Rea Dulcetta and Anton Restuta - Co-Founders of Sharky.fi join Brian Friel on the latest episode of The Zeitgeist. Sharky.fi is the first escrow-less, decentralized NFT lending protocol on Solana that brings DeFi liquidity to NFTs. Are you NFT-rich but SOL-poor? Sharky.fi allows you to instantly borrow SOL by using the NFTs in your wallet as collateral. For lenders who want to earn yield on their SOL, Sharky.fi allows users to offer loans for specific NFTs in a collection and earn yield in return.
In this episode, Rea and Anton share their journey into web3, how Sharky.fi works, their views on NFT royalties, and their vision for the future of NFT-backed lending.
Show Notes:
01:10 - Background / Origin Story
02:57 - Why Solana and NFTs?
06:54 - What is Sharky? How does it work?
09:55 - Transition from web 2.0 to Web 3.0?
15:18 - NFT collection
20:03 - State of royalties on Solana
26:24 - Sharky’s roadmap and vision for the future
31:44 - A builder they admire in the Web3 ecosystem
34:10 - Learn more about Sharky
Full Transcript:
Brian (00:06):
Hey everyone and welcome to the zeitgeist, the show where we highlight founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web 3.0 Space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom and I'm super excited to have on today the founders of SharkyFi, Rea and Anton Sharky is the leading NFT lending protocol on Solana. Rea and Anton, welcome to the show.
Rea (00:29):
Hi, so excited to be here.
Anton (00:31):
Hey everyone. Thank you for having us.
Brian (00:33):
I'm super excited to have you guys on, I think we actually first met way back last summer. We were all working out at the Solana Labs office in San Francisco. For those who have never been there, it's a really cool environment where a bunch of ecosystem teams are huddled together, iterating on ideas. You guys were very early to this concept of NFT lending and since then you guys have just exploded in success. Before we dive into all things Sharky, I'd love to know a little bit about you guys in particular. Who are you guys, and how did you come to start working on this idea of Sharky in the Solana Labs office in San Francisco?
Rea (01:10):
Oh, yeah. Well, that's a pretty long journey, but yeah, I've always been a fan of startups. I think I started engaging in startups even when I was in college. I started hacking using my college student manual labor to really hack for free back then. And I really fell in love with the idea of being able to have so much impact. And I think that you can have impact anywhere if you're passionate about what you're doing. But there's something that's really intrinsically beautiful about being able to touch something so closely, be able to talk to someone about the problems they're having and then actually solve that. Do all parts of that. Being more than just a full-stack developer, being a full-desk founder where you do the design, you have to walk through the customer stories. So I found that entire thing really exciting.
(01:59):
So I've been bouncing around startups since and Anton and I actually co-founded a startup before this for engineers because we really like the idea of giving back. And Sharky is another way that we're giving back to another community. We're really, really proud to be part of the NFT Degen crowd and this is some way that we can actually give NFTs lasting power. We can give NFTs this sort of financial backbone that it needs to really be this asset that people don't have to take so lightly and think of as just JPEGs. So I'm really excited to be contributing to that cause.
Brian (02:33):
That's awesome. So Rea, you graduated from CalTech, I see you were the former founder of Slack community and then as you mentioned, you co-founded a startup with Anton. Both of you guys do have an engineering background. Anton, I'd love to know from you what brought you guys over from working in Web 2.0 Together? What was it about Solana and NFTs that made you guys think this is a problem we're solving?
Anton (02:56):
Yeah, so I had also pretty long journey before I came to Solana. I’m originally from Ukraine. I started way back when as just an engineer working there. I remember pretty well how board startup was pretty scary for me. It felt like, "Oh, it's a whole different world. I don't know if I'll ever be ready to help my own startup and things like that." Then I moved to the United States, moved to Bay Area and Silicon Valley and all of this became way easier and way more tangible. And I started working at a lot of early-stage startups, kind of preparing myself for the journey. Then co-founded my first company and then I met Rea after work we were working on again one of the startups and we met just engineers and we faced some problems in that company as engineers that we were unsolved and we thought, well how about we just hacked something over weekend and also had another common friend, mutual friend and was like, "Well, let's hack it together. It seems fun. Maybe we can solve this problem."
