Joanna Zeng, co-founder and CEO of SOO Network. Welcome. Hey Peter, how's it going? Hey, great. Thanks for being here and we're excited to have you. I want to begin with a tweet you sent out back in September as a prompt to kind get into your journey into entrepreneurship, especially within the crypto space. So you had just attended the Solana conference and then this is what you said. I gravitated towards The Solana ecosystem, due to my motto, do it scared. A playground where it's all about shipping and only the strongest can survive. Founders don't have PhDs. Instead, they ruthlessly prioritize user adoption. Scrappy, united, and not motivated by short-term gains. Why Soon Network is on a mission is not only to extend the Solana network infra SVM, but the builder culture to other ecosystems. So I want to use that as a point of departure. because there's, you said a lot of things in there, but I want to first start out with the first thing you said with your motto, do it scared. Why is that your motto? Yeah, I think I first saw this in, what was it? I'm trying to remember. This is coming from a book, Yeah, basically, as I was part of the Shifa community, which I guess for those who don't know, it's more. of a female mentorship organization, right? So kind of suggest it to the leadership team, right? That we should use this as the overall works model as well. Because I often witness this with the female leaders. It's very much about taking the first step towards something in the unknown, right? And I think female especially has this huge fear when it comes to, you know, what if I fail. So the question is, what if you fail? It's not really a question. It's rhetorical. So it's really meant for you to think through as a founder, what is the worst that could happen? You just at least try it and have given it all and then get to the other end of it feeling very much you have really like no regret and really have given yourself the chance to put something to the limit or put something into fruition. So that to me is like a very often phenomenon, very prominent phenomenon that happens within especially the female founder community. So that's why I think I've been... hopefully living by that example ever since. Well, you shared this at the beginning of the Soon Network journey. What other times have you leaned on that motto, do it scared, during your journey as you develop Soon? I feel like I've done this a lot, taking risks, but hopefully all calculated risks. Yeah, I think it's very much based on. this inner voice that is telling you that even though you're doing something that's rather uncertain or unconventional, but you know it's the right choice. So again, if you go through that decision tree, you either go ahead and do it without any fear or you have the fear and you do it anyways. So an example in this scenario is I was not working in Web3. I had a career before Web3 on Wall Street for many years as a currency trader, actually over decade working on the trading floor. Yeah, so the idea is I kind of climbed up the corporate ladder in America, get to this like... know, SVP title. And then I quickly gravitated towards the Web3 ethos because the one place that I used to work at, like the first place I used to work at was Lehman Brothers, right? So that was a leading example of, you know, how vulnerable like a centralized financial system could be to a few back actors. And, you know, I kind of saw it as the, and really sometimes look back and thinking like maybe that's why we saw the white paper, Bitcoin white paper happened at the time that it did, right, during the, shortly after the financial crisis had hit, right. So I think everyone was gravitated towards that, know, decentralization, permissionless, open source ethos, and how we can rebuild the entire financial system from the ground up. So anyway, it's a very long way of saying, so I was very much attracted to that, but but I was definitely also having the fear of like, okay, what if, you know, I'm taking a pay cut to join this new burgeoning industry that hasn't been proven yet. So I think that was the moment when, especially after I actually not only just did some personal investment to hedge my currency risk or career risk. right with a Bitcoin investment at a time but actually did. learned about Solidity. This was back in 2017 when the smart contract capability became a possibility. Yeah, took a coding lesson and just that was the sort of the beginning of the end when it comes to really speaking to a lot of fellow nerds about white paper and we started this whole crypto developer community here in New York. And then I just realized I was, you know, really spending a lot of time on the side job versus my real job. right? So that helped me make that kind of leap towards the end. You shared a lot of things that I want to kind of into you you mentioned Lehman Brothers and you were like right at the You had like a front-row seat during that time It sounds like during the the great financial crisis did that and you mentioned how that kind of helped you maybe look at like crypto as you know Maybe there's something here. That's an alternative financial system. That's different from what I've been in That was a scary time I imagine Yeah, yeah, for