This Is How Solana Wins With Lucas Bruder
🎯 Summary
Podcast Episode Summary: This Is How Solana Wins With Lucas Bruder
This 61-minute episode features Jack Cubanek interviewing Lucas Bruder, CEO of Gido Labs, one of Solana’s most critical infrastructure providers. The central focus is the unveiling of BAM (Block Assembly Marketplace), a comprehensive overhaul of Gido’s transaction architecture, positioned as one of the most significant infrastructure upgrades for Solana to date.
1. Focus Area
The discussion centers on Solana infrastructure, transaction sequencing, MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) mitigation, and enhancing on-chain execution capabilities to improve competitiveness against specialized chains.
2. Key Technical Insights
- BAM Architecture and TEEs: BAM moves transaction sequencing into Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), leveraging hardware encryption (present in modern processors like Intel/AMD and Apple devices) to ensure transaction contents remain private from the sequencer until execution. This is verified via hash attestations matching the open-source code.
- Mitigating Toxic Flow and Sandwich Attacks: By keeping transaction contents private within the TEE for as long as possible, BAM aims to significantly reduce the ability of malicious actors to observe and exploit transaction order (e.g., sandwich attacks), thereby improving fairness.
- Application Control Execution (ACE) via Plugins: BAM introduces a plugin architecture designed to enable Application Control Execution (ACE), allowing applications (like DEXes) to grant specific execution advantages (e.g., 10-20ms speed bumps for market makers) to improve quoting efficiency and liquidity provision.
3. Market/Investment Angle
- Improving DEX Competitiveness: The primary market goal of BAM is to enable Solana-native applications to offer pricing and execution quality competitive with specialized, high-performance chains like Hyperliquid, particularly in the lucrative perpetuals (perp) trading sector.
- User Experience and Liquidity: Successful implementation of ACE via BAM is expected to lead to “way better pricing” for users on Solana DEXes, driving higher volume and better overall user experience.
- Infrastructure Centrality: Gido has become highly central to Solana, with 85% of stake running its clients. BAM aims to decentralize this core function while simultaneously improving performance and transparency.
4. Notable Companies/People
- Gido Labs (Lucas Bruder): The core team driving the infrastructure upgrade.
- Solana: The underlying blockchain whose performance and competitiveness are the direct subject of the upgrade.
- Hyperliquid: Mentioned as the successful, specialized chain that Solana applications are currently struggling to compete against in perp trading, serving as a major catalyst for BAM development.
- Drift: Solana’s established perp DEX, noted as one of the initial potential adopters of BAM plugins to implement maker speed bumps.
- Flashbots/BuilderNet: Mentioned as an inspiration for decentralizing sequencing infrastructure and improving transparency, similar to Ethereum’s MEV relay architecture.
5. Regulatory/Policy Discussion
No direct regulatory discussion occurred, but the focus on transparency (open-sourcing the sequencer code) and decentralization of the block assembly process aligns with broader industry trends toward verifiable and auditable infrastructure.
6. Future Implications
The conversation suggests a future where Solana can support specialized execution needs (like ACE for high-frequency trading) without requiring applications to fork to entirely new Layer 1s. If successful, BAM could solidify Solana’s position as a leading general-purpose smart contract platform capable of handling sophisticated financial applications, potentially stemming the tide of user migration to specialized chains.
7. Target Audience
This episode is highly valuable for Solana developers, infrastructure engineers, DeFi product managers, and crypto investors/analysts focused on blockchain scaling solutions and competitive dynamics between L1s.
Comprehensive Summary
Lucas Bruder of Gido Labs details the rationale and technical specifics behind BAM (Block Assembly Marketplace), an imminent, fundamental upgrade to how transactions are sequenced and processed on Solana, driven by Gido’s dominant role in the network’s infrastructure.
The narrative arc begins with Gido’s unexpected growth from an MEV research focus in 2021 to becoming the routing layer for the majority of Solana traffic, often due to network congestion issues. Recognizing that their existing architecture wouldn’t scale to Solana’s projected future throughput (2K-10K TPS), Gido decided to rebuild for speed, transparency, and decentralization.
BAM’s core innovation lies in moving transaction sequencing into TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments). This hardware-secured, encrypted environment ensures that transaction contents are private from the sequencer until they are scheduled. This mechanism directly addresses the problem of “toxic flow” and sandwich attacks by preventing malicious actors from observing transaction details prematurely. Furthermore, BAM will be fully open-source, allowing external verification of the sequencing logic, a significant step up from the current opaque system.
A major strategic driver for BAM is enabling Application Control Execution (ACE) through a generic plugin system. Bruder explicitly links this capability to Solana’s need to compete with specialized chains like Hyperliquid, which currently dominate lucrative sectors like perpetuals trading due to superior execution guarantees. By allowing applications like Drift to implement specific speed advantages for market makers, BAM aims to drastically improve DEX pricing and liquidity on Solana, bringing execution quality closer to specialized L1s.
While the existing Gido block engine will remain operational initially for spam protection, BAM represents the future architecture. The goal is to create a verifiable, faster, and more application-friendly sequencing layer that can retain and attract high-value financial activity back onto the Solana mainnet.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
đź’¬ Key Insights
"Yeah. I would say that like it's open source code. It's just code and like there's no requirement to run this. We hope that people run it because it's good and like all of it will be open source. So you can look at it. If you want to run it, you can. If you don't, you don't have to."
"A lot of them revolve around Gido's centrality to Solana where it's like a lot of transaction flow goes through Gido and BAM is sort of expanding Gido's importance to the transaction ordering process or kind of how Solana blocks are architected."
"We saw some of this with the Jupiter DAO like people were discussing salaries and like it's like we don't need to talk about that. Like, I think we hopefully have shown that we can like execute and create a lot of value and like I don't think random people need to be deciding like what the salaries are for like the like very good engineers and ops and all the other people that we have."
"There's just things that you have to do, like running a protocol that you can't discuss in a public forum or you can't like the counterparties that you're dealing with. It's like all confidential and like N and PII."
"we decided that we want to start sending all the fees that we're making at Gido Labs to the DAO and like there's some sub-DAO that will figure out what to do with that money, whether it's buybacks or, you know, whatever it is."
"I've definitely lost sleep during the last administration, like thinking like, am I going to get in trouble or something. We thought about my wife and I actually talked multiple times about leaving the US."