(03:59):
Most of the stories like that, it grew slowly, we got our first customer, we sold our own problem, and somebody wanted to pay us for it. Then we started thinking, "Well, maybe it's going to be a business." And we grew it to a pretty substantial profitable company. Our goal was to try building a company, try running a startup, try working together, but keep it small, keep the company small in all the separations. And I think we succeeded on that. And since then, I kind of worked a little bit on other Web 2.0 companies, worked on education, passionate about education, and we've been in crypto as an investor for quite some time. And I think last year in August, I think that's where I first heard about Solana, maybe in July.
(04:48):
But August when I seriously read about it, I listened to podcast with Anatoly (Yakovenko), was impressed with just general intelligence and thinking behind how conceptualization of ideas and the grand vision I get similar wipes, how that I got from Steve Jobs when I first listened to his presentations, and I wanted to build here and try how it feels. And I think I pitched Solana in kind of this whole space to be at, and we came to Miami for Solana's second hacker house, kind of met a bunch of people in the ecosystem, fell in love with all the people we met and the energy around. And that's where a decision was made to, well, how about we found the company here. And by that time, we already were passionate about NFTs and saw them as the future, if anything would bring crypto to the real world. I think the first theme of concept that is likely to do it is NFTs.
(05:47):
And it felt good to be early in that journey. It felt good to kind of try and build something fundamental. And I think financial products are very fundamental for NFTs and that's kind of how we got to it. And we were not sure at first, we were all very confused kind of how things work in general and not how technology works I guess how dynamics of building Web 3.0 companies works. That was definitely a new and very, very interesting journey. But yeah, that's how we met and that's how we started.
Brian (06:18):
Yeah, I love that. And so you guys had this key early insight that Solana was unique. You mentioned listening to Natoli, getting those Steve Job vibes, but then also that NFTs were really what was bringing it into the mainstream a little bit more. At the time that I met you guys, pursuing this financialization of NFTs was basically unheard of in Solana. I'd definitely say that was a contrarian bet and then now that's worked out pretty well. Could you walk through for the uninitiated, what is Sharky? What is it that you guys are doing for people? How does all of this work under the hood?
Rea (06:54):
So what we do is allow you to take all these JPEGs in your wallet and basically use it as a credit card. If you're willing to put the JPEG on the line, then you get access to a lot more of that liquidity. So anytime people say, "I'm rich in JPEGs, but illiquid AF." This is what Sharky comes into play, you can take those NFTs that you have and actually put them as collateral in a loan and then you can take out that money and do whatever you want with it and then you pay back that loan and then you get an NFT back.
(07:32):
Now, traditionally this requires you to actually put your whatever, if you're using a physical object, your grandmother's heirloom ring, you would have to put it in a safe box somewhere and not have access to that during the time that you have access to the money. But what we actually have done is allowed you to be able to do this in wallet. So you keep your NFTs in your wallet, you don't actually have to send them away somewhere and never see them again. You hold onto the NFT during the loan, and you just can't move it around, so it's locked in your wallet. So the escrow is effectively staying in your wallet and then when you pay back the loan, then the NFT gets unfrozen and you can do whatever you want with it.
Anton (08:11):
Yeah, and I guess the second side of what Sharky is about is we also allow you to be a lender. We'll allow you to lend money versus borrowing them. So in the traditional world, it's either you go to a bank and bank lends your money or maybe you go to some pawn shop and that small pawn shop lends your money. There is not really a lot of opportunity to be a lender just as an individual. And that's what Sharky also allows and that's one of the most talked about features I would say. You hear lots of stories on Twitter, Twitter threads, basically how to make money in the bear market, and usually Sharky comes up. So as a lender you can lend money. I would say you need to be somewhat knowledgeable about the space. You don't have to be an expert, but at least be aware of what's going on. And you can make a pretty substantial yield with Sharky in the current volatile market. But yeah, so that's that we're kind of creating this two-sided market in a sense.