sure. mean, imagine a wide-eyed, recent graduate that just finally kind of got to the place that this person has been kind of working her entire life towards, and then only to find out that she was in the epic center of this financial crisis, Quite literally three months after she joined. So yeah, it was very scary. I think it was... It was the entire kind of a existential crisis moment where I was questioning why I'm in this industry at all. The industry doesn't even exist maybe in the six month time. I think it was, in hindsight though, was very interesting to have an experience like that. And really, mean, I guess using the same kind of model. as we have started this conversation with, was still thinking, okay, do it scared, right? Let's do it. I have chosen this path. So even though it wasn't with Lehman Brothers, I ended up working at a different investment bank afterwards because I wanted to answer that question to myself, right? Like, what if I continued on this journey? Where would that take me? Sadly, that time around, it wasn't taking me to somewhere exciting. So I quickly... that journey right and and went for business school afterwards but yeah at least again like I didn't feel like I was taken out of this journey randomly by outside forces. And then you mentioned you joined the crypto community in New York and you started to learn how to develop in Solidity. That's pretty interesting having someone with a business background learning how to code. How difficult was that? It was very difficult because I only had some basic programming language background back in school. I did go to Carnegie Mellon, so that was actually one of the mandatory classes in freshman year. It's like you have to take two programming lessons. So that quickly came back, but the actual journey to learn about smart contract and... and know, Solidity Language was very much like a six month journey. So yeah, I took this like in-person slash online course. This was pretty pandemic time, so there's still, you know, these in-person venues available. And yeah, it was very interesting to kind of like, I just realized I didn't know enough to really have an educated conversation with fellow, you know. crypto nerds and this was a necessary step in order to be able to really understand the technical promise of blockchain. Because so far at that point I was treating it more as an investment vehicle and I think the metallic vision at the time just really inspired me to really treating it more as a technical vehicle. And since you were learning Solidity, I imagine the first kind of ecosystem you were exposed to is probably Ethereum. And then later, you became interested in the Solana ecosystem. Tell us about that, what that journey was like, and then let's get into a SOON network. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that was probably one of the defining moments, When I really, as you mentioned, I was very much of an East Maxi, right? To start out working in Coinbase and then later on at Optimism, very much working on the infrastructure side, but very much on the ecosystem building within the Ethereum ecosystem. I think the switch happened when I became more of a user of the tech as opposed to a like a BD person, A builder, ecosystem grower, right? So when I started using the various applications at the time, especially in DeFi, you know, the... like average DEX aggregator that you find on the Ethereum side. This is after L2 mania has started and there's just so many different versions of the same application, right? These are some different L2s. So when you compare things like a Jupiter, right? For instance, it's just... really the user experience is very much superior than what you would have gotten on the Ethereum or EVML2. Things like DCA value average, all these user features that is only uniquely enabled by the SVM. So... I think that was the aha moment and I started kind of diving into the other DeFi echos within Solana on the lending side. A little bit of perp, not so much, luckily. So, yeah, so think that was the initial reaction. then, obviously, like with all the meme coin culture and then the subsequent, this kind of social fight. movement, agent, AI, all these new narratives keep popping up on the Solana. That was like the defining moment for me to realize that, I mentioned this in the beginning quote, like user adoption is what I strive for. think a lot of people strive for in this space. So if we are just kind of stuck on being in the ivory tower doing research about various privacy tax, which I was part of by the way I quickly moved out of that. But yeah, then we can't really tackle this user adoption issue. So to me, when I was looking at this back to soon, why I founded Soon was during the exact same time now last year. So around East Denver last year is when I was starting to look at the various ecosystems at the time. where I can see this massive potential for user adoption. And I think Solana really popped up as the top choice. And as I mentioned, some of that is because the technical design allows high-performance applications, right? So it's a technical limitation issue. And then the other part is really this builder culture, right? Where you just seems to see a lot more high-quality