# Solana Infrastructure: Jito's Strategy for Scalability and Economic Growth

**Podcast:** web3 with a16z crypto
**Published:** 2026-04-03

## Transcript

GEDO is the largest liquid staking protocol in Solana.
We view ourselves as the economic growth engine for Solana.
What is your long-term vision for the future of Solana?
Basically, where all of finance happens on-chain, I would say it's all done on a single state machine at the speed of light.
You want to trade stocks on Robinhood.
How many hoops do you have to hop through to do that?
Send them your driver's license.
There's a whole KYC process and they limit you on how much you can purchase.
It's like, what are we doing here?
I think if it happens on Solana, you can download a wallet on your phone, press a few buttons, and then you have access to this whole financial system.
Bitcoin is just kind of like a pet rock.
Solana is like doubling and continues to double capacity.
It's hard to not be impressed with what Solana has achieved and there's still so much work to do.
Lucas, thanks for coming on the show.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah.
Okay, so tell us what you're working on with Gito.
Yeah, so Gito is the largest liquid staking protocol in Solana, and we kind of view ourselves as the economic growth engine for Solana.
So we have a liquid staking protocol, and then we also build a validator client, which basically tries to optimize the transaction ordering on the network.
Why would we need...
such a service on Solana.
Yeah, we started Jito in 2021 and we just had this thesis that there would be a lot of spam on Solana, just transaction spam.
And there has been because block space is so cheap.
Yeah, and transactions are super cheap.
Transactions are less than a hundredth of a penny, so very cheap.
Solana was pretty early back in the day.
The tech has gotten much better, but back then it was a little simpler, which can be good and bad.
For a while, it was pretty bad there.
Some outages here or there?
Yeah.
I started doing MEV before then, so I was doing a little trading on Ethereum and fell down that rabbit hole for a few months.
So I was working my day job, and then I'd go home and work on this trading bot.
I discovered Solana, I think early 2021, and just kind of fell in love with it.
What was it about Solana that attracted you, having come from, you know, your background with Ethereum?
I would say it was just like the very low-level stuff.
I studied computer engineering, so like very low-level, how do processors work.
That team knew what they were talking about, like I could tell right away, and it was kind of just a different approach.
I think everyone was really focused on L2s and scaling through that method and some other methods, and Solana was just like, we think we can synchronize this entire state machine.
on one network versus many different networks.
Started looking at the code and everything, and I was like, oh, this is a very cool network.
I think it's going to scale.
Probably going to deal with some spam in the meantime.
So, yeah, we started Gito in 2021 and built out this validator client and this whole system that basically tries to help Solana filter spam, kind of like a Cloudflare.
I think that would be a good analogy.
Yeah, Cloudflare, recently, well, they're sort of this...
kind of intermediary between the end user and websites.
They grew up being this sort of like DDoS shield.
And now they're like saying they're going to filter out AI bots and things.
That's kind of like where they seem to be transitioning.
That's what Matthew Prince has been saying.
Yeah, I think that's kind of like a good analogy for the past few years of GDO.
So it's like take a lot of load off the network.
I think we were pretty successful in that.
Yeah, it's been a lot of fun building it.
How do you measure success?
I think there's like the numbers, but I think it's just like we're so...
intertwined with the solana network like we ship a valid air client roughly like 80 to 90 percent of the network runs that client and we're the largest liquid staking protocol like we have our own numbers that we care about like the numbers i just mentioned but at the end of the day it's like how many people are using solana and how much trading volume is there and i think we have made pretty good contributions to solana being what it is today obviously a job's not finished But Solana is doing the most Dex volume.
The cool thing is that Solana is the cheapest place to buy Solana.
The best place to buy Ethereum isn't on Ethereum.
It's on like Binance or Coinbase or these sexes.
And over the past like six to nine months on Solana, the markets and the activity have just gotten so good.
And there's a lot of smart engineers working on exchanges and things like that.
They're just so good that it's actually like much cheaper to buy Solana on Solana.
Something that was really interesting to me to see.
Solana has talked about real economic value, this sort of metric as a way to measure them by.
So we just put out our state of crypto report, which we put out every year, big data report, just to see of all of the projects in crypto, which ones are people paying the most to use?
You know, which projects are people paying for block space for?
Yeah, Solana's way up there.
It's like Solana and Hyperliquid are, I think they're the top two.
Yeah.
To clarify what you said, like it's not even people.
paying the most like people pay the most on ethereum when there's that market that crazy market activity i guess like two fridays ago surge pricing when everybody's trying to transact yeah everything on ethereum went up like i think the fee on ethereum was like fifteen hundred dollars for one transaction so if i want to sell whatever i have i want to swap it to uscc i got to pay fifteen hundred dollars just in the processing fee on solana it was like a penny or something Yeah, it's just the number of transactions times the price per transaction is very high, but the number of transactions is much higher on Solana than other networks.