Rea (09:09):
Brian, aren't you a lender?
Brian (09:11):
I have tried it out. It is a pretty interesting novel phenomenon. We have a few folks at Phantom who I would say are, I don't know if the term whale is right because it's Sharky, but giant sharks, I guess. But...
Rea (09:23):
Whale sharks.
Brian (09:25):
I am curious because to build all this, you mentioned that building a Web 3.0 company is pretty different from your previous Web 2.0 ventures. It's not just a consumer app that you guys are building, which is already hard enough trying to build a two-sided marketplace, get these consumers. You guys also had to build the plumbing and the protocol for all this to happen as well. Talk a little bit about that, the difference between your guys' success and Web 2.0 and what lessons you guys had to learn to bring that knowledge into Web 3.0.
Rea (09:56):
I think one of the biggest shockers when we came to Web 3.0 is seeing the amount of traction that people were having with no product or even the semblance of one people were raising from community and raising from VCs with, “I have a plan”, and sometimes that plan isn't even very well thought out, but I mean I attribute that to the infancy of the space at the time. I think at the beginning of any bubble that's still inflating, there's just sort of dumping money in and it's exciting. Everyone's euphoric on that whole experience. And now I would say this ecosystem, it's been only a few years, but for most people in this space, it's only been one year. And it's already mature to the point where I see lots of founders that were famous, no longer around, or lots of products that were literally the epitome of – that was your role model when you grew up on Solana.
(10:55):
And that's also not no longer around. And I think what you see is some of the lasting teams who are continuously building and that's something that I have to hats off to everyone who sort of stuck through the storms on this. But even beyond that, something that I'm noticing is all of that hype and that big rush of raising before pre-product and all of that. That is no longer the extreme meta that we're seeing. We're seeing people having to prove yourself a little bit more, but what I think is also I guess coming to some of the pros I see in Web 3.0 is it's so much more of a community atmosphere to build in. I think previously there was a lot more in Web 2.0 we see more under isolation or you kind of go heads down until you either make it or break it.
(11:38):
Whereas in Web 3.0 there's a lot more of this open communication. I would say it's almost more similar to if you ever participated in a kickstarter campaign for everyone out there who's Web 2.0 and doesn't understand Web 3.0 yet, you see this continuous discourse while they're sort of raising from the community and having this conversation back and forth. And there's a little log of how the founders are going about this. "Oh, today we had production issues, so sorry about that." But we really nailed a prototype on this other thing. We finally got some of our supply line issues figured out. And that open communication, that transparency is so important, and I dare say a lot of times we kind of idolize some of these tech founders whether Web 2.0 or Web 3.0, but they're human, and their teams are also human and they're really worth learning from.
(12:27):
So a lot of times you have these stories and you hear and the more transparent a team is, the more you actually get to be a part of that process and it builds so much compassion within the ecosystem because a lot of times I think it can become you're building this thing you promised this time and you said you're going to do the deliver this exact thing, what's up with that? And I think this discourse. One, makes it much more fun to build it. And two, allows the community to be much more excited because a lot of times if you only get the finished product every quarter or whatever, you're not able to really stay continually engaged. So I think a lot of these things makes this much more of a more welcoming atmosphere to build in both for the people we're building it for and for the builders.
Anton (13:10):
Yeah, I would say it's hard to separate Web 3.0 building from just building and crypto space and I think this space is just very volatile. So I think another side of the story of what Web 3.0 is describing. There's a lot of apps, but there's also lots of downs. There's like market downturns or just space volatility. There's always things that are hard to predict. You wake up every morning and you kind of read the news, Twitter and all kinds of things can happen positive and negative.
(13:44):
And unlike Web 2.0 companies that move much slower, everything moves faster and if everyone moves faster, it doesn't mean everything is just better. It just means in the condensed time you'll experience these ups and downs. And to me, it's definitely a more challenging aspect I guess as a founder I feel like I needed to step up in terms of mental health and mental stability even more than usual and don't let myself to be too high or too down and try to be more even here that less reactive and more strategic and it's sounds generic but it's real. This pain is real, and the hardship is real.