builders on Solana. Yeah, I agree with you. I don't consider myself part of any specific camp, but I spent almost all of my time in crypto, either in the Ethereum or Bitcoin communities, and just most recently in the Solana community. And I'm definitely seeing a different ethos. It's very palpable, clear, different ethos. And I actually appreciate it because I'm pretty pragmatic. I'm very practical in just kind of my life. And I see that kind of ethos in the Solana community, just very practical people. they optimize for kind of a, they optimize for the user. And that's also kind of what I, what I'm very really focused on in my life. so now let's talk about soon because soon is, I believe in some ways it's a new category that you've created. So tell us about the category. and also like what soon network is. And maybe as you were explaining it to the audience, maybe, I think it'd be helpful to draw some comparisons into, because it kind of sits on top of multiple ecosystems or potentially, right? And whereas most people are thinking of like a specific ecosystem. And so maybe give us a sense of, yeah, tell us what soon is and the category that it fits in. Yeah, I really like how you laid out that thoughtful explanation. for us, right, is a, they roll a stack that allows anybody to use the Soon stack to spin up their own, know, Solana execution environment on top of their own choice of settlement layer. So that's kind of a mouthful, but essentially what we have already accomplished is to put Sonata execution on top of Ethereum or other EVM-based layers. So far we have a live mainnet, what we call Su mainnet, is putting Sonata execution on top of ETH, but also we have a version for BNB chain. So the Binance Smart Chain, which is an EVML1, has now a SBN version sitting on top. So why would this matter? Why are we even talking about this? I think going back to maybe some comparison, so we have seen the success playbook, successful playbook coming from the optimism side with OP playbook or OP stack essentially. standardizing the EVM, Ethereum Merchant Machine across multiple use cases. So there's app chains that got set up because of them. There's the whole base chain that's actually kind of like a competitor of them. But now it doesn't matter because the end of the day is all spreading out this... this developer education amongst the EVM side. So we see ourselves as the SVM version for OPStack. So we have the ambition to also quickly extending to other ecosystems beyond Ethereum, like Bitcoin, like Cosmos. But I think the main thing right now, the main ecosystem needs a lot of saving as far as the user adoption goes, is Ethereum. or ETH plus the 200 EVM L2s that have no differentiation out there. So the reason why I think this really becomes critical and it's the right time to do this, by the way, I didn't even get to mention. So this whole new category is called SVM, right? It's on a virtual machine. And it's a somewhat new concept, right? As far as like the research has been done or as far as like, you know, real use cases has been done. So we started this journey last year around May when there was like a winter opportunity we saw you know, Toli was talking about OPCAD on Bitcoin and then we were talking about like basically the Sonata Foundation finally started realizing that they wanted to modularize the stack, right? We've been talking about global state machine for the longest time, but now they're also starting to pour resources towards, know, especially research resources towards the split between the execution environment and the settlement environment. And that was... carried out by this development shop called ANSA. So ANSA actually ended up publishing this repo, called Agave repo, and they quickly celebrated all these projects that wanted to work on SVM, the timeline on that. So what we ended up doing is we did use some of that existing research, but we also came up with a decouple SVM approach. what this really means is it helps further modernize the transaction processing unit, TPU, and introducing something called horizontal scaling. So. not only like the TPU workflow gets to optimize for the higher TPS, but there's a higher reliability of the network because we rotate among multi-machines. So all of this tech design, we are very practical people. So we ended up taking the portions. in this modular stack that has been better tested, like the Solana virtual machine itself, like the OP stack, right? So we're using OP stack to link the R1 R2, but the actual SPM mini engine was completely revamped and redesigned. So we made it so it's a native application on top of Ethereum. We had to add markalization, which Solana doesn't have. And in that process, really... make sure that the, you know, the Merkel Patricia treat is added only in the slots that are. necessary so it's not impacting the overall performance. So it's like happens every 12 minutes as opposed to every slot. We also added a fraud proof, right? This is super important when you're becoming a stack and a standard for other people to use, right? You wanna make sure that your entire trust assumption doesn't just rely on the multi-sig bridge that's easily ruggable. We've seen so many cases, right? Like 1.4 billion got rocked just recently. a lot of these other projects like movement, like Eclipse, they are actually side chains. So we talk about this a lot. It really means so much from a security standpoint when you're trying to become a standard, have to have proper validity proof and fraud proof. So yes, I think I cover a lot of ground there with this question, but yeah, let me know if that makes sense. No, all of that's actually really helpful because it is a new area. so people have heard of side chains. People have heard of roll-ups of L2s. And so a natural question that probably people have in their mind is like, where does Su Network fit? it sounds like, from what you've described, you've got the execution layer, which is Solana, the Solana virtual machine. But then for the settlement layer, it could be any chain. It could be Ethereum. Right now it's Ethereum. And so I guess the next question is like, who is the target audience for this? If I were an app developer and I'm considering every chain I could possibly build on, and if I'm considering building on Solana, for example, why not just use Solana? Why soon network with something else beneath it, which kind of increases complexity? Yeah. So yeah, so let's break it apart in two scenarios, right? So two types of developers are really attracted to the solution. One is, first of all, right, I agree. Like, you know, we were talking about Solana itself doesn't need scaling, right? That's why we didn't become a Solana out to like many of the other SVM projects have become. we're ETH out to using, you know, some kind of virtual machine underneath. So, paradigm execution versus single-threadedness. But, at end of the day, right, we're settling back onto Ethereum because... In the ideal world, everybody will develop on top of Solana. But it simply is not the case today. Even with, I think, everything kind of going towards that direction with the developer side, user side, the size of the markets, the coin price itself, it's just not possible that everyone develop on Solana because there's an existing existing user base and liquidity that is parked on ETH, right? So myself, like I have a lot of NFTs that's still living somewhere in ETH or one of these L2s that I still haven't figured out how to liquidate yet. I think it's just, it's important to understand ETH is here to stay, right? Even though it needs a lot of saving, it needs a lot of, you know, kind of redesigning, but... the end of the day, like, it's where the OG money is at. So our question here is not to sort of like question the efficiency of Solana, is to, just like how Ethereum did it in four years ago, right, to really standardize and propagate and to proliferate the Solana standard across multiple ecosystems. So bringing back to the actual use cases and the audiences of this. So I think the one part is like all these emerging developers or new developers that are developing applications in emerging markets. So these are the people that just for one reason or another have been underserved within the Telana ecosystem, given it's still very much a Western. you know, kind of a based ecosystem. We actually send this with our own observations, right? So some of my coworkers in the Asia time zone, like I have to go meet with people on my team that are based in APAC a lot. So every time I go to say like, Singapore, Malaysia, like I go to these super team events, And our super team is just Solana, you local based ecosystems. And then I see a lot of these teams that try to win the hackathon. And they ended up not getting the top prize and then they wanted to move to a different ecosystem. So we're right there to retain these talents locally. So yeah, so that's one, right? If you're looking at the current applications on Sumina, about 40 applications, about half of them are all native to Sum because we have these local connections and we have the resources to provide the dev route support on the ground. And we run all these hacker houses in places that most ecosystems cannot reach. So I think that has been a really working model for us. side of the equation is also EVM. Developers are curious about Sonata for the longest time and didn't find a way to break into it, right? So like a good example there is Dex Cogdodo, DLDO, they're one of the OG Dex out there. I think they first got their first claim to fame back in 2017 in the Binance listing time. And they've just been bouncing around these various so-called high performance EVM L2s, most notably I think was at Arbitrum. So that became more like, we see how these these blue chip EVM applications struggle to really find their... product market fit and rivaling some of these newer applications on Solana. So we brought them over to Soon and then now they have built out their new features that has a meme coin culture. They have a meme launchpad now. They have a bunch of other batch upload and on-chain order book and all these stuff that can only be supported by the SVM tech stack. giving them a new chance to revamp themselves, but at the same time, still stay in touch with their existing ecosystem. That's the EVM-based. So they can still keep their ease, liquidity, and user base, but completely revamp their user experience. And that actually makes a ton of sense. I