Flywheel DeFi Why Solana is Winning w/ Jordan Prince - Flywheel #125
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Oct 10, 2024 
Jordan Prince, co-founder of Metaplex and B&J Studios and an early Solana engineer, reflects on Solana’s design and community. He discusses why low fees and strong UX attracted developers, the hacker house culture that bootstrapped projects, Metaplex and NFT standards, liquidity risks from L2s, and the threats from Web2 superapps and regulators.
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How A $100 Transfer Turned A Doubter Into A Solana Dev
- Jordan Prince went from crypto doubter to Solana engineer after testing Ethereum vs Solana fees and speed with a $100 transfer experiment.
- His first real transactions showed Ethereum fees ate ~$40 while Solana returned nearly the full $100, sparking his conviction to join Solana.
Why L2s Fragment Liquidity And How To Fix It
- L2 rollups fragment liquidity because they often require locking tokens into separate pools, creating isolated token economies.
- Jordan suggests L2s should move compute/data offchain while keeping value on L1 via a data bus so liquidity and composability stay intact.
Developer Education Is Solana's Flywheel
- Developer experience and teaching are core growth drivers; Solana wins by being easier and cheaper to build on.
- Jordan credits Solana's tooling, docs, hacker houses and simpler single-layer deployment for a self-reinforcing engineering flywheel.