Brian (14:27):
Yeah, one year in the crypto ecosystem is living 10 or 20-years in traditional markets, just compressing those ups and downs not only in the market but also as a founder, journey, and all of that as well. I definitely resonate with that. One other thing just on this topic of differences between Web 2.0, Web 3.0 is that you mentioned the community buy-in aspect, you have this community that's rabid. If you haven't seen Sharky's Discord, you go in there at any time you guys have a product update, it's like there's a stadium in there that's going crazy. But in addition to all that, you guys made a pretty interesting decision. You guys, not only are you this protocol for lending NFTs, you also created your own NFT collection. Talk a little bit about that. What is this NFT collection? Why did you guys decide to launch this?
Rea (15:18):
We are an NFT centric company, so it only made more sense to completely Degen-ify ourselves. I mean there are also business aspects to which I'll let Anton dive into the more boring parts, but I think that has just been just so fun. I mean our entire team is really creative and for me, I've been a part of many NFT projects, whether as a consultant on the team or just help with some of the strategy there, but never taken something that's really fully our own. And we considered hiring other artists, but since we had people that actually are artistic and on our own team, like myself included or championing that effort, it was just really fun to actually take something, give back to the community in a wholly different way than we have in the past with our tech without products. But now actually being able to take our art to the next level and to put it out there with the Sharky standard, that was really, really fun.
Anton (16:14):
So there are several aspects of why. One, we planned this from the beginning when we started the company. We thought we would do an NFT sale sometime around August and we did this in October. So we were not even that far in our estimation in obviously this aspect of fundraising, kind of public fundraising and you get extra funds for company runway operations, all of that. But it is also what we thought would be useful, but we didn't realize how useful. It’s one of the best growth mechanisms for the company because you build in so many incentives for people to promote your company without you doing this. It's kind of like this network snowball effect and that's very powerful. I think all of our metrics pretty much doubled within just two weeks of intense... I wouldn't say promotions because we didn't do promotions of us announcing that we’re going to have an NFT collection and how it's all going to work and just trying to sell that vision, pretty much within two weeks we got more customers than we ever had gotten.
(17:20):
So that's just a very powerful growth strategy. And a lot of companies run NFT projects as a fundraiser before they have a product. I think it's also super useful and nice, but it accelerates growth basically if you do have a product. And third aspect, we want to embrace building in Web 3.0, and I think building in Web 3.0, the major difference from Web 2.0 is building together with your users, users/ investors and that social building is impossible without aligning incentives and alignment of incentives. It basically allows everybody to be part of the journey, allowing everybody to invest, to be holder, to get benefits from platform growth. And that's what we ultimately wanted to do, and experience how it feels to truly build Web 3.0 company, truly build community and succeed with community together.
(18:09):
So yeah, I guess NFT is not the only way to do it. Realizing and talking through the ideal process would feel somewhat similar but not exactly. I think the NFT community is unique in that it is formed by more, I guess, demanding investors, some smaller, less experienced, but also much more focused on being involved, versus just basically observing the company. So those are the reasons why I would say.
Rea (18:37):
I would just add that beyond all of the very reasonable or good reasons that we've already said, the community every single day was like when NFT. So I think that was also a pretty big driver for us.
Brian (18:49):
Fair, definitely fair. It's pretty wild when you go on Twitter, and you just see someone that you've never interacted with before wearing your NFT as a profile picture. In your guys' case you have these cute little baby sharks that are going to power up as the protocol evolves. They're definitely pretty cool. But yeah, I agree it's a pretty wild and unexplored lever for growth when you have users who just are continually showing their allegiance and buying in with displaying these NFTs month, after month, after month. It's pretty wild to see.
(19:21):
Now that you guys have your own NFT collection, I have to ask you guys, the hard-hitting question that the Solana ecosystem is pondering right now is, what is your take on the state of royalties on Solana? So for those who don't know, every NFT sale traditionally has paid out a percent royalty to the creator, it's baked into the tokens metadata, but this was not enforced programmatically. It required some sort of social buy-in by the marketplace or whoever was selling it. And now months into this NFT journey that's coming under fire, what have you guys seen in Sharky that informs your opinion on what's the state of royalties on Solana?
