Today’s guest is George Harrap, co-founder of Step Finance, the front page of Solana, whose mission is to take the currently disjointed and hard-to-understand Solana DeFi ecosystem and distill it into a single platform. Step Finance is a portfolio visualization platform aggregating all LPs, tokens, farms, and positions a user may have associated with their wallet and displays them on a seamless dashboard. Step aims to be the page that DeFi users have open perpetually, with all the functions and information they need to make informed decisions. George is also an advisor at YAP Global. George is a veteran crypto entrepreneur and former CEO and Co-founder of Bitspark. He started in the crypto world almost a decade ago as an early miner, and brings a wealth of experience, having built the first crypto remittance startup in the world, built six cryptocurrency exchanges, both centralized and decentralized, and launched 12 stablecoins, raising millions from VC and corporate investors along the way. We discuss various topics, including Solana, Crypto Adoption, the future of DeFi, the industry's early days, and much more. We begin our conversation by discussing how George began his crypto journey. George shares how he first got into crypto by mining bitcoin. We also discuss how we learned finance and financial literacy by trying to understand crypto and the principles behind it. George also discusses his first crypto-startup, Bitspark, and the various roadblocks he faced. We discuss the exponential growth of crypto adoption over the last few years and how that has enabled more crypto-native businesses to start. We pivot our conversation to discuss Solana. We begin our conversation by discussing how to evaluate coins based on their philosophy and the unique problem they're optimizing for. George explains how Solana is optimizing for transaction speed and low cost. George also discusses the importance of hitting a critical mass of users for the ecosystem to become valuable, which Solana has over the last year. George explains the consensus mechanism that powers Solana and how it differs from Proof-of-Stake. We discuss the different approaches various chains take to scale their transaction output. George explains the security risks and user experience problems associated with Layer-2 solutions. We transition our conversation to discuss how crypto impacts emerging market societies where their financial systems are less robust and trusted than their first-world counterparts. Our next discussion topic centered around the merge. We discuss the various probable outcomes of the merge and the second-order consequences of the merge. Our final discussion topic centered around Solana’s go-to-market strategy. George explains Solana’s unique approach to user acquisition and its marketing philosophy. Please enjoy my conversation with George Harrap.
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