mean, I can see the different user groups being kind of segmented that way. How are you, I guess, what's the messaging to, you as you approach developers or as you meet with developers, you mentioned there's some developers that are kind of soon network native. Like it's the first kind of network that they choose to build on. And then you have folks that are kind of bouncing around in the Ethereum ecosystem looking for a home. And then know, soon network becomes a home for them. I guess, are you, how are you, what's the messaging to both camps? And are those the two, are those the two main segments that you're targeting? Or that soon network targets? Yeah, yeah, I think those are the main two camps and Sorry, I think we're a little slow here, but it's okay Yeah, I think those are the main main to like developer camps right so the major appeal to them is they just develop once and then they can deploy everywhere. Because I think the question to your question, the answer to your question, initial question is like, why should they consider soon? For any applications, it's we bring in the users. And you can basically develop this. if you're still on a developer ready, develop something in Rust, right? And you can just deploy onto soon with very minimum changes, simple redirect of the RPC endpoint. And then from their perspective, they wanted to have this brand new ecosystem, the interoperability between the EVM side and the SVM side. Because let's face it, it is a very kind of siloed ecosystem in the past. It's very hard to tackle both. Yeah. Looking at the homepage, I want to get into mainnet in a minute, but I think the homepage, the headline and sub headline is, I think instructive and helps me. So coming soon, use Solana on every blockchain. Tell us about that because so far we've talked about Ethereum as the settlement layer, but we'll eventually Is there a roadmap for when soon then supports every blockchain and where every blockchain can become the settlement layer, but then the SVM becomes the execution layer? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. think, yeah, so the, you know, that in that vision, right, we call like the super adoption stack, or SAS, right. So in that vision, we will see is basically one dominant SVM chain, right, or take over that ecosystem. So in every ecosystem, have, you know, SVM chain on Bitcoin, on Ethereum, on Cosmos, and then there's interoperability surrounding them. Right. So that's the important part. think, frankly, like OP really didn't try to solve that problem until two and a half years later. It's really important to, to consider how do we not just know further fragment liquidity, but become the solution to it. Right. So in scenario, again, we have built in this interoperability on the sequencer level. and we use hyperlane as an underlying tech for the cross-chain messaging, not just asset bridge, messaging bridge. So all the chains that live within the universe of Soone can not only kind of interrupt with each other, but we also had this product that further interrupt all the Soone chains with Solana and with Tom. So those two ecosystems, I think, have been arguably has the highest adoption so far. So again, the idea is just we bring the users where the developers are. Sorry, tongue, T-O-N, tongue. Tong, got it, got it, got it. Yeah, I met with John Cole from Hyperlane a couple of weeks ago. Great project. Mm-hmm. Yeah. They have a lot of, like, tricks under their sleeves that they haven't even talked about yet. Yeah. So soon network launched its mainnet recently. Tell us about that and how that's going. Yeah, yeah, so I think that's probably one thing when we talk about all VM these days, right? That's his own category. mean, SVM is kind of one of the three major, there's Parallel EVM, there's the... Smooth VM and SVM, think the biggest difference that set us apart is the fact that we are the only all VM viable auction with the main net that hasn't has a token yet. So that itself is very attractive to developers that obviously comes in with expectation of potential financial gains, So airdrop expectation. I think we've always been prioritizing product over pure sentiment, which in hindsight, I'm not sure if it's the right choice or not. I feel like the industry is heading in a different direction, but we are still very much focusing on product-led growth. So we have the actual proper... know, mean that that has launched for two months now. We also have the stack that has been live for two months now. So the on the stack side, I think I talked a little bit about the main net itself, right? So the stack side, have five plus chains that have committed to use soon stack to speed up their own chains. So be it like the SPM version of BNB. So they really wanted to attract the Solana users into our developers into their ecosystem, providing these folks with the distribution of finance, obviously with the overall distribution of the network. But also there's multiple cases where app chains are being built using SwinStack. And I think the most useful cases so far are both AI and consumer. So these are two. organically the highest adopted use cases that we've seen. And I think on the AI side, you've seen all these not just DeFi, AI, but AI being used for social five, for info five, for other type of entertainment even, for other kind of use cases are now spin up on Soot Network. That's great. So you took an unorthodox approach to raising money for the Su Network. Maybe tell us about that and kind of your approach to that, because I think it says a lot about kind of the long-term focus that you and the team have. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I mean, we kind of did this in the first of its kind, right? Industry, first industry standard, however you call it, like way to prove out this concept of, you know, we want to only attract long-term users and long-term, you know, investors, right? So we first did a very small... know, Andrews only we call the copier's round. Right. So that was done back in the summertime when we announced our company out of stealth. I think that even that like small round was a somewhat unconventional. We were turning away like VC offers because to me it's really important at that early stage to get you know, like multiple people to to help co-build the narrative given it is a new category and just feeling that if I had overweighted one single player, we now have help with that narrative. So we looked at the kind of the three space that we think will be most aligned with our value, right? On the modular side, we spoke to the DA Providers, like... Sasha, Iken, Veil, and then obviously with a couple folks like Andy from the Roll Up, and then on the Sonata side, we spoke to Toli, Anza team. the super team, right, super team is very decentralized. We had to speak to everybody really locally. And then on the Ethereum side, we spoke to a few people that are highly regarded within the East Global and Denver, East Denver, know, ECC, et cetera. Anyway, so the idea is I had to do all these calls in like a... a very short period of time, 40 calls. And then we got like out of that, think, sorry, it was 50 people I spoke to. And then I think I got 44 yeses out of the 50. So that was very interesting. And then we did our actual, I guess the large round, the seed round with this community approach. So that was done back in January when we basically did a fair launch with All the community members can come in permissionlessly. We did the entire round structured as an NFT sale. So folks can pick three tiers of NFTs. And essentially, the three tiers are benchmarking different risk appetite and different valuation expectations. let's say that VCs will get in at lowest valuation but that longest lockup and vice versa as a retail investor you can get the lowest lockup almost you know day one like 100 % unlock but with the highest valuation so with that variability we were able to capture like a pretty big I think overall we have 5,000 people participated and these are like frankly, the highest quality users for the application, right? So the way that I've been kind of building the ecosystem around it is, I tell my application builders, like, look, this is the existing kind of you know, strong community that are all... big believers of soon. you guys can just, you know, and these, these are all guys that have been trading and, you know, de-genning in this ecosystem, obviously knows how to use different apps. So you guys should just use this user base as your first beta users, right? Alpha users. And then, then from that point on, we can build a even larger flywheel of user ecosystem. So that has been really paying well because the NFT holders, not only they get the token conversion at the end, but we've been using it as more of a battle pass, I guess, like giving a utility so they can get access to even more activities on like a quest platform, right? So they can get higher rewards when they try out a new killer app, right? That just got deployed out soon. So. Yeah, it has been, I think, paying dividends quite a bit. It's a very unique way to raise money because it's also very aligned. You've got the co-builders round and then you've got the second round, the community round, now it's getting 5,000 people to participate is a huge accomplishment. These are people that are long-term aligned. They participate. I imagine probably everybody participated in the test net and then most are probably active in the main net, which is amazing. You know, every application developer will tell you that the number one problem they have is to get users. you know, because soon network already provides those users and these users are long-term aligned. I mean, that's, that's a huge value add to developers because this you're exactly right. mean, the, set of users and the set of participants at the community round are the, are the people that are also going to participate in the applications. That's huge. Yeah. I think that's usually what really new ecosystems kind of struggle to cultivate is the first users, early adopters. So I think the NFT self also bond the community together when they have this like share identity. We haven't allowed people to redeem the NFT images yet, but once that's out, I can imagine like everyone has that, know, up on their profile, right? Discord, Twitter, and use that as a PFP. I think that'll be huge. The second people can identify their personal identity with the NFT and then they change it on X, