Stephen: This is your host, Stephen Sargeant. We are breaking down Solana. We're talking with one of the top projects named by 99 Bitcoins on the Solana ecosystem, marinade finance. We have the chief commercial Officer. That's an inside joke you'll see in the episode. Hadley Stern was just an amazing professional, had a background working at Fidelity.

He's gone on to work with BNY Mellon AWS Block. He's definitely an OG in this space. 11 years working in crypto and leading digital asset teams is explaining why Solana might be the blockchain that you have to start looking into, and what is staking, what is liquid staking, all the pros, the cons, and the risks.

This is one of my favorite episodes when it comes to talking about a blockchain that we all know and love from a builder's perspective. So if you're anywhere working in a financial institution, you're trying to understand more about blockchain, Solana might be the place to start specifically with marinade finance.

Listen to this episode, I'm guaranteeing you're gonna love it. I'm gonna meet Hadley probably at Consensus here in blockchain week in Toronto in a few weeks. So I'm excited to do a follow up episode. Maybe they're live with them. I'll let you know. Talk soon.

Stephen: This is your host, Stephen Sargeant, the Around the Coin podcast. We have a little bit of a Canadian connection here. Somebody that was, you know, grew up in Ottawa. I'm here based outta Toronto. We have Hadley Stern, the chief compliance officer, or chief com commercial officer. I'm so used to saying compliance officer when talking to people. Chief commercial officer of Marinade Finance named one of the top projects on Solana by 99 Bitcoins, which is a huge accomplishment. I know I grew up learning about Bitcoin and blockchain on that platform. So to be named as a Top Solana project is, is pretty is for something pretty interesting.

Hadley, tell me a little bit about yourself, then We're gonna dive into your background. All the digital asset teams that you've worked with and led throughout these years.

Hadley: Sure. Yeah. So first of all, thanks for having me on the pod. It's great to be here. And yeah, chief commercial officer, you're not the first person that made that mistake. And normally job descriptions, it's like, whatever, but you don't want to be chief compliance officer, let's be real here. You, you do not want that mistake.

So, chief Commercial Officer, thanks for clarifying that. Yeah, so Hadley Stern Chief Commercial Officer at Marinade Finance, a leading staking solution provider on the Solana platform. Been here coming up on almost a year. And yeah, I've been in crypto quite a long time also have a Canadian connection, so looking forward to diving into everything Crypto. And maybe we'll throw some Canada stuff in there too.

Stephen: I love it. I love it. A lot going on in Canada, including, you know, Bitcoin Spot E or Solana Spot ETF just got announced last week. We're always the leaders when it comes to spot ETFs. Whether people use them as much as they do in the US is a completely different conversation, but it's great to see.

Solana. What are your thoughts on that? Before we even jump into your background, what are your thoughts about on the Solana spot, ETF in Canada? Is that huge news? Is it not news until it hits US?

Hadley: No, no. It's, it's news. It's absolutely news. And Canada has been great in being a leader in the crypto space, particularly in the ETF market, as you know, did it. So all those things are incredibly helpful because it sets the, it gets the commercial and operational engine in motion to actually make these products work. So having a country like Canada take the lead is definitely, you know, very helpful. Not only just for the US but I think globally for the, the maturation of the, the asset class and in this case for Solana. So, very excited to see that and excited to see these products come down here. And we're, we're working with a few companies on that as well.

Stephen: I would love to hear your thoughts.

I know, you know, speaking about Canadian connections, Solana, you know, Vitalik had some, I would say negative words about some of the Solana projects. What are your thoughts about Vitalik speaking on Solana and is he missing some of the things? 'cause he is so focused on the Ethereum network.

Hadley: Yeah, I mean, first of all, all due respect to him. I mean, so I do think, and, and since I've been in this space, it's coming up on, I think 11 years now. So when I first joined, there was no ETH

Stephen: Right,

Hadley: So I've had the privilege of seeing us go from a Bitcoin only world to then a bitcoin plus ETH world, to then a bitcoin plus ETH plus plethora of coins world to then I'd say a third phase, which was, you know, bitcoin plus eth plus altcoins, plus significant ETH competitors.

Stephen: Right.

Hadley: whether it's Carano Ave. You know, avalanche and now Solana. we're in a very, you know, we've gone through many different cycles and I think what he may be missing a little, and when I joined Marinade Finance. One of the things that I needed to do a lot of due diligence on was Solana, because Marinade only, we only operate on the Solana blockchain. So if you're like not into it or if you don't believe in it you, you know, that it doesn't really make sense. And one of the things that I really love about Solana that I think Vitalik may be missing that yes, it's an incredible technology with some innovations, proof of history, et cetera. So that's sort of the, the what, but the how, how the salona ecosystem functions, how the foundation functions in a very business-like strategic hands-on, but hands-off way

Stephen: All right.

Hadley: of like not being involved in every project and not thinking it just, you know, fund everything, but also, you know, picking usually the winners and then letting the community blossom. if I was to sit down with Vitalik, I'd say. A foundation isn't just about the technology, it's also about the business and the building.

Stephen: I love that. And it's hard too, right? If I'm gonna give advice about podcasts, I'm going to use my experience with my podcast as like my kind of foundational point. So everything that doesn't look exactly like the way I'm doing it here seems foreign or maybe not, right? Because of the success I'm having with my style of podcasts.

But there's other people looking at like, Hey, we do it completely different. We have similar or better success than you. There's no really right or wrong way. I think it's looking at from your lens of like, Hey, this is the way a blockchain is supposed to work. You're not doing it exactly the way we would do it over here.

And I think everyone has to take that with a grain of salt.

But you talked about being in Bitcoin for 11 years, or at least Crypto for 11 years. And I'm assuming if you're talking about 11 years, it's, it's Bitcoin only at that time. That's around the time. Maybe a little earlier than I got into the space, or at least knowledge of the space.

But you were working at Fidelity Investments for over 17 years. So you started in social media, you kind of worked your way around to Fidelity Labs. What, what were you doing? What's Fidelity Labs for those? I don't know, because I feel like that might have been at the impetus of your innovative style through Fidelity.

Hadley: Yeah. So like many organizations, fidelity Labs has changed throughout the years. It still exists, but, but when I was there, really the remit of the group that I was a part of was any new tech. It was very much more technology focused initially. So as new technologies came out, cloud, mobile, social things that seem very passe now, what, what was the opportunity and was, what was the threat to Fidelity Investments? So, for example. Again, it's gonna sound very passe. I was there, I was in the room when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone at ww DC in 2008. So that device comes out. do you do as a Fidelity? Do you ignore it? Do you, you know, do you recreate your website for a mobile screen, the first of its kind? And then when the app store API infrastructure was, or SDK was released, about six months later do we a dedicated app. And so our group was mandated with researching those things, making decisions and proposals on what to do and what not to do. And then if the decision was to do it, to build it.