Anton (20:03):
Yeah, I think we're in this state where we're trying to figure out how to make it work. So clearly, how it was working before is not sustainable. So right now, it's kind of like everything is broken and with really building and rebuilding, I think incentive systems and also technology, how to make it all possible. I think Sharky’s stance is that there needs to be a choice at the time of creating a collection allowing holders to decide whether they want to invest into something where they have to pay royalties or not. I think it's not great to do it retroactively, kind of remove royalties from project creators or introduce royalties to holders when they didn't agree to them, and the choice wasn't possible before. And right now, we have quite a few approaches that make it possible. None of the technical solutions are perfect. So unfortunately, we will have to choose some trade-offs.
(21:00):
Whatever we choose, we have to support two things. One, we should allow existing collections to migrate all at once without making it to be a holder's decision. So basically, the choice that I described before, allowing holders to decide what projects they want to invest in. Unfortunately, we'll have to kind of reinstate this and make everybody re-decide that if... Let's say as Sharky, we want royalties because it's part of our benefits for holders, part of benefits for the team as well. But maybe some holders don't want royalties, so they would have to exit the project at that point in time and that would be a decision. But what I don't want to happen, what I think would be really bad for the space, if all holders would have to decide one by one whether they want to upgrade their NFT to be royalties enforced or not. I think that should be a choice for creators, for collection owners.
(21:52):
So that's one aspect of it. Otherwise, it'll be a fractured ecosystem. It'll be kind of like, oh, within the same collection, some sharks from our collection support royalties, some don't. And there'll be confusion all over the place. And second, there is this debate right now. So basically, for context, all of the solutions involve some kind of whitelisting and blacklisting protocols that NFTs allow you to interact with in some sense. In my worldview, the approach with blacklisting is much more forgiving. Imagine if we go with a whitelisting approach, I think there will be a negative consequence for the ecosystem. Let's say Solana Hackathons. I want to experiment and build a new protocol and deploy it to main net and demonstrate how it works. If that protocol is not whitelisted, I cannot demonstrate this using any popular NFTs that use this royalty enforcement because I need to go through approval, I need to get some DAO or some authority or somebody to get my protocol approved.
(22:48):
And I think that extra hoop, that extra step, just would stagnate innovation and would create a lot of roadblocks, but it'll be in the sense, some kind of perfect solution excluding that because then we can only trade on these whitelisted marketplaces or at least the protocols and everything is great. But I think the trade-off is very significant. Versus if we go with a blacklisting approach, then we can just say, "Hey, you're not allowed to trade with these protocols that are not respecting royalties and the trade-off there will be like, there would be a lot of attempts and protocols (created) to work around royalties short-term and as a space we would have to play the catch up game. We'll have to keep blacklisting them, and keep kind of finding solutions for that. But I think it's better, I think it's better than the alternative because we're still open for innovation. We are kind of permissionless by default, if that makes sense, and require less authority, less authority on decisions. So not a lot of solutions allow for those two. And I don't know where we land in this space, but that's our viewpoint, I guess, on this year.
Rea (23:50):
I was also going to add that with royalties, you also kind of have this free rider problem if you allow everyone to pick and choose what they want to pay. Because whether it's a team that's not really doing anything and then they're just collecting royalties and you kind of feel bad, they're like, "Oh man, we're all paying and they're just sitting on their asses, that's so messed up." Versus a team that's really actively putting out content or new ways for you to earn or whatever it is that the team is doing. And then you have a bunch of people that don't pay for that and then a bunch of people who think it's worthwhile. So they pay for that. The creators aren't really getting paid for their work and the people that aren't paying for that anyway are also receiving the benefits. So what is the incentive to be a good actor in this case?