And it's going to keep going up and up.
What misconceptions do people have about the problem you're solving?
Yeah, so we've been working on this new product, BAM.
The main customer for this is applications on Solana, but you need validators to kind of buy into this vision because ultimately they're the ones that produce the blocks and you want...
more blocks produced by the software to give applications these kind of customizations i would say more recently we've kind of discovered that some validators are very aware of what's going on in the salon ecosystem and then just other ecosystems so they're aware of hyperliquid they're aware of these l2s and other ecosystems that maybe have a little more customizability over how things work some validators are surprised to learn like what hyperliquid is how it works many of them didn't really know that they're kind of like really in the weeds on what on running a good validator not very in the weeds on the other ecosystems there's some like education and awareness that needs to happen on our side to where maybe validators aren't fully bought in they think it's like jito trying to sell something for a problem that doesn't exist yeah i think there there's a real problem a pretty optimistic solution how do you persuade people of the value here one thing that we're doing is trying to connect validators and the application developers so validators can really hear the application perspective All these networks have transactions going through them.
They're not just like magical transactions that will keep coming through.
Like there needs to be good apps that are built on top of it.
And if there's things that we can do, like at the validator level or the sequencer level to make better apps, then the validators should know about that.
So there's a lot of education and just like, hey, here's what we're trying to build.
This is how we think the network should work and so on.
What is your long-term vision for the future of Solana?
It's...
Basically, where all of finance happens on chain.
So trading crypto native assets like tokens and trading actual stocks and real world assets.
I would say it's all done on a single state machine at the speed of light.
So I think it's a very exciting future.
The advantage of doing it is the speed.
What advantages do you get for putting all of this TradFi world on chain?
Yeah, I would say the permissionlessness of...
putting it all on chain and just the lack of friction that would be involved like let's say you want to accept the e-trade account or you want to you want to trade stocks on robin hood like how many hoops do you have to hop through to do that send them your driver's license and all this information and there's a whole kyc process and they limit you on how much you can purchase per day until you like pass these different verifications levels and all this other stuff.
It's like, what are we doing here?
So like, I think if it happens on Solana or just blockchains in general, you can download a wallet on your phone, press a few buttons, and then you have access to this like whole financial system.
I think it's a pretty promising future if we can make that happen.
Before this, you were telling me that you worked in robotics.
like autonomous construction vehicles.
How did you go from doing something like that so physical to working on Gino?
I like robotics and embedded systems, basically things that interact with the real world in machinery and moving pieces and all that.
I would say like when I was doing robotics, there was a lot of reverse engineering and just trying to figure stuff out.
And I feel like that is kind of what attracted me to Solana.
There's like this massive system.
It's like, What is going on here?
How does this work?
How is this so good?
Starting to like kind of peel the layers of the onion.
And then like I just kind of got nerd sniped into that.
And I would say that the MEV and kind of trading side, instead of moving dirt or whatever it was when I was doing robotics, it's like this movement of money and people trading and this activity going on that it's pretty similar to what I was doing in a past life.
Moving dirt to moving money.
That's the connection here.
Yeah.
It's funny because the lead partner on our Solana and maybe on G2O2 at our firm is Ali Yaya.
Previously, he was working in robotics at Google Brain.
Maybe this is just two examples, but it's just a funny coincidence that there's this trajectory.
It's hard to not be impressed with what Solana has achieved, and there's still so much work to do.
The rate of increase of the capacity of the network, it's...
basically like way higher than any other network in existence like and with plans to double capacity by the end of the year yeah i think they've already increased capacity by like 50 this year and then they want to double it and then i think it's just going to continue doubling probably like twice a year so it's just going to keep getting better and better and better and cheaper and faster and then you have a lot of other stuff going on like the fire not boar's law but uh anatoly's law yeah Yeah, new law here.
And yeah, you have other stuff like Double Zero, Fire Dancer, new clients, new applications coming on board.
It's hard to not be excited about it.
So Bitcoin has been around for the longest.
And then you had earlier movers like Ethereum.
Solana has been more of a latecomer in the grand scheme of things.
What would you say to people who are just coming to crypto now and maybe they've heard about...
Bitcoin certainly has the most attention on it.
Maybe they've heard about Ethereum, but Solana to them is like a new thing.
They're like, okay, there's even more now that I have to learn about.
What would be your pitch for them to get interested?
When you try to explain crypto to people and like the different projects, the best way to do it is just through analogies.
I think the one that Solana marketing has started with is pretty good.
So it's basically blockchain and NASDAQ speed.
You know, Bitcoin is digital gold.
There's only so many in existence.
Created in response to the financial crisis.
You have Ethereum, which is like you can write programs on chain.
It's really expensive and slow.
And then Solana is like very fast and cheap.