So in that case, we did build Fidelity's first iPhone app. Yes. Again, seems very passe. Help launch Fidelity on, on Facebook and Twitter. Which was wild back in the, the day of what Twitter was like, although it's even wilder now, I guess.

Stephen: I was gonna say like, I think, I think we've reached that historical cycle.

Hadley: Yeah. And then, and then some technology projects like cloud infrastructure that aren't necessarily customer facing, but are really important.

Stephen: I'm cur

Hadley: context that I came to Bitcoin.

Stephen: I love that. I'm curious about like how quickly you would move. Like I remember my bank, like at some point, like, you know, five, six years after internet banking, then they would have a representative of standing outside the bank, kind of pointing you towards, you know, setting up your, your online account versus going to the teller.

But that was a long time after I was using, you know, digital banking was Fidelity. Do you feel like really quick in moving or like, you know, doing a lot of research first, making sure that you had the support of your users and customers before launching? Like what was your approach from such a large institution?

Hadley: Very, very aggressive. So. Fidelity is a very unique company. It's privately held, so it's not a public company. So it has different economic dynamics. I was there, and I think it's still set by people from there, that in many ways it's a technology company that happens to offer financial services rather than a financial services company that uses technology. it was a very forward-thinking. The chairman and then his daughter, Abigail Johnson, who took over and is now the present, CEO, very forward-thinking from a technology standpoint. She is the reason I got into Bitcoin. She's the reason all of us at Fidelity got into Bitcoin. It was her vision. And I can talk about that a little bit more, but no, we moved quickly when we decided to do an iPhone app. It was, you know, the first of its kind in the category in the app store within a few months. We also did some weird stuff like, you know, when apps on TVs were a big deal, we did that, avoided Second Life. And there's a little bit of context of why I mention that in my Fidelity story. We, you know, I don't know if you remember Second Life, but this virtual world Linden dollars

Stephen: Dollars

Hadley: it was like every company has to have a presence in Second Life.

And we are like, okay, yeah. You know, and no we didn't do it, but we also launched some things like the, the TV app stuff. So it was a real mix and that was the kind of context. But yeah, moved very quickly and that, that is the culture that set that, the groundwork for why Fidelity was so aggressive early on in adopting Bitcoin.

Stephen: even, and maybe not just fidelity. You've worked obviously at places like Block and Amazon Web Services, BNY Mellon. What makes an idea of like, Hey, we're gonna go forward, even though it's kind of like cutting edge, innovative, or hey, we need to like, this sounds sensational right now. I'm thinking of like NFTs, like sounds sensational now, but like there's an eight month hype cycle and now nobody wants to go to the metaverse.

How do you balance like being innovative or like, Hey, we just blew a bunch of money on resources and consultants and now we're having a party in the Metaverse and it's just us and three other friends.

Hadley: And Steven, 'cause he's, he's gonna show up, you know, to, to our party. You know, it's a really good question. And then what you're getting to is the root of like, really one of the biggest challenges, which is how do you innovate? How do you create new products and services? When do you not do something? I'll just say that, you know, in my career I've seen a few different approaches. I think what's so incredibly impressive about Amazon in so many ways is their sort of true North is the customer. So it's worked backwards from the customer needs and really focus on that. So if you can solve a customer need, you know, I wanna get any book in the world, I want to get any book in the world the next day. and you can be laser focused on that. You can, you can win. But they've had their duds too. And Jeff Bezos talks about this, the fire tablet the fire phone, actually not even the tablet. I think it was a phone. See, it's like so repressed in my memory. Not that I was involved in it, but the fire phone was a comp, the Amazon phone was a complete dud.

And he talks about that as an example of, know, we've had some misses. So I think look, even, even the best of the best miss, you know, in sports and business and life, it's a question of what framework you put around it, what discipline you put around it. and that's probably more of the art and the science than anything.

Stephen: That makes a lot of sense. If that phone was a success, everyone would be, of course, a success. You know what I mean? Like it makes sense afterwards that it be success, but when it fails, like there's a lot more questions than there are answers of like, Hey, why wasn't this success a success? But like,

Hadley: innovation movies, and it has a Canadian spin to it, is the, the Blackberry movie. I forget what it's called.

Stephen: oh, I don't think I've seen it. I don't think I've seen it.

Hadley: to see it. It, it's a really good film. And that talks about this issue the founders of Blackberry were brilliant and they solved a particular problem for a particular

Stephen: Yeah.

Hadley: moment in time in technology, but also very arrogant.

When they saw the iPhone launch, they completely ignored it and poo-pooed it. So I think the other thing that I've learned throughout my career is that things change and there's a time for some things, and that may play into the NFT thing, where it, there may have been a bubble of something, but not everything in the ecosystem is right. Like if you go back to the iPhone again, was also this very particular time when the processor speed was just fast enough. The, the touchscreen technology was just good enough. The cell phone speed. The network was just good enough for all these things to come together, so someone could have conceived that 10 years prior and it wouldn't do anything. So I, I just think that's what's interesting about, you know, product and technology innovation is that yes, you can have the idea, but there are so many other things that play in what makes a product work.

Stephen: As your point about like knowing what the customer wants and putting it out there, you know, also not listening to what the customer says and more on what the customer does or how they act, right? Everyone said. I'm not gonna use an iPhone because I like touching the buttons. Not realizing we, we were always optimizing for speed and convenience, which is why we went from phones, from pagers.

Pagers were something that, you know, you got a buzz for some of our younger listeners that probably see them like, like the archaic game boy I have here. That's how pages are now. It's like, Hey, what was that? What's that thing?

I'm curious, you've been to all these amazing companies, you've picked up so many experiences leading digital asset teams in 2024, where let's be a realistic, you could go anywhere, any company would wanna have your commercial and business savvy.

This background, why marinade and like, and not to say that marinades not great, but you know why? The move to like, Hey, let me go into Defi, soul staking, liquid staking, versus like, Hey, like who's the biggest, you know, brand now? Like, let me go to Coinbase and you know, handle their base blockchain

Hadley: Yeah. No, great question. And you know, something I reflect on, part of it is, is on my experience of where I am in my career, part of it is yeah. So, mean, breaking it down. 'cause I went Fidelity, 40,000 people at that time to block 40 people to bank to Amazon for a bit. And then bank in New York Mellon, which is also really big to now startup land. I mean the Bank of New York Mellon experience, which was every experience in life, I think is a, a great and positive experience. That was just because the. The ability to build a custody platform for a bank for digital assets was just too tempting, a challenge to walk away from. I walked away from it largely because of SAB 1 21, which really put the pause on the business. And also because wanted to get closer to the technology and the builders. So think the problem, the problem with being in a really big tradify organization in particular, is that you're trying to fit this crypto thing into this traditional thing. And so that's your problem solving mindset versus now at Marinade it's all crypto, all defi all the time. It's a fascinating company. I started off advising, so that's how I got to know the company. And very quickly it became clear that there was a kind of personal and, and product and business fit. And it's, I love the fact it's a dao. I love the fact that, you know, we, we build things very quickly. we're focused on the technology and the ecosystem for Solana. So I see this job as, you know, a, a real gift to get deep, not only into marinade, but also Solana, which in my view is gonna be the chain is starting to be the chain already that everyone is gonna build on. So I wanna be at the core of that infrastructure because when I look at what the possibilities are for blockchain and crypto, so much of it is about Solana.

