just do that?
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Well, it's for security reasons.
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The wallet is the single trusted point in crypto and everything else is more or less untrusted.
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Every website, every DNS record, every app they're all untrusted.
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But the wallet, whether it's MetaMask or Backpack or whatever, that is the single point of trust that everything is built on.
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And so if you want to connect with an application, if you want to sign transactions, if you want to upgrade the user experience in any meaningful way, you have to interact with a wallet.
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And particularly on Solana, you have this kind of I mean really on every blockchain.
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The wallets are really the gatekeepers because they are the ones that interpret the protocols.
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They interpret all the data on the blockchain and then render it to the user.
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So when you open up your, your Backpack or your Soulflare or your Phantom or your MetaMask or whatever, those teams are deciding what you see.
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There's tons of protocols that they can show, but they ordain what is the canonical asset representation of basically anything, whether it's an NFT or whether it's tokens or whether it's something like applications like XNFTs.
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The wallet determines that and you see this friction and you see this problem manifest itself in the Solana ecosystem when you take a look at the recent drama around MetaPlex, where you have this really challenging social problem where, on the one hand, you have this private company, metaplex, that has every right to do what they want to do to build a sustainable business.
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They own the program that represents NFTs on Solana, they control that upgrade key, so they basically control all NFTs on Solana.
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But then, on the other hand, you have this decentralized network.
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You have all of Solana with all of these heterogeneous companies and developers and contributors that all rely on this central company and those incentives don't necessarily always kind of work out and it creates a lot of drama.
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The challenge is that, well, the ecosystem has ossified around this singular program implementation, and whether this is good or bad is like, maybe besides the point.
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I think there's trade offs, there's good things about security, but I think really that what I'm referring to is, like the challenges at the social layer where you have this company, metaplex, where they have the right to have fees.
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They should have infinite fees if they want to.
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If they want to have infinite fees, they can do that, but the challenge is that there was a huge uproar when they did it, because everybody's like wait, wait, wait.
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I thought this was a public good.
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We're all stuck with this program.
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Why are you doing this?
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It's really important that the ecosystems can be flexible enough to adapt around any given company, any single point of failure.
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If they do the wrong thing, right.
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If they go out of business, if they're hacked, if they do something malicious or if they just do something that is maybe a silly business decision, which they have the right to do, it's their business.
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Circling this back into wallets well, you know who determines who that canonical representation is.
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It's the wallet, right?
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It's a wallet in the marketplace.
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Those are the two companies.
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You have to convince MagicEaten and you have to convince Phantom on Solana, right.
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If you don't do that, it's over.
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You're not doing anything on Solana without doing that.
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That's a really good example of why this is so important.
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If you really want to innovate, you have to create your own distribution channels, you have to create your own demand, and that's basically what leads you to creating a wallet, or it's what led us to creating a wallet, which is that we don't want to go begging hat and hand to these companies.
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We want to just be able to do the things ourselves, because there's too many important problems to solve.
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The first very good example of this was XNFTs.
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We cannot have built XNFTs without having built the wallet, because nobody would have given us the time of day.
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Yep, that's 100% on point.
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As a builder in this space, I 100% appreciate it that there's this option that we can contribute to as an open source company, like at Olaplex.
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It's one really important piece to protect us from the platform risk that it exists.
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I think you've probably saw me on Twitter weighing in on this with Metaplex specifically, but I want them to have a sustainable business model.
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I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
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There's a lot of experimentation that can happen around open source business models, especially at the protocol level.
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The big issue that I have is they were a GPL license.
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First they were Apache and then that got closed source, forked a bunch, so they changed it to GPL.
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Gpl allows forking as long as you open source the code.
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That was awesome because we could contribute to that and fork it if we needed to.
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If the incentives were misaligned, if they just made a business decision, that really would hurt our business.
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We had protection there.
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I don't want to build a new NFT standard of a fork of theirs that is potentially insecure and doesn't have a thousand developers building on it.
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That doesn't make any sense.
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That's like a last resort for our business.
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But when they change the license to the current new Metaplex license that prevents forking.
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If you fork it and you remove the fees, you're in by the license.
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That creates a lot of business risk for us.
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We can't really continue to invest in that standard knowing that they could one day just change their minds about fees or do something with it.
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That breaks our business and then we have no other option.
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We're actively looking to develop and invest in other infrastructure Standard all the way up to the marketplaces.
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Actually, we worked on a project called Night Market which is just open sourced, which is a fully functional open source marketplace.
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Now it doesn't have the eyeballs Magic Enier Tensor does, but it is there.
