Solana: Scalability and speed on the blockchain – Galaxy Fund Management – 12.6.21

Summary:

Now On Demand. Solana is one of the world’s fastest programmable blockchains. It boasts one of the fastest-growing crypto ecosystems, hosting over 400 DeFi, NFT, and other Web 3.0 project. The blockchain’s native digital asset, Solana (SOL), now ranks as the fourth-largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of roughly $72 billion.

In 2017, developer Anatoly Yakovenko conceived Solana as an open-source blockchain solution to resolve long-standing scalability issues inherent to the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism used by Bitcoin and Ethereum. Yakovenko recruited technologists from Google, Intel, Qualcomm, and Twitter to design his vision of a high-performance, low fee network, and the San Francisco-based Solana blockchain made its debut in 2020.

Solana is rapidly gaining traction and drawing the crypto community’s attention by delivering against Yakovenko’s value proposition of the network being truly scalable. The platform is attractive to solutions-oriented decentralized app developers with growing user bases seeking a faster, cheaper transacting alternative to Ethereum. Solana’s blockchain performance suggests the platform is ready to support increasingly complex, inventive applications. We’ll examine how Solana’s pragmatic Proof-of-History (PoH) protocol challenges Ethereum’s market share dominance, even as the Ethereum network readies for the transition to ETH 2.0 and completes the transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS).

Join Galaxy Digital’s Head of Asset Management Steve Kurz and resident Solana expert Michael Jordan for a straightforward primer on:

• The rise of Solana
• Solana’s competitive advantages: its speed, cost, and rapidly developing ecosystem
• Solana as an investment and how to access exposure

Steve and Michael will also discuss Solana’s role in the portfolio and how to approach client conversations about the digital asset. This informative presentation will provide a thorough foundation on Solana and leave you feeling confident in your ability to discuss it with your clients.

Speakers:

Steve Kurz is Partner and Head of Asset Management at Galaxy Digital. A member of Galaxy’s founding team, he launched and oversees its industry-leading asset management business. He also serves as a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Before joining the firm, he was a Co-Founder of Outer Realm VR, an enterprise focused immersive software company. Previously, he was a Principal and Head of Business Development at River Birch Capital, where he was responsible for raising over $1 billion in assets. Prior to that, he was a Vice President at Fortress Investment Group. He started his career in the Fixed Income Division of Lehman Brothers. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Cornell University.

Michael Jordan is Galaxy Digital’s resident Ethereum expert, and manages investments across Galaxy’s three portfolios of Macro, Venture, and Liquid strategies. Prior to investing, he wrote Galaxy’s software to help the firm adapt crypto technology to its institutional platform. Michael came to Galaxy after writing automated trading strategy algorithms, and before that spent his life engineering atoms not bits. Michael got into crypto by trying to build fintech products and learned that traditional finance wasn’t the future, which led him to bitcoin and Ethereum.