Stephen: And it is interesting you're, you have a nice intersection of like innovative digital assets. As you said, salon is really just starting its nexus into building out this ecosystem. But you're also bringing all of your experience dealing with traditional financial institutions that are touching digital assets and like, so this staking product for institutions, you know, from a compliance focus, you seem like the perfect person that would be able to bring these things together.

But what is, like, if you had to gimme the state of the existing state of Solana, give me a rundown of where we are today with Solana. You know, the prices is up from, you know, where it was a few years ago. People have always bet on Solana, I think, whether it was, you know, some downtime and that people complain about, but people have always bet on Solana.

What is the thing that attracted you most of the blockchain?

Hadley: So, part of it again is I'm gonna go back to the what and the how. So let's talk a little bit about the what. I think the chain has the most activity by far, in terms of, you know, metrics every day in terms of actual utility and usage the institutional side, I was introduced to marinade by Nick Duff, who's the head of institutional at the foundation.

And he and the team there have done a fabulous job, a, again, not selling Solana, but just helping explain it. So you have companies like Society General BlackRock Franklin Templeton building and issuing real world assets on chain. I mean, that's an incredible thing. And so, you know, from the, the institutional adoption. Side of the, you know, incredibly healthy and the technology just continues to evolve at a lightning pace. So one of the things I love about Solana is it's a builder community.

Stephen: Right.

Hadley: ship, ship. then I go back to the how side as well. people increasingly coming into the ecosystem, helping build yes, my, you know, my one superpower in life, which is kind of an odd one, but you'll appreciate this from a compliance standpoint, is helping institutions adopt and build crypto and digital asset products. So marinade has about 2 billion US total value locked up. About 12 to 18 months ago was getting more and more institutional interest. And my role there as Chief Commercial Officer is yes, to help drive business, but to also help build the compliance regulatory framework so that we can work with the best in institutions in the world. marinade is unique and you know, one of the things I really like about the challenge is we are, we don't run any validators. So a lot of people are like, wait a sec, I stake with marinade and you guys don't run a validator. What am I staking with? Well, when a user stakes with us or an institution, say Steven Stakes a thousand sa, we take that so and distribute it every 48 hour epoch to the top performing validators. so that model is a very, and by the way, those validators interact with us all through command line interface. So it's a very defi, very tech kind of protocol. How do you bring that to institutions? Which we are is the challenge.

Stephen: But can you explain what is the existing, you're saying like this is a new way of doing thing. What is the existing system? If you went to another blockchain? They're using their own validators, which means it's a little bit more centralized, less decentralized, you know, than what you're proceeding, which is always, always gonna be a risk when you're dealing with cryptocurrency or Web3.

Hadley: so it's more on the institutional side in terms of like, if you go to Coinbase and you say, stake my soul, your salon is being staked on one Coinbase validator. Or if you look at our, our, our competition Canadian company, figment French company kiln. If they go to a Bank of New York Mellon and say, we'd like to be your Solana staking provider, they would stake to just one figment instance or kiln instance. Marinade is different. And we do this for two, a couple of reasons. We do it for, yield. So we're able to offer a higher yield because of the way our system operates. And then we're also able to support decentralization, which is a very important theme for any blockchain.

It's, it was existential when Solana first started, which is how Marinade started about three plus years ago, was the idea of helping sup support decentralization of the network. But it's gonna continue to be 6% of 6% of Bitcoin is now held in ETFs, which is incredible. Almost all of that is with one custodian. So I don't think that's what Satoshi had in mind when he created Bitcoin.

Stephen: Right.

Hadley: we want to help make sure that Salona stays healthy and decentralized so that we don't end up with pockets of centralization as institutions adopt blockchains. And we also believe, and this comes from some of my Fidelity days, when I was at Fidelity very early on, one of the first questions was, should we mine? Why would we mine, like, it seems like a pain in the butt, you know? And there were a couple of reasons. There was an economic opportunity. Yes. But the other was that if Fidelity's gonna build businesses that utilize Bitcoin, we should be a good citizen and we should help verify the network.

Network. And so same thing in Solana. If you're an institution, you're gonna be a good citizen. You should help with verifying and decentralizing the network.

Stephen: It makes a lot of sense. And we've seen, you know, some central points of failure, and I hate bringing up like FTX and Celsius and Block Fi, but we see where we centralization sometimes because what happens is they're centralized. So they attract more money. They attract more money, which attracts more users.

But what they also do is they just continuously make themselves more centralized and that point of failure becomes bigger and bigger. And we saw the exposure that had on almost 90% of the ecosystem when, you know, those large companies went down.

Hadley: Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's one of the interesting challenges about crypto is technology decentralization, community decentralization, up against regulators and you know, how you balance that and who controls that and who should or shouldn't. Like, should regulators be concerned that 6% of Bitcoin is in ETFs and that the majority of it is with one custodian?

Should they do anything about it? Japanese regulators, for example, regulate the amount of of crypto that should be in hot versus cold.

Stephen: Right.

Hadley: running a custody in operations in 90% of your crypto has to be in cold and only 10% in hot. So that's a way of the government sort of protecting the ecosystem. It's not a very libertarian thing though, right? So, yeah, I, I'm not sure what the right answer is. They're

Stephen: It has some pros and cons. I think especially Japan's learned their lesson from being a little too maybe lenient when they came to some of the controls they had in place with their exchanges. I think they've swayed the other way. And there's, there could definitely gonna be some debate. What are some use cases?

Like what are these institutions coming to you to do is like, Hey, they have sold on their banking, on their balance sheets, and they're like, Hey, we could make a little bit more of a percentage here. Maybe loan it out on the other side. Can you gimme some use cases for marinade finance?

Hadley: So for marinade finance specifically, we are laser focused on staking and staking services. So all of our conversations with institutions are around pointing their solana, whether it's Solana, they have on balance sheet Solana. They're building in products like funds like ETFs or ETPs and using marinade as the staking provider. That is, that is the majority focus, a secondary focus. So we offer two types of staking. We offer liquid staking sal, so Sal was basically the first liquid staking token on Solana. And then we offer native staking. And native staking means that there's no LST involved liquid staking token, so less smart contract risk and has some other benefits from a custody standpoint technically that are, that are better for institutions. But some institutions are also interested in SO as a kind of financial product. So we talk to them and, and work with teams on, on how they might utilize SO.

