Description: Join us as we talk to Raj Gokal, Co-Founder and COO of Solana about BreakPoint 2022. BreakPoint is Solana in real life, where the Web3 builders and enthusiasts will gather to learn, share and play in Lisbon, Portugal. Host: Sheila Lirio Marcelo, Co-Founder & CEO of Proof of Learn and Founder of Care.com Guests: Raj Gokal, Co-founder and COO of Solana
0:09
I'm very excited to have Raj Gogol, co founder of Solana and COO Solana labs to talk more in depth about this incredibly important company. Solana is notably the fastest blockchain in the world and the fastest growing ecosystem and crypto. Raj was part of a wave of projects in early 2017. that aim to solve scalability in blockchain. He's the Creator, curator of amazing talent and an innovator in the web3 ecosystem. Solana is the power behind breakpoint, the conference that brings together the Solana community in real life, or what we call IRL. Raj who talks a little bit about Solana. But now tell us more about breakpoint give us a little history of the event. Yeah, last year was the first time that we did breakpoint at the end of the year in November, same as this year. And, you know, it's a little bit different than the rest of the crypto conferences. It's, you know, partially about celebrating the accomplishments of Solana ecosystem developers over the course of the year products that got shipped demos that they can show partnerships that they're announcing, and unveiling of new products and new teams. It's also about workshops, and frankly, about you know, just celebrating the, the community in person because breakpoint, the original one was really born out of a very deep pent up frustration that everyone had coming out of lockdowns during COVID, it was basically the first major conference that happened after lockdown. And most of these folks, you know, were not part of the Solana ecosystem the year prior. They didn't, you know, half of them hadn't written smart contracts before. But they had formed all these really meaningful relationships through building through teaming up and finding funding, or just through, you know, trading and collecting NFTs or participating in token based communities. And it was just frankly, very powerful. But it also led to some really lasting effects. The first hacker house was formed kind of organically developers that came to the conference and didn't want to go to all the talks and workshops, they just wanted to build, they took out a warehouse with a bunch of desks, and there were whiteboards with people, you know, standing up and announcing $100,000 USDC bounties for different features and, and products that they wanted to see, you know, and these were getting crossed off, and people are sending money to each other. So it was a really beautiful thing to see developers just put their heads down and use that time in person to just get together and build. And we took that concept of the hacker house and brought it worldwide to over 20 cities with 1000s of people participating. And so this year, we're doing breakpoint again, with folks that have on boarded to Solana through hacker houses throughout the year. Many of them competed built demos, the hackathon winners from the last two hackathons are all invited, we have students that are sponsored to come for free. And, you know, we just expect it to be that much more of a spectacle. I think it's going to be two or three times as big this year. And anybody that was at Lisbon last year can tell you, normally when folks, tell me about their breakpoint experience, they say it's the best conference they ever been to. It was one of the most powerful experiences they've had in crypto. And we want to top that this year. You know, at proof of learn as you know, our project, our Premiere project is Metacrafters, and it's really onboarding, the next we our goals, the next million web three developers and Kevin Yang, Lauren Tornow. And I'm, our co founders often describe that, you know, we're in this exciting creator economy to unleash the power of creators. And I love that what Solana really stands for is unleashing the power of developers to have that community development and the fact that you celebrated at this big, ginormous event that's coming up in Portugal in November. So super exciting. So it's bigger this year. Any other kind of special teasers that you can tell us about this 2022 breakpoint I think everything is a secret maybe even to me at this point. So nothing to tease other than awesome awesome projects and builders that will be there like yourself. Okay, awesome.
4:35
Well, I'm excited to announce that our company proof of learn its premiere project Metacrafters will be making our debut at breakpoint this year. My co founder Kevin Yang and I will share a demo of our public launch which introduces Solana in Metacrafters and reveal the winners from our Solanight creators cup. Back in August we called in our community with a special 30 Day Challenge to conceptualize Solana Solenite world in the Metacrafters Metaverse.
4:59
The stakes were high teams from across the world competed to earn over 20,000 in prizes and see their ideas incorporated in the Metacrafters Virtual Academy. They met our challenge head on with tremendous enthusiasm, vision and creativity. Proof of learns three co founders had our work cut out for us and narrowing down many of the strong submissions we receive into the top three teams. These teams have worked so hard to visually conceptualize Solana through our unique world building and strong character renderings. They've creatively portrayed key Solana principles in history and their designs and can't wait to share their imaginative concepts with the world. It's such an honor to bring our winning teams that were tied for first place to Lisbon, to be part of breakpoint with us to experience a Solana community and ecosystem and most importantly, to share their incredible work and vision with attendees. Metacrafters as a group of beta testers and early users going through our introductory Solana course and we've also been running a design competition where entrants had been submitting proposals for the design of the Solanight house and the Metacrafters world. At breakpoint, we are going to announce the launch of our intermediate Solana course as well as unveil the winners of our design competition. This means that attendees a breakpoint will get a first glimpse of our intermediate Solana course, which helps developers move from using JavaScript using rust and anchor on the Solana blockchain. Crafters will learn rust fundamentals and design patterns that will enable them to write simple smart contracts as a Solana developer. breakpoint attendees get an exclusive look at the Solanight house. Think of it as a Hogwarts style house or academic department within the Metacrafters Academy. Raj thank you so much for joining me today. And it's a really big thank you for partnering with proof of learn for breakpoint 2022 We can't wait to showcase Metacrafters and see all the innovation brought to life with Solana. Thanks Sheila can't wait. And this year is going to be so much better than the last because like you there are so many amazing builders that now have incredible products over the last year that have been built helium launching new hotspots for 5g hive mapper with decentralized mapping biomes that has sandbox style metaverse. And there's so many that I can't even think of and they're all going to be they're building and iterating and demoing their products. Can we see there! Thank you, Raj. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Web. If you've enjoyed today's discussion, please continue to check us out on all of your favorite streaming platforms.
7:36
This podcast is being provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as investment advice