(24:37):
So I think that there are some ways that we've thought about within Sharky about how we incentivize, and people who are not caring about these benefits don't need to have these benefits and they don't want to pay for these benefits. But the people who do care about these benefits can actually be a part of the contributing community. So I think this is a problem that really requires a tailored approach according to what your company or project is doing. And I think I would just like to see more people put more intent towards this, whether you're just a part of the ecosystem, someone who's buying and selling flipping NFTs or a team.
Brian (25:08):
I think that's a great-nuanced take, which we don't always hear on the crypto Twitter side of things, but I agree it's definitely in this state right now whereas you said, Anton, we kind of have a way to just wipe a clean slate and rebuild this. And there are a lot of benefits to this Web 3.0 ecosystem where it is permission lists by default and people like you guys can come in and build a protocol idea without having to ask anybody's permission and keeping that spirit alive, I think is pretty important.
(25:37):
So I want to look ahead a little bit, what do you guys see as the future for Sharky? So today, Rea, we started this podcast, you said if you have JPEGs and you're JPEG rich but cash poor, you can lend these things out, you risk losing the NFT, but you can get immediate liquidity on the flip side of that. There's some speculators who think that they'll be able to make a pretty good ROI, assuming that the market holds up. Obviously not financial advice, very, very risky, but that's the current state of things today. As you guys look out about the long-term potential for what NFTs could be, what financialization of NFTs could be lending of these things, what excites you guys? What's on the roadmap and on the vision for Sharky?
Anton (26:24):
Yeah, it's a good question. So I think we'll be releasing a series of new products next year. So that's one exciting thing. Basically, applying our learnings to make the product better. One of the big ones is mortgages, or Buy Now, Pay Later. We've already been seeing experiments in this space with that. And yeah, basically the overall goal is to allow you to finance JPEGs on the entire spectrum of that. Whether you hold this JPEG or maybe you don't yet hold this JPEG, maybe you just want to get it, but you don't have enough funds to get it or maybe you want to just buy with leverage and buy several. So we want to release that product to the market, allowing you to basically pay a down payment and get an effect. You pay the full price of the NFT later, but still start being a holder immediately. Imagine you can join MonkeDAO and only pay 20% of the price and kind of see what's it about.
(27:24):
And maybe if you don't like it, you can sell it back but you only invested a fraction, or for any other benefits, you can look at the community or you can just trade. There's two different aspects. Deciding whether you want to be a holder or just trade in with leverage, which we believe will be a pretty popular use case as well. Obviously, there's a lot of nuance with our existing product and we are adding more features to that, but I think one of the things that I'm excited about is not directly a Sharky product feature, but it's more experimenting with user experience in this space. And we've been trying to pioneer at least some approaches and try to see how we can establish new norms. Right now, every interaction with a DeFi protocol on Solana on other chains, I call it click approve UX.
(28:12):
Basically, you do some meaningful action and then you need to approve a transaction in your wallet. What we want to experiment with is to build a different kind of experience that allows you to interact with protocol and look ahead, do actions, several of them, and then approve it all at once. Basically, making this experience more smooth and fluent. And that's kind of a UX pattern that we are developing. I'm personally very excited about releasing it and seeing how users will accept it, and see whether other protocols and other products will also try to do something similar. And on the NFT side of things, we are releasing our gamified revenue share program. It's not a passive revenue share, it's kind of requires users to actively contribute to the platform, engage with our product and with our NFTs and with that we will share some portion of upside with them. So that's coming pretty soon. And for the next year there's a lot of secret strategies and secret features for our holders that we will release over time. Did I miss anything, Rea, do you think? Like anything major?
Brian (29:20):
Anything for the clamoring Discord channel that is asking when, when, when any hidden nugget you can drop in here.
Rea (29:28):
I was like, "Are we going to drop some alpha?" Yeah, I mean I think that there's probably some other further development. I should probably check with the marketing team before I say anything crazy. But there's further development on the NFT that I think the community already knows about and that involves more goodies for the people who are really excited about sharks and love the art style. So there's a lot there. And yeah, I think that's it.