Stephen: And what's the benefit of liquid staking? Is it just a little bit more yield, like is utilizing more of your stakes sold than you would normally? How? How does liquid staking impact like or add on top of native staking?

Hadley: Yeah, good question. And this comes back to Beloved Vitalik. so LSTs were really an Ethereum innovation and much more my by necessity, than on the Solana blockchain. to stake natively on Ethereum, you need 32 Es, which depending on prices is, you know, what, 50,000. So that's one challenge that it, it blocks off broad adoption. And then the other challenge on Ethereum is the unst stake time could be a week or two weeks. So get in takes time, to get out, takes time. So that led to the creation of LSTs and Lido was really the leader in this space. So you basically, you create a token that reflects a stake position,

Stephen: Right,

Hadley: the protocol manages that, you know, that time difference for you, and you can come in and out. So that's one benefit of LSTs, particularly on E you can come in and out instantly. The other benefit is then you can use that liquid staking token in Defi,

Stephen: right.

Hadley: you can lend it, et cetera. Now, in Solana it's a little different because Solana, the epoch times are 48 hours. So you're not dealing with two weeks or, or longer.

You're dealing with 48 hours. And so you can come in and out very quickly. And then in Solana, the minimum that you need to stake natively is one solve. So instead of 50,000, you know, 150 bucks.

Stephen: Right.

Hadley: So the, the use case for for LSTs on Solana becomes much more skewed towards those defi use cases. And marinade native takes advantage of Salona native architecture, which does a couple of really interesting things, and that is it separates out delegation authority from withdrawal authority. Am I getting too deep in the weeds here

Stephen: I think we have to though because I think this is, these are the important nuances that, you know, I think most of the audience here is fairly tech savvy. I think staking is fairly new for us, so we really want to like dig deep on like what these words mean. And I think I have a few questions on exactly what, you know, some of the risks are and how to explain them.

So keep on going deep for this audience.

Hadley: I just wanted to make sure, 'cause I can, I can go deep, but and kind of passionate about this, which is which is fun. So, yeah, so there's delegate, delegate authority and Withdrawal Authority. What that means is when Steven stakes his solana to marinade native, gives marinade native the protocol authority to do something with his sa. Stephen retains withdrawal authority with whatever we do. So we take your thousand soul and we distribute it to say a hundred validators, and it's sitting there and marinade goes away. know, we're a scam or we get hacked, or whatever. You know, a horrible event happens. Steven still has withdrawal rights at the code level, at the protocol level to withdraw his solana from the validators without marinade.

Stephen: Interesting.

Hadley: a really important risk design piece in Solana that we take advantage of for marinade native.

Stephen: I love that. Tell me a little bit about, I know you guys had your ultimate guide for staking soul, which is important, right?

A lot of institutions and people like myself are very new to staking. What are the pros and cons of either holding or hobbling soul or staking it? Like what are some of the reasons why people are just like, no, I'm okay.

I'll just hold it. And then what are the people saying that are staking it? Like you'd be a fool just to hold it, like you have to make it work for you,

Hadley: well this is again, a big solana ETH difference. You know, the return right now in Saul is, is 8%. It's gone as high as 12 or 13. I don't know, do you wanna not earn 10% on an asset really doing anything and also helping support a network? And we tell people regardless of the difference between ems, o and native staking, if you want to buy Solana, just buy ems o like it's built in it's

Stephen: right?

Hadley: exchanges.

So, holding Solana on its own is, you know, doesn't really make a lot of sense. Now getting back to risk, I already talked about, you know, liquid staking tokens. There is smart contract risk and liquid staking tokens. So then you could say, and this is where it gets a bit rabbit hole ish, well, Steven really cares about that Thousand Soul. the most prudent thing to do is stake it natively with marinade

Stephen: All right.

Hadley: you know, and then you sort of set it and forget it. And then you can come in and out. If you need that thousand saw, you gotta wait 48 hours right now, although we're working on an instant untake feature. But that's really your own limitation.

And so if you have Solana in your wallet that's just sitting there, just go to marinade native and stake it and be done with it. And then you're getting that 10%.

Stephen: Yeah, it's just like you're not gonna have, you know, funds in your checking account collecting 0% interest. If you're not using it for, you know, a certain period of time, why not transfer it to your savings account? Make the percentage interest, even if it's like three, 4%, it's staying there anyway. You might as well make some money on it in regards to it.

I'm curious, you know, staking yield, A-P-R-A-P-I wide, these all had like a negative connotation around Celsius and Block buy. I feel like the conversation has changed where we're like, okay, we can realize that 25% a PR is not sustainable for the long term. I am not hearing those amounts as much now in the industry than we did in the days of Anchor and, and maybe a couple other protocols.

What are your thoughts? Have we kind of removed, have we gone out of this speculative nature where these are like, Hey, this is where, what a real return should look like, versus like just going after the highest returns that people are promoting on Twitter.

Hadley: where, actually a place where I think regulation can help. I think language can help in standards, can help. So we're a member of the Proof of Stake Alliance, which is a lobbying group for staking. And one of the, our sort of premises that when we talk to regulators is that staking should only be defined as a product, as yield that you get from programmatically supporting a blockchain, meaning. It should never be staking is lending out reating or doing stuff in defi. Staking is very clearly just one thing and one thing only. is where as an industry and for consumer protection, we have to continue to be diligent. And yes, there was a period of time in our industry when words like earn were used and it sort of conflated with staking and maybe it was a mix of different things, but it really, what had nothing to do with staking, it was just lending and, and doing all sorts of nonsense. So I think that's something that's really important for our industry to get right, is staking is staking. And the risk with staking is if something goes kaput with the blockchain, you know. That's it. and there are very unique risks and there are risks in everything in life. So

Stephen: Right,

Hadley: there and we should state them and we should study them and understand them, but it's not a, like a three hours kind of risk, like it's a very particular kind of risk. And that's it.

Stephen: and I think that's what happened to your point is people just started copying the language of what was working for other platforms and protocols and projects. And using those words interchangeably, I think really confused a lot of the customers. So to your point, being very decisive on what these words mean and what they're being used in reference to and conceptually and contextually is important.

Much of your clientele are global institutions, like you have asset managers, crypto exchanges, custodians, we mentioned ETFs.

What have been the biggest benefits, like gimme the landscape of this sole Canadian spot, ETF, and how like companies could work with you or like what would be the, you know, services that you could leverage for these companies that are thinking about getting involved in salona based ETFs?