Tech advances at a very rapid pace.
And the best companies are typically ones that iterate and advance the fastest.
So if you look at all the blockchains and like...
Ethereum's kind of been running at the same capacity for a while now.
Bitcoin just kind of, you know, it's like a pet rock.
And Solana's like doubling and continues to double capacity.
Digital gold, not pet rock.
Might piss some Bitcoiners off with that one.
Yeah, you might.
Will Jito always be tied to Solana?
We don't have any plans to leave.
And during the bear market, we were getting pit like the 20...
22, 2023 bear market.
We were getting pitched a lot to go to other projects.
And ultimately, I think...
Was anything tempting?
Yeah, there's a few tempting things.
Definitely glad we didn't do it.
But ultimately, it was like we can double down and contribute to the success of Solana and make it way better.
Doing that is much better than kind of like trying to spread ourselves to too many networks.
I'm glad we doubled down.
And like, I think we had a big impact on Solana's success.
And yeah, I would say like another thing, too, is like what are projects that have gone to multiple ecosystems, like multiple blockchains that have done well?
Like there's not really that many.
Yeah.
Uniswap, Unichain.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I would say there's probably less than like three or four.
So for us, it's like focus, make concentrate bets and like try to help out where we can.
Let me ask you this.
So what was most compelling?
Or if you weren't working on Solana, where would you be?
i guess without naming names we were pitched on like helping to develop a new l1 client or potentially be one of their early operators on that network i think that network is launching soon or soonish so three three years later i think if we would have pivoted to doing that then we kind of just would have been like twiddling our thumbs for a few years but instead we just like chewed a lot of glass and worked on solana what gave you the conviction to stay a lot of it is the core solana team so not only like anatolian raj but a lot of the engineers and just like they didn't really give a about the macro environment it's like let's just make the fastest blockchain in existence ignore all the noise the bear market in like 2022 and 2023 was pretty brutal especially for solana and so there's a lot of like stuff swirling around that but those guys and girls are just like so heads down on continuing to ship and make improvements.
They didn't care.
And I was like, okay, that's a good sign.
They're in it for the right reasons.
And so we kind of just took a similar approach and just like chewed a lot of glass and helped out where we could.
No atheists in the foxhole, as it were.
You ready for a lightning round?
Yeah.
All right.
What's the worst advice you've ever gotten as a founder?
Sometimes there's pressure from people outside the company to grow the team in a certain way or focus on different areas.
I think that is a mistake because you end up hiring too many people, diluting the culture.
People just kind of end up like sitting around wondering what to work on.
So stay lean.
Yeah, we're a pretty lean team.
We're 21 people.
Everyone has way too much work to do, but it keeps us super focused on the most important thing.
21, is that a nod to Bitcoin?
Maybe.
No more.
Okay.
Hard cap at 21.
Yeah.
What's your biggest productivity hack?
Probably nicotine.
Yeah?
Are you a fan?
Yeah.
Okay.
We just had Palmer Luckey on stage.
He's been talking about how the reason progress has halted technologically is people aren't having nicotine anymore.
Yeah, I can believe that.
It's pretty interesting how helpful it can be, but you can definitely overdo it.
What's your preferred intake?
like zins or something i've been on notes recently or newts or notes yeah i would say that and then the sweets have cornered the market on this yeah there's so many flavors now too what's your what's your flavor of choice um pretty simple i just like the uh like the spearmints okay yeah i would say that's pretty good and then i mean good sleep it's like so obvious but like i would say if you have an eight sleeper or ring or something and you have one or two drinks at night and uh maybe before you didn't really notice it but when you have like an eight sleeper or ring or whatever it is it's like oh like that's a big difference so uh definitely like not drinking pretty simple nicotine over alcohol yes yeah give us a book recommendation show film i think memento is a good movie ocean's 11 i love that movie fantastic i'm into like the sci-fi memento like westworld foundation silo yeah yeah silo was great yeah first season really loved yeah okay and finally what is the smallest hill that you will die on i would say that if you litter you should get that's like pretty pretty reasonable and you should get like fined or something oh that's a good one i mean coming from texas don't mess with texas is like the famous anti-littering campaign uh In Austin.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is like a classic marketing line.
Because when you say don't litter, people are like, well, screw that.
I just thought about littering, so now I'm going to litter more.
But when you say don't mess with Texas, people think twice.
Oh, I got a good one.
If you don't put your shopping cart back in the corral, you should get fined.
That is a fantastic one.
There's a fine line between anarchy and order, and the shopping cart is the indicator of it.
Yeah, it's not that hard.
I think it's just Americans.
You go to Japan or like Tokyo, it's like so clean and everyone's so respectful of the shared space.
And then America, it's like, yeah, it's different.
I love it, but it's different.
Amazing.
Thank you so much for coming on, Lucas.
Thanks.