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It is a fully-fledged NFT marketplace that you can fork and use and deploy, with a whole reward center built in and all the stuff that you need to build a business with a marketplace business.
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What I'm really interested to hear from you is okay, wallet and marketplace, right, but what other pieces of infrastructure need to be built to support a new standard that's actually open source?
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Yeah, I think really the big challenge that the ecosystem is facing at the moment is there's two conflicting requirements.
00:17:05.055 --> 00:17:20.718
On the one hand, you have a single canonical representation, a single instance of a program, and then on the other hand, you have the desire to fork and have multiple competing asset representations, and this is basically what leads you down the conversation to having interfaces.
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I mean, it is a wallet problem in the sense that the wallets need to implement the interface and interpret that asset representation, but ultimately you want to be able to fork, and that's a really important property for decentralization.
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And there's a trade-off there.
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If you have multiple token programs and somebody implements their own version and maybe they're malicious or maybe they're just incompetent, those assets could maybe have a problem with it, right, and so there's this trade-off.
00:17:52.032 --> 00:18:08.799
My theorem has kind of gone the path of interfaces and so there's a bunch of security kind of foot guns and problems, but they've seemed to have built a robust kind of social layer around it, given what we're seeing with the conversations around MetaPlex.
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I'm updating my opinion in real time, but I feel like right now I'm a pretty big advocate for interfaces and feel that the added competition and flexibility that it gives the ecosystem outweighs the potential security consequences, which can be overcome with just good user experiences.
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Yeah, I 100% agree with that and I think also because wallets and marketplaces can still be gatekeepers with interfaces right, you can still audit an open source interface.
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You can require that it be open source but to be used in backpack, like you can say if you want me to render your standard in our interface, it needs to be open source, we need to be able to audit it, and that's how you provide the protection.
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That's the responsible thing to do as a company.
00:18:50.220 --> 00:18:55.372
That's like a critical piece of infrastructure, but it gives the flexibility for competition to happen much faster.
00:18:55.372 --> 00:19:03.625
Right, like the mode that MetaPlex has right now around the stack to get distribution of these assets and like get users is pretty, pretty significant.
00:19:03.625 --> 00:19:14.901
So for me, it's just about reducing the barrier and that's just for safety, like for safety of the ecosystem, not for safety and the security standpoint, but just making sure that there's like other options and the platform risk goes down.
00:19:14.901 --> 00:19:23.924
I think it's an important conversation to have and I still think MetaPlex can do things to improve there too, like on the open source side, especially on the license, if they so choose.
00:19:23.924 --> 00:19:32.921
I think that the license issue is actually going to force, is accelerating the path to competitive standards and it's going to backfire.
00:19:33.561 --> 00:19:36.367
Mark those words and let's check back in six months and maybe nobody cares.
00:19:36.367 --> 00:19:38.151
Maybe, like I'm the only one.
00:19:38.151 --> 00:19:40.955
Last thing I'll say is I do love the team over there.
00:19:40.955 --> 00:19:48.710
I like a ton of respect for the all the builders and the devs Like they've worked with the Olaplex a ton over the last two years and I just have nothing but respect for them and I understand.
00:19:48.710 --> 00:19:51.555
You know building an open source business is hard.
00:19:51.555 --> 00:19:52.436
It's really hard.
00:19:52.436 --> 00:19:53.278
I know that firsthand.
00:19:53.278 --> 00:19:57.105
You know kind of got to throw spaghetti at the wall at sometimes and see what sticks.
00:19:58.705 --> 00:20:01.127
Yeah, I mean maybe to like wrap up this topic.
00:20:01.127 --> 00:20:06.880
I feel like it's not on Metaplex to solve this problem.
00:20:06.880 --> 00:20:09.470
It's really on the ecosystem to solve this problem.
00:20:09.470 --> 00:20:10.573
Metaplex is a business.
00:20:10.573 --> 00:20:15.810
They should do whatever it is that they think is strategically in their best interests.
00:20:15.810 --> 00:20:25.106
They have shareholders, they have a token without privy to their corporate entity structure, but they should be able to do whatever they want to do.
00:20:25.106 --> 00:20:26.653
They should be able to have infinite fees.
00:20:26.653 --> 00:20:35.234
That's their right, but it's the responsibility of the ecosystem to maximize competition and decentralization.
00:20:35.234 --> 00:20:38.001
The only way I think that's going to happen is with interfaces.