Hadley: Yeah, and we were, you know, in conversations with three iq I won't get into details, but we weren't ready from a custo. We weren't ready at that point in time from a custodian standpoint. one thing that we're laser focused on is custody integrations with custodians because they're a really important distribution point. So we're integrated with Zod and copper in the uk. We're very close to announcing a large integration with a US custodian that will be very helpful there. will help our kind of go to market and building these products. So yeah, gut getting back to the three iq. ETF Fantastic.

That they're doing that great, you know, great team, great vision. and I believe they're, I think they're working with Figment also know them very well and have friends who work there. So, you know, it's, it's you know, crypto's a small industry staking is a, a a smaller industry

Stephen: sliver of the, a sliver of the small slice.

Hadley: know each other. So I think it's, it's nothing but positive as the industry moves forward.

Stephen: And I feel like there's a vision that every company's gonna turn into a blockchain based company and have, you know, some type of crypto or digital assets on their balance sheets. So it's going to be more than enough Tam to go around. You know, Fred Pie, I, I, I don't know directly or personally, but I've seen like him from like 2017.

It's like dealing with the regulators and lawsuit, like trying to get through to see these successes finally for three IQ is inspirational for people that actually believed in the sustainability of the ecosystem, especially here in Canada. These are huge wins. I don't think everyone sees, everyone sees like ET, F, it's so easy, just launch it.

But I think the Winklevoss twins saw that, you know, a decade ago to see all these ETFs pop up. They're like, Hey man, we've been like working on this for like a decade. It's not as easy as it looks like when we're seeing the results we have. You've worked with, yeah, go ahead.

Hadley: I was just gonna add one thing that occurred to me. You know, I think that's really important to say in the industry. 'cause we all build upon the shoulders of others. know, the Bitcoin ETF took 10 years in a lawsuit from Grayscale. so each thing is like, we can't forget those things and that each thing builds upon itself. And and so, you know, everyone has to respect the different teams, building the right things, the bad teams we can disrespect, but the good teams, we gotta give credit to.

Stephen: Yeah. And somebody has to pay those, like somebody has to pay for those lawsuits and those early applications. And I even find in crypto too, a lot of people like, and I'm not defending some of the, the, the characteristics of like a Binance for instance. But we have to remember early days in crypto, if you weren't a little bit shady or like we're able to finesse certain bank accounts and names, we, none of us would be here because every customer that dealt with a, a crypto exchange would be out of business.

Because those bank accounts would be shut down. So it's easy to look 12 years and say, oh, we're doing everything. So compliance focused. I agree with that, but if it wasn't for these companies, there would be no industry to kind of piggyback on to launch our products. So I think we have to give a little bit of consideration.

We can't, you know, we can't totally get rid of like, Hey, compliance has to be a focus at some point, but we can't get rid of like, Hey, some of these companies built out the infrastructure that allow any of us to operate. Because if every customer's bank account is shut down because they sent to a crypto exchange 10 years ago, there would be no crypto or digital assets ecosystem to, to kind of build upon, which is what we've done.

Hadley: Yep.

Stephen: I'm curious, what are the biggest issues you see, even like before marinade, what were some of the challenges and bottlenecks for financial institutions to get into Defi and Crypto and Web3, and how have you helped navigate these financial institutions while working at Marinade?

Hadley: Yeah, I mean, this is a tough one because it's very hard to avoid the political here, which is also a tough and complicated and nuanced topic. But, you know, I was down in DC with the Proof of Stake Alliance about three weeks ago for a lobbying week, and so meeting with house and Senate staff members on both sides, democratic and Republican.

Also meeting with the SEC, I've done that at Bank of New York Mellon. I've done that at Fidelity complete night and day. Complete night and day. So, you know, it used to be you'd go in you'd do all the talking and there'd be kind of like, you know, um, and that was it. These conversations, dynamic, engaged, involved, stablecoin legislation is passed, working on market infrastructure, wanna make sure we get it right. So, you know, the challenges previous to this administration were incredibly complex and difficult. Even if you had a lot of expertise and experience because you were dealing with a regulatory framework in the US that time, that was sort of against you. So, you know, no amount of knowledge can work you through that.

You just have to work through it. So we were about six months away from launching the digital asset custody business at Bank of New York Mellon. And I was running and helped build, and we got this, you know, someone forwarded an email, I think it was from Yahoo Finance of all places, SEC introduces SAB one, two, any one rule with a blurb. And I read it and I'm like, yeah, whatever, you know? Okay. next day it's all hands on deck. this is existential, how are we

Stephen: Yeah.

Hadley: business? That this is like a very cleverly designed attack on banks getting involved in digital asset custody, which it was. So, you know, that gets back to there are some things in life that were, are within your control and some things that aren't. now that we actually have that, that regulatory environment that makes sense. It's an incredibly creative and energizing time for our industry. world may be falling apart with tariffs. And we may have this silly situation with what's going on between the US and Canada, we'll have our crypto.

Stephen: Yeah, well if maybe you guys wanna, you know, us to become a, a state so you can adopt our solano spot ETFs without having to go through the SEC. Maybe I'm curious from your state, we talked about the administration. Have you noticed any trends? You've been almost a year at marinade. We've seen Donald Trump move more in 30 days to 60 days than you know, most other presidents when it comes to crypto.

What are your thoughts? Have you noticed any trends? Any in more interest, more like discussions around like, Hey, what is this staking and how does this apply? And how I'm, I'm assuming a lot of what marinade does is, is education around like financial institutions. Have you noticed any changes over the last year?

Hadley: Yeah. So at a macro level, incredible change. So, the US was like verboten to now it's the place to be and we're

Stephen: Hmm.

Hadley: build stuff. Pretty much every tradify institution is now switched back on and very focused on it. But we're really just at the very beginnings because there's so much to learn and so much to build.

So that's why after 11 years I'm still excited about this industry. truly believe we are at like the 0.01% in terms of adoption of this technology in real world institutions. So it's kind of like, you know, it's 1994 and the web h TT P has just been released and one company has a website and they're a weird company and no one else understands it.

That's exactly where we are. So when I talk about. We look at builder and BlackRock issuing assets on chain with Solana as a leading indicator. That's how early we are. I think it's very energizing because we're early. We've got all the crypto people with all their years of experience ready to build and come in. And then we've got a regulatory environment that looks ripe to work with the industry. So, I'm excited. And then, yes, as it relates to staking and marinade, one of the things that we talk about is that staking is not just about yield. I mean, that's a great thing. Staking is about supporting the underlying infrastructure of the tech platform that is going to come. So when a company stakes, when someone supports staking, yes, they're making yield, but they are helping stand up the infrastructure of the future.

