The Internet Capital Markets Roadmap | Lucas Bruder, Max Resnick & Austin Federa
🎯 Summary
Podcast Summary: The Internet Capital Markets Roadmap | Lucas Bruder, Max Resnick & Austin Federa
This 62-minute episode features a deep dive with key figures from the Solana ecosystem—Max Resnick (Anza), Lucas Bruder (Gido), and Austin Federa (00)—discussing the ambitious Solana Internet Capital Markets (ICM) Roadmap. The central theme is evolving Solana into a platform capable of hosting the world’s most liquid, accessible, and high-performance financial markets, mirroring or exceeding traditional finance (TradFi) capabilities.
1. Focus Area
The discussion centers on the Solana Internet Capital Markets (ICM) Roadmap, focusing heavily on market microstructure, transaction sequencing/ordering, and the necessary infrastructure upgrades (networking and execution control) required to support sophisticated financial applications on-chain.
2. Key Technical Insights
- Application Control Execution (ACE): A core feature being developed, allowing applications fine-grained, millisecond-level control over how their orders are sequenced within a block, moving from probabilistic ordering to deterministic execution.
- Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM): Gido’s mechanism designed to enable ACE in a permissionless manner, allowing applications to deploy and gain execution control without forking the validator plane.
- Deterministic Networking: Double Zero (00) is building a decentralized physical network of fiber cables to provide dedicated, low-latency, and low-jitter routing between validators, crucial for achieving predictable performance required by high-frequency trading models.
3. Market/Investment Angle
- Goal of ICM: To build the most liquid markets on-chain, accessible globally with the tightest spreads possible, enabling complex financial products like on-chain IPOs (e.g., Figma).
- Competition & Differentiation: While current on-chain spreads can be tight (1-2 bps) due to proprietary AMMs leveraging current auction mechanics, the long-term sustainability of these tight spreads is questioned. The ICM roadmap is Solana’s strategy to build a superior execution environment compared to competitors like Ethereum L2s and centralized off-chain venues.
- Hyperliquid as a Benchmark: Hyperliquid is seen not just as a competitor to Solana, but to all execution layers, demonstrating significant product-market fit by successfully bridging off-chain execution concepts onto a fast environment.
4. Notable Companies/People
- Anza (Max Resnick): Solana’s developer shop, driving the overall roadmap and transaction landing improvements.
- Gido Labs (Lucas Bruder): Developing the Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM) and implementing initial forms of ACE.
- 00 (Austin Federa): Building Double Zero, a decentralized physical network infrastructure layer to solve networking latency and jitter.
- Katana: Mentioned as a DeFi-first chain focused on deep liquidity and real yield, sponsored by Polygon and GSR.
5. Regulatory/Policy Discussion
The discussion implicitly touches on regulatory concepts by contrasting the current crypto model (where the validator is the “dictator” with complete control over block contents) with TradFi exchanges (which use permissioned code to enforce rules, such as prioritizing cancel orders over taker orders to maintain market health). The move toward ACE and BAM suggests a shift towards enforcing application-defined rules on-chain, a significant cultural departure for crypto.
6. Future Implications
The roadmap signals a long-term commitment to solving market microstructure challenges, suggesting Solana aims to become the dominant execution layer for sophisticated, high-throughput financial applications. The integration of physical infrastructure (Double Zero) with execution control (ACE/BAM) indicates a comprehensive approach to achieving TradFi-level performance metrics, including shrinking block times further.
7. Target Audience
This episode is highly valuable for Web3 infrastructure developers, DeFi strategists, blockchain architects, and institutional investors focused on the technical evolution and competitive landscape of high-performance Layer 1 ecosystems.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
đź’¬ Key Insights
"the settlement layer is an abstraction for physical safety. Whereas execution is not. Execution is the purest extension of the market which can exist in the absence of physicality."
"I have self-custody on my ledger until there's a guy with a gun pointed at me, and then self-custody is not worth very much, right?"
"at the end of the day, the ultimate settlement layer is physical safety and everything is an abstraction above that, right? Like we sort of forget that like the point of the US dollar is it secures the US government, which secures property rights."
"Those people are visionaries from 2016 who want to bank the unbanked and replace all of finance. And now they're going in like saying, 'Oh, put your finance on-chain and we'll settle it for you.' It's like, no, no, we're not doing that. We're going to replace you because you suck. That's the Solana vision."
"I just look at MCL and I'm like, this is the truest expression of this since the advent of Bitcoin."
"Like that sort of idea of like we're weaponizing greed to produce positive-sum outcomes is the core philosophy of blockchain."