00:20:38.001 --> 00:20:56.903
I think they've been in both a fortunate position where they've been able to build this mode, but also an unfortunate position that they've been on the receiving end of a lot of this hate, where you have these conflicting requirements, where you have a business on the one side that's looking out for itself and then an ecosystem on the other side that's also looking out for itself.
00:20:56.903 --> 00:21:01.862
It's a tough situation, but I'm confident that we can overcome it collectively.
00:21:02.291 --> 00:21:03.597
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
00:21:03.597 --> 00:21:04.582
I think it's really well said.
00:21:04.582 --> 00:21:08.135
I think that just part of it is just crypto, twitter and crypto in general.
00:21:08.135 --> 00:21:13.676
It's just so toxic sometimes it's my least favorite part of the space that we work in for sure.
00:21:13.676 --> 00:21:15.726
Let's change topics here a little bit.
00:21:15.726 --> 00:21:19.542
We talked about backpack and the important of the wallet, but talk about XNFTs.
00:21:19.542 --> 00:21:22.313
That's a huge innovation that I really want people to understand.
00:21:22.313 --> 00:21:24.459
It even took me a while to grasp it.
00:21:24.459 --> 00:21:29.680
I would love to try to break that down a bit so people can understand what a big deal that idea is.
00:21:30.751 --> 00:21:31.292
Yeah, xnfts.
00:21:31.292 --> 00:21:33.317
It sounds like a load of jargon.
00:21:33.317 --> 00:21:34.398
It is a load of jargon.
00:21:34.398 --> 00:21:36.022
The idea is very simple.
00:21:36.022 --> 00:21:43.634
In the same way we can tokenize images those are NFTs, right, you have JPEGs in your wallet In the exact same way you can tokenize code.
00:21:43.634 --> 00:21:48.352
You have ownership of code that's tracked on a blockchain.
00:21:49.095 --> 00:21:57.207
The way this manifests itself inside of a wallet or inside of any app really, it doesn't even have to be a wallet is simply on-chain applications.
00:21:57.207 --> 00:22:05.512
The way I like to think of it in the context of backpack is WeChat mini programs on Solana, where you have these plugins or these mini apps that can do whatever they want.
00:22:05.512 --> 00:22:12.964
They're their own sandbox little world where you can build an app store around it, or you can build an NFT collection around it.
00:22:12.964 --> 00:22:18.589
When you go to open a backpack and you click on your madlad, it's not just an image, but it's actually a full-blown application.
00:22:18.589 --> 00:22:27.104
You can get this token-gated experience right to the wallet If you can combine this protocol with an ecosystem of services around it.
00:22:27.104 --> 00:22:52.099
So everything from like user names, profile pictures, bi-directional friends ie a social graph, push notifications, an app store, developer tooling this starts creating a compelling ecosystem, if you will, around this XNFT concept, where you're simply just creating a new way of running applications directly inside of the wallet.
00:22:52.099 --> 00:22:53.522
That's the entire idea.
00:22:53.789 --> 00:22:54.819
Give me some examples.
00:22:54.819 --> 00:23:00.348
Was your top three apps that you're most excited to see get built or that you want to build?
00:23:00.348 --> 00:23:01.953
That are XNFTs, yeah.
00:23:02.019 --> 00:23:03.618
There's been a bunch that have been built.
00:23:03.618 --> 00:23:06.779
If you go to xnftgg you can see the whole store.
00:23:06.779 --> 00:23:09.169
I think there's a couple of different categories.
00:23:09.169 --> 00:23:13.700
The first category, I think, which is just maybe a good starting point, is just games.
00:23:13.700 --> 00:23:17.134
Games are simply just tried and true.
00:23:17.134 --> 00:23:25.598
We've seen this playbook run multiple times before, whether it was WeChat and Facebook, html5 games or iOS and Android mobile apps.
00:23:25.598 --> 00:23:34.147
Many games that you run on your phone that hook into the crypto economy, are just fun, especially on-chain game assets.
00:23:34.147 --> 00:23:43.806
Especially when you start looking at these larger NFT projects, whether it's Klanosaurs and their mobile app, or Yuka and their Metaverse or Star Atlas and their entire just incredible game.
00:23:43.806 --> 00:23:49.310
These game assets are coming on chain the whole ecosystem of gaming.
00:23:49.310 --> 00:23:58.432
In particular, mobile gaming is something that I think we've yet to see, but I think makes a ton of sense to live in the form of in-wallet applications.
00:23:58.432 --> 00:23:59.915
That's one category.
00:23:59.915 --> 00:24:04.368
Another category is NFT token-gated experiences.
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