Stephen: That they're looking to build on and take advantage of and contribute to. Right? So you, you very rarely see that. Like nobody feels that way when they move funds from their checking to their savings account at a local bank, they're probably just like, Hey, how come, how come I can't get a branch manager

Hadley: yeah,

Stephen: at at the office past three o'clock is probably their biggest question.

But when you're building and supporting the ecosystem that is actually gonna benefit you in the long run, I think that's an important point. I think we miss a lot of times when we see the yield and the aps and APRs.

Hadley: Yeah.

Stephen: What are your biggest regulatory requirements? Like you talked a little bit about the new administration and building regulations.

Do you have regulatory requirements? You're still under kind of that defi space, but I know you said you have to partner with custodians, so what are some of the regulatory requirements that you have to consider?

Hadley: Yeah. I mean, regulatory requirements as marinade, we're pretty much all set. Like in the US we don't need mtls and, and we know a regulatory framework. It's more, there's no staking in ETFs in the US right now. Okay, that's a bit of a problem. So the ETH applications originally included staking,

Stephen: Right.

Hadley: the SEC said, sure, you can launch, but you gotta take out staking. that's what we gotta solve as an industry now, and that's what's going on. It will happen first on ETH, and then it will flow down. So our regulatory challenges are, you know, and a lot of it goes back to your insight around conflating, staking with these crazy earned products. You know, the regulators. So it's going in and educating them.

This is what staking is, it's supporting the network, it's validators, it's not anything else. so our regulatory challenges come around making sure that these types of products can be more mainstream and actually be built.

Stephen: What do you think their concern is? I could be wrong, but I think some of the stablecoin regulations is also around yield bearing products, like they did not want to include that. Is this all around yield? Is it all around the promotion of yields? Like what's their biggest concern, do you think?

Hadley: Yeah, I think historically even, you know, and we have this at marinade you know, being careful around when you say yield a PY like those words, a PY in consumer's mind has a very specific meaning. So, you know, making sure, and it, it doesn't, it doesn't apply. So I think their concerns are both how the product is communicated and then how the product is built.

So making sure that, you know, and, and again, this gets back to like what is the role of the regulator,

Stephen: Right.

Hadley: I think the stable coin interest is, has a more nefarious undertone. I think that's the banking industry being scared. not sure what profanity is like on this show, but being scared shitless that there's gonna be another way for people to make yield outside of the banking infrastructure and therefore taking away huge profit.

Stephen: In a way that they control too, right? If like in a way that they can see, yeah. Yeah.

Hadley: Yeah,

Stephen: curious, you do have offices in the eu. Where does some Mika come in? I don't think you'd be considered as like an a technology service provider, so I don't know if Dora kind of applies to you, but it, there's all these gray areas.

It's like technically you're providing the technology, but you're not really integrated. Maybe where do you sit in the EU when it comes to regulations and do you have some like further considerations that you might have to be mindful of as the EU continues emerging regulations and legislation within their, their region.

Hadley: good question. So, yeah, the company not only has location in eu, but is a Prague founded company. So most of the company sits in Prague. There's a few of us in the US and someone in Paris. we've worked, we've worked more with the UK regulatory side, so the FCA then on mica. But again, it's, it's, we're. We're not a money transmitter, we're not a custodian. So it's very much a protocol. So, you know, all those things are fine.

Stephen: Does the travel rule implementation popping up in a variety of countries impact your business model at all? I, I'm not sure exactly how staking works if they're sending funds to you and then like does the travel rule impact you the way you have to do your reporting

Hadley: I mean, some of this comes to the difference between a defi protocol and a, and a, you know, centralized exchange.

Stephen: Right

Hadley: our customers who use us through Zod and Copper are onboarded from a KYC standpoint there,

Stephen: there. Okay.

Hadley: they're not. and that's one of the reasons why, you know, there's juris. It depends which jurisdiction you're in, whether you have access to the tool from the DAP

Stephen: Right.

Hadley: versus from the custodian.

Stephen: It makes a lot of sense. So that's actually great for institutions 'cause they can, they have to go that route, they have to go the compliance route. So the fact that they can still participate by going that route and still getting access to defi is important for them. I'm assuming that's the only way they'd be able to kind of like dip their toes In the digital asset world,

Hadley: Yeah.

Stephen: obviously with like cybersecurity, you mentioned the risk and we're gonna go into a few risks, but how do you ensure like stake soul and the rewards are safe?

'Cause obviously you have to have institutional grade security. Now how do you make sure that we've seen, as you said, smart contract risk? We've seen bridges get hacked, we've seen defi protocols be completely abused by hackers and DPRK and other regions. How do you protect the assets once they're state?

Hadley: So one of the things we did shortly after I joined is we kicked off a SOC 2 compliance process. So we worked with ey, we just got our SOC 2 type I We're very proud of that

And going into our SOC 2 type II process now. So these are just structural things that you need to do when you offer institutional products to, to. So, you know, it also has the added advantage of being true. It's not just a certificate, I dunno if you've ever gone through a SOC two, but it's, it's quite a laborious process. that talks to how we operate the business, how we onboard and offboard people background checks, how we harden our software and operations, et cetera.

So that's, that's, you know, one big piece of the puzzle is operating as a ma, a mature business, and being able to prove that you do that from an audit standpoint. And those are the types of things you've seen, you know, become standard in the institutional crypto space. So that's, that's something we lean on heavily leads to, you know, a hardening of all of our infrastructure, which has been running for three plus years.

Stephen: I love it. What are, you know, you, in the report, I read something about some of the risks and considerations that everyone in this ecosystem but specifically for Marinade as well, have to consider. Maybe I, can I go through a couple and then you can kind of gimme a high level of what this means and how do you mitigate the risks?

So slashing risks, this is something we hear a lot. Oh, what is slashing risk?

Hadley: That's an incredibly easy answer. In Solana, Solana, there is no slashing on Solana. So, slashing is something that may come to Solana and it has to do with sort of punishing a validator who is either misbehaving or trying to do sneaky things like double spend and you basically slash their ability to, to earn rewards.

Not an issue on Solan, it doesn't exist.

Stephen: Is that a good thing though? Like let's just say I'm staking, but I'm not acting properly, I would lose the stake amount. Is that not a good thing for the ecosystem or is that like,

Hadley: that's one of the reasons it's on the roadmap for Solana to, to figure out. I would expect to see it within a year and then yeah, we'll have a way of dealing with it just like others do.

Stephen: and what's the risk there? Is that like, what would be the risk there? Like if you're a bad actor and you get slashed, so be it Who, what's the risk there for institutions?

Hadley: validator. They get slashed, you can lose some of your Ethereum.

Stephen: Right. I understand. So it's like at the validator level, like, hey, if they do something bad and you have your soul state with them, then you could be impacted. Makes sense. How about lockup period?

