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In the most recent Lightspeed podcast episode, we dove into the “quick call” issue. Are quick calls ever quick? Are they ever justified? Should we all be Telegram extremists?

The crypto world needs to converge on quick call decorum. Despite the haters, I think quick calls are fine as long as they’re pre-scheduled and run 15 minutes max. We can’t just live in a Telegram-only world. I digress:

Indian tech magnate teases Solana-built ‘finternet’

Whenever a big name in the financial world saunters into blockchain, a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted. Institutional blockchain initiatives can oftentimes be more about firms saying they’re doing something than about actually doing something.

One initiative that I’ve been trying to tease apart the seriousness of is the “finternet,” a forward-looking financial system being championed by some of the contributors to India’s UPI digital money system.

The Bank for International Settlements penned a paper with the financial magnate Nandan Nilekani, who co-founded India’s sixth-largest company by market cap, about the finternet in April of this year. Since then, the team has been on the talk circuit. 

In late August, Nilekani and Siddharth Shetty, who was formerly an advisor to the Indian Ministry of Finance, demoed the finternet in a talk at Global Fintech Fest. In the demo, the Indian businessman shows off the finternet sending 2,000 rupees and settling the transaction on Solana.

Then last month at Solana Breakpoint, Shetty gave a talk about the finternet which admittedly was a bit of crypto word salad, but he did get into the idea of assets being tokenized on multiple interoperable financial ledgers — that is, building the economy on blockchain rails instead of traditional financial rails.

The finternet is in its very early stages, one person who helped work on the demo told me. And the finternet team, obviously, is not the first to have the idea of moving economic activity onchain. But what interests me is the names involved — and what they imply about the potential stakes for a project that’s integrated itself with Solana.

Nilekani’s Infosys IT company is worth $94 billion, and he and Shetty were involved in building India’s Unified Payments Interface, or UPI, the Solana Foundation and Shetty have said. The Indian government rolled out UPI in 2016 as part of a broader digitization movement in the country. It’s a quite ambitious, albeit offchain, digital payments program that processed over 100 billion transactions between Indians in 2023. 

The finternet is wholly distinct from UPI, according to multiple people I spoke to. It’s more about unifying the financial system across asset types and geographies.

The Solana Foundation and Superteam India — a Solana community organization — are both listed as contributors to the finternet sandbox. 

At the end of the day, maybe the finternet project won’t turn out to be much. But when we talk about large institutional projects involving Solana — the Visas, PayPals, and Stripes of the world — perhaps it’s worth throwing the finternet in there as well.

— Jack Kubinec

Permissionless has the galaxy brain content you read the Lightspeed newsletter for, but IRL. 

Catch the brightest minds in the Solana ecosystem as they discuss the challenges and future of blockbuilding in Solana.

There’s been a good amount of hullabaloo about crypto adoption in east and southeast Asia lately, but don’t count out India:

Chainalysis ranked India first in its 2024 global crypto adoption index. The index is based on different countries’ usage of different sectors within crypto, where that data is available (it’s also interesting to note Singapore isn’t in the top 20, but perhaps it doesn’t have available data).

A good bit of this crypto activity is likely also taking place on Solana. As I’ve pointed out before, Solana by far leads in registrations for the latest Colosseum Solana hackathon.

— Jack Kubinec

Edward Snowden recently decided to stir the crypto pot, claiming that Solana is centralized—without offering any actual evidence. Mert Mumtaz from Helius quickly shot back on X, throwing down the gauntlet: “I challenge anyone to show me the precise attack vector that would let a single entity exercise a loss of funds, or prolonged power over the network.” So far, no real takers.

Mert acknowledged that while Solana might not be as decentralized as Bitcoin or Ethereum, that hardly makes it centralized. In his words, “Ethereum and Bitcoin are more decentralized than Solana—this is correct. Usain Bolt is faster than LeBron James in a 100m dash. That does not mean LeBron is slow”. Now, with Frankendancer live on mainnet and Firedancer on the way, Solana is actively reducing potential single points of failure.

Attempting to back up Snowden's claim, @ItsDave_ADA raised a potential concern: “The Solana Foundation is staking roughly 13.18% of the total 387.5 million SOL staked. Meaning, if they created a validator, they would only need an additional ~19.82% to reach 33% consensus and stop block production.” Mert dismissed this scenario, saying: “Getting an extra 20% in stake for such a large mcap network is insurmountable (the largest validator on the network has 3%)... Even if the Foundation attacks, it’d be suicidal and expensive, at most causing a two-day liveness failure before they get forked”.

@phyrooo agreed with Snowden, claiming, “Solana is exactly what Snowden said. It trades decentralization for speed, optimized for UX and not for adversarial environments.” @ryangtanaka jumped in with a history lesson: “The fact that Solana went off-line, not only once, but a few times should have automatically disqualified [the network] from the race at that point but somehow it kept on going. This has never happened to Bitcoin or Ethereum - not even once.” Mert was quick to clarify that those outages were merely “growing pains” caused by a software bug, and those issues are now resolved with multiple clients running on mainnet.

@vinibarbosabr, a self-proclaimed Solana skeptic, admitted: “I don't like Solana, and I have a huge respect for Snowden. Yet, this speech is highly misleading and does more harm than good to our industry. It's a similar narrative to BTC maxis calling everything centralized without backing it with data.”

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Arnold Lee, co-founder and CEO of Sphere: