David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Right. It’s like, no, we want to capture that upside. That's our leverage. There's massive switching costs. I mean, if you're going to go write something for Solana, you don't write in Solidity. In any of these applications that have already begun development or are already developed for Ethereum, there are some other systems that are compatible, they call them EVM compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine. Basically, the globally distributed computer that is Ethereum. You can, with minor tweaks, port those over to non-Ethereum blockchains. But for ones that are dramatically different and better in a lot of ways like Solana, it's going to be hard to get the developer community to really shift at this point. It's not that Ethereum has a 30 year lead but they have a four or five year lead with the developer community that is non-trivial. I think there's another element of switching costs too, which is for participants in the crypto economy, ether is the coin trading pair and Bitcoin too, but probably ether more than Bitcoin for other coins and other objects. If you want to buy an NFT, you're buying that with Ethereum. You're not buying that with Solana tokens. If you want to buy Solana tokens, you're probably buying that with Ethereum. If you want to trade on Uniswap, I think ether is the number one trading pair on Uniswap. Then there's another level which is that if you're accruing tokens for participating in something that's built on top of Ethereum. Those are ERC-20 tokens, so maybe there are some mechanisms where you sell, you convert to something else, and then you get a new token if the project switches to another chain. But it seems incredibly complicated if not impossible to pull that off. I think just the fact that all these tokens are ERC-20 tokens, it has a switching cost as well.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.