Anton (29:54):
Yeah. And like you mentioned something about the future of NFTs, how we see that. I think it's very interesting to see the first attempts to bring NFTs to real world assets and tie them together in some ways. And we're already talking to teams who are trying to do that. So our vision is to stay in the space of JPEGs, but also branch into the space of where NFTs start representing assets that could be your car or any collectibles and stuff like that, and provide financial infrastructure there. It'll be a pretty different product because the market is different, volatility is different, but fundamentally it's kind of the same type of incentive systems.
(30:36):
Fundamentally it's like lenders. Some people could be lenders, people could be borrowers, with just a different structure and maybe different terms of loans. So we definitely want to be in that space as well. And that also requires us to not just build a protocol, but requires us to gain expertise in those specific domains. Because lending is not created equal. What works for NFTs, and JPEGs may not work for collectibles, may not work for houses or cars. It requires different risk models and probably slightly different products. So yeah, that's kind of the vision for the next three to five years is expanding to those areas as well.
Brian (31:13):
Yeah, that's exciting. I think we can all kind of picture a world where one day those assets are represented on-chain. Obviously, the frictionless nature of transferring those makes a lot of sense. But as you noted, it's important to stay in-the-now and be realistic that right now there's a lot of JPEGs, and I'd say that you guys are handling that use case pretty well. This has been an awesome discussion. One closing question we always love to ask our users, and I want to hear this take from both of you is who is a builder that you admire in the Web 3.0 ecosystem?
Anton (31:45):
Yeah, it's really hard to pick one. I would say top of mind is the Tensor team, Tensor founders. So I think both of them are pretty amazing builders. It's impressive to me how just two of them, how much they built and how quickly in this space. And not just with Tensor. I was following their journey before, and they built lots of cool things for the ecosystem and they also just have a good intent. Things they built, they try to align those incentives with just like what's good for the space. Not just like, "Oh, let’s build a cool product." There's plenty of really good builders in Solana that just like to build things, but the reason I'm highlighting that team, I think they have a combination of both. They're really good builders but also built things that are very, very important and useful for the space and make the space better. So that's my take. It's Richard and Ilmoi from Tensor Trade.
Brian (32:42):
Yeah, Tensor Trade, the real-time NFT trading platform. Rea, your take.
Rea (32:48):
Yeah, like Anton said, it's pretty hard to pick one. I think if I had to hat tip to my origins, I learned a lot of my early technical knowledge on Solana from Brett, who's now at Star Atlas. And he’s done a lot of, I think, open-source work that is just a lot of the necessary work that goes into making the ecosystem something, who builds for the builders, is kind of how I think about him.
(33:16):
And so he is also been really fun to talk to about the different, if you want to look sort of long and far at what's going to happen to the technology down the line and what are some of the upcoming scalability issues, roadblocks that Solana faces, if you want to just get a pulse on that to be able to build with that in mind so you're not constantly building to catch up. You always have really good conversations with Brett, and I just really like that he's also someone who you can tell is genuinely passionate about the space. He's working on his own time to learn more and also to contribute more. And a lot of times when something happens in the ecosystem, if no one knows what's going on, you can still go talk to him about it. And he always, we can always theory craft and it's always a good time.
Brian (34:02):
Oh, that's great. Well, Rea and Anton, this has been an awesome conversation. Thank you so much for your time. Where can people go to learn more about Sharky?
Rea (34:12):
Well, the Sharky.fi is a really good place to start. You can look at the beautiful order books. We've recently rolled out some performance improvements, so that's going to be really fun. And I think nothing creates a better impression than making money. So go and make some money. Not financial advice.
Anton (34:31):
You can read over white paper on the homepage. Kind of gives you a high-level overview. Otherwise, if you just type “Sharky lend Twitter” in Google, you'll see threats that are written by the community. At this point we've seen more than 10 just not even sponsored by us in any way. Just some lender supporters describe how to use Sharky. And I think those are the best to learn because it's through the eyes of real users and there are even YouTube walkthroughs of how to open Sharky. Yeah, it's a pretty rich ecosystem already.
Brian (35:05):
Awesome, thank you so much. Anton and Rea, founders of SharkyFi.
Anton (35:09):
Yeah, thank you for having us. It was a pleasure.