Hadley: How about what,

Stephen: Lockup periods

Hadley: that gets to the conversation we had earlier on around the Stake Untake time in ETH versus Solana. you've got 48 hours in Solana. Now if you hit the Untake button eight hours into the 48 hour epoch, it's eight hours.

Stephen: right.

Hadley: you're, you would not have the access to your SA is 48 hours,

Stephen: Interesting. Whereas in other blockchains, namely Ethereum, it could be two weeks. You don't have access to your under underlying asset

Hadley: It's just, yep. You're just waiting.

Stephen: and you can't obviously do anything else with it. You can't take advantage of other opportunities trade or anything, just waiting. Man, that's like, that feels like the MTO, like in the us, like the, that feels like an MTO.

Like I, if you need your driver's license, like waiting two weeks is a long time.

Hadley: yeah. It's like the, yeah. Here we call it the DMV the Department of Motor Vehicles. Yeah. And that's why liquid staking tokens are really popular on the yeast because

Stephen: Right, because you could, okay, that makes sense. So with liquid staking, you would still be able to utilize those assets while they're kind of going through that staking process of two weeks.

Hadley: whoever, whoever the liquid staking provider is taking on that, that risk and figuring it out for you.

Stephen: Interesting. Okay. Liquidity constraints, I think the audience is pretty understandable what liquidity is, what is the risk there with constraints there?

Hadley: I'm not sure what the constraints are with liquidity. I mean, really, I, and I'd say the biggest risk for staking is just that something goes. Belly up with the protocol. So I don't think liquidity really plays into that. I mean, I guess there's liquidity risk potentially with the LST because with a liquid staking token provider, you're, you're assuming that, that, like with Mol, that, that we're managing the ins and outs

Stephen: Y. Yeah, that there's enough people that still want to interact and trade and buy and sell, that you're able to offload it when you need to or buy some when you need to.

Hadley: There's a functioning market,

Stephen: And then last probably, but not least validate a risk.

Hadley: Validator risk. I think on Solana it's pretty, that's you know what, I'm gonna have to defer and say, we're gonna have to have me back on the podcast in Toronto, and I'm gonna have to come back to you

Stephen: I love that. We'll do a whole episode on valid on validators, because I think that would help.

Hadley: It'll be the top the top. One.

Stephen: I, I love that.

I love that you have a lot of headlines surrounding Meade and the work your team is doing. Why don't we go through maybe a couple of these headlines and milestones. You know, MEV is something that, you know, people don't talk about. There's not much, pretty much legalized front running on crypto.

So if I wanted to buy an NFT and I conduct a transaction, the, you know, miners could be like, Hey, I see a lot of people wanting to buy this NFTI have all the transactions are for this NFT. I'll just put my transaction ahead of theirs and I'll buy the NFT and everyone else will lose out on that opportunity.

Is that a great way of explaining MEV or do you have any other analogies that you'd love to use?

Hadley: I mean, I think it's good. It's about prioritizing and ordering the transactions at that level. And yes, you know, like anything in blockchain, and this is the same with staking and the same with validators, unfortunately. These technologies can be used for good and bad, and this is where pressure testing comes in, whether it's sandwiching or front running or these types of things, the protocols are very aware of it, including Solana and working on toolings and solutions to deal with it. in many ways, these things aren't a surprise. They're just things that need to be dealt with.

Stephen: Right, you just launched a new staking rewards feature where now people can receive reports, track their rewards, which I'm sure a lot of people love to do. Just like they love to look at, you know, they're always on open CC what offers they're getting. What, was this on the original roadmap or is this something like customers are demanding, like, Hey, I wanna print out this report for this purpose or that purpose or to show our board, like, where, where are you seeing the rewards from?

Was that from initial roadmap item or something new?

Hadley: I was actually very much customers wanting to see the details. I mean, it's a little confusing how things come in and out and when they come in and out. yeah, people obviously wanna see detail. you know, all of that. So that, that was very much a customer co-development item coming from the community.

Stephen: I don't think we can talk about Solana without talking about the meme. Coin Culture Pump Fund. You're actually partnered with Pump Swap, which is the Automatic, which is their automated market maker, automatic market maker for the pump fund ecosystem. What's your lay of the land on how people should look at Pump Fund?

Because I think we see a lot of people are like, Hey, well this got access to many that wouldn't be in crypto, into crypto, but then once you open the access, that means anyone can come into crypto and kind of do whatever they want with these tokens. And we saw both sides of that with Pump Fund. What are you doing with Pump Swap and how should people look at pump fund?

Is it more of like a casino type where it's like buyer beware, like everyone's kind of gambling and if you lose money, it's not a rug pull, you just gamble.

Hadley: I think it, it's, you know, part of the, I. edge of innovation on crypto where you have, you know, things like this that are very innovative, but also push the envelope. So I do think it is very much a kind of buyer beware scenario. but that said, there's also, you know, buyers should be involved with, with their own risk profile.

'cause there's a lot of creativity there. So, you know, I don't, I don't view it as a, a good or bad thing. I think the whole meme coin thing is really interesting. I mean, it's interesting from a cultural angle. It's interesting from an economic angle. The way that I look at it is good or bad. Why did meme coins happen on Solana?

Stephen: Mm.

Hadley: Why? Because they could, because there is no other blockchain that can support the issuance, the trading of assets in real time in an insane, real time like Solana. So to me it's like a proof point. I. For, you know, that tradify should take very seriously from a technology and product

Stephen: Right.

Hadley: The fact that its meme coins is kind of incidental to me. It's just what the platform can be used for.

Stephen: You think like probably BlackRock and others are like, Hey, why don't we replace meme coins with real world asset tokens? And you know, now we can use that same technology to power our ecosystem. That's not speculative. And that's focusing on one of the biggest scaling issues that most blockchain has, which is what you're saying.

Being able to mint trade and everything at, you know, real time speeds.

Hadley: Again, the, the, the quality or lack thereof aside, when Trump coin was released, the Solana Blockchain did 10% of the volume in Nasdaq in the first 24 hours without a hiccup. There were some hiccups on some of the DSEs, but the underlying protocol did its job. So that's kind of interesting. Okay.

There's this thing that does 10%, 24 hours. Well, what about 20%? What about a hundred percent? Why

Stephen: And I think,

Hadley: data centers and

Stephen: yeah.

Hadley: and mirror databases and duplication and, you know,

Stephen: And I think sometimes we have to remove like platform technology from like taste, right? Like I think people are like, it's like looking at TikTok and saying, oh, it's a bunch of teenagers dancing. But yeah, billion dollar corporations are investing in it. They're, you know, sponsoring an ads. There's 17 year olds making millions of dollars a month.

Like that's if you didn't like it, that's taste right? Just like at my age, I'm looking at like, this isn't real rap music. I used to listen to real rap mu and like we have to separate like, hey, this is still a, something that the majority of humans are using. We have to look at it either from a creative or a business lens versus like, this is just not for me when it's definitely for a lot of people.

Hadley: Yeah.

Stephen: I'm, I'm curious, one last thing I wanna talk about is your, the stake auction marketplace. What Sam is, what you guys call it.

Hadley: about it. It's, it's really interesting.

Stephen: It is one of the most interesting things I thought. I know it's going through several phases. I think we've done at least two of the phases. Maybe you can talk me through what is Sam, what are the phases and what do we have to look forward to?

Hadley: Yeah. So Sam is truly unique. No other company on any protocol does this. So that when Steven Stakes is 1000, so we distribute it to hundreds of validators. Well, how do we do that? How do the validators get picked and the validators get picked in every epoch. They partic participate in a stake auction marketplace. what does that mean? So if I'm a validator, I want as much soul as possible to be able to make as much as I can. very hard to get Saul. How do I get it? well, I can come to marinade and I could bid for the right to receive some solana to stake, and I can bid with portion of my mev, portion of my fees, et cetera, in a competitive marketplace. And so this is why marinade has higher yield than anyone else. Our yield is consistently 25 to a hundred basis points higher there's a structural piece that we're solving an economic disparity between how validators can earn and how they can bring that back to end staking customers. that's the stake auction marketplace.

It functions every epoch, validators come in and out bid win or they lose. And we, we give those rewards back to you, Steven.

Stephen: How is it weighted? Like is the bid, are you bidding on just like, Hey, what's the lowest price of validators willing to take? Or is it like things like, Hey, it's the lowest price. Plus they also have a great validator rating. I'm not sure if that's a thing, but they also have a great reviews about being a good validator, so we're taking in lots of things into consideration versus just like who has the lowest bid?

Hadley: Yeah, that's table stakes. You can't participate in Marinade over the long term if you're not a good validator,

Stephen: Okay.

Hadley: you don't have good off time, good performance, et cetera.

Stephen: Interesting. What are your thinking?

Like if I said, Hey, tell me the future of staking, future of liquid staking, what does that look like to you?

Hadley: I think the future of staking is that it's just much more widespread and, you know, staking should be like, this kind of financial product in the future. Once our world really runs on blockchains like Solana, where it's like turning on water. That, that, you know, you know, Stephen will be staking, the companies that he works with will be staking because the Solana blockchain will just be a part of the underlying infrastructure of our lives, and staking will just be built into that.

We're, we're all helping support it. So it's this, you know, this idea of decentralized infrastructure where everyone uses it and everyone benefits from it and is rewarded by that usage.

Stephen: You've worked with large financial institutions and even AWS is still like part of a larger organization. Is there any industries or like sub-sectors of industries that are you like, Hey, they should really be buying up some soul staking it 'cause it could really benefit them? Or is it still just like the financial institutions that you believe should be taking advantage of it?

'cause they have so many assets under management.

Hadley: Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's, not investment advice. So, you know, people have to make their own decisions, but I'm obviously very bullish on Solana. So I think it's individuals, I think it's companies. I'm also very Bullish on Solana blockchain being used for many use cases across tradify sports medical, so sort of all the, the use cases that we think of.

So, I think at the very least, you know, companies should be spinning up their own r and d efforts into Solana. They should be staking with marinade so that they can learn about it, perhaps standing up their own validators and participating in Marinade that way. And more importantly, starting to build products on top of Solana.

Stephen: What products could they build in your like yeah, what products could they build?

Hadley: So real world assets right now. So,

Stephen: Yeah

Hadley: what you see companies like BlackRock and Society General doing, stablecoin infrastructure you know, any use case that a blockchain can help support.

Stephen: I love it. Is there anything, is there any one myth you wanna break about Solana? We see a lot of headlines and it's easy to read these headlines. Like I think everyone's, like Solana always goes down. I don't know if that happened this year, two years ago, when they first, like, what is a one myth that you would like to leave the, or maybe a couple of them that are like, you know, people talk about this, but it's really not that true.

Hadley: I think a couple of myths. So one is, yeah, the, the salona goes down. I think it's been over a year. I. I think another myth is that Solana is a centralized chain. Not true. It's, it's very decentralized from a validator ecosystem. There's over 1300 validators, validators clients being either there on board with fire dancer coming. I mean, I guess I'm not as interested in the myths is the facts. Solana is just the most used chain and people are building a lot of stuff on it. So I think people should just look at the projects just Google, you know, Solana projects and look across the ecosystem, the wide variety of startups that are building and look at what stuff people are building. So focus on the facts, not the myths.

Stephen: And I'm not, I'm not saying, well, I remember when I was, you know, researching about Salon and for this episode, like, Hey, marinade comes up at the top of lot of those lists. And people are really digging not only what you're bringing to the table, but the way you're going about educating, especially institutions that kind of need that education the most marinades being listed as the top one of the top projects, which is gotta be good, feel good for you from like 99 Bitcoins, which is like a pillar of this, you know, blockchain community highlighting that.

I, I think some of your team didn't even know I was like, sending them the message and they're like, oh, we didn't even see that.

Hadley: Yeah. It's a pretty humble team that builds like a lot of people in Salon

Stephen: Yeah,

Hadley: So, yeah, we're definitely proud of that. One of the fun things about joining Marinade when I go to conferences and I, I'm from marinade, most everyone has a, a really positive experience and have known it 'cause it's kind of an OG company within the Solana ecosystem.

Stephen: that's always great to hear. Any plans, any roadmap, things you can, we're going to air this episode in about three, three and a half, four weeks. Anything you can maybe leave this audience with anything on the roadmap that's dropping or they should look out for.

Hadley: Let's chat in Toronto.

Stephen: That's awesome. I'm excited to hear that. Where's the best place they can find you? Other than coming for Canadian blockchain week, which I'm, this episode should air before, what's the best place to find you?

Hadley: you know, Twitter handle @hadleystern on LinkedIn and you know, at a lot of conferences and events. Gonna be speaking at the staking summit in Dubai in about 10 days. I'm gonna be speaking at consensus. So usually on the road and happy to talk to people and get, and you know, if you're a marinade customer who's listening to this or someone has any questions, would love to also hear candid feedback, 'cause feedback is a gift.

Stephen: I love that. I think that's the first person on the episode that said, Hey, like, give us some feedback. I love that about you and the company always willing to listen to your customers. Hadley, it was so great to have you. We have to do this again. We might do this again in person or just chop it up, you know, China House rules and just chop it up and you can tell me all about your sole investment advice there so that these other guys can't take advantage of it.

Hadley: Okay. Awesome. Thank you for having me on today.

Stephen: Thanks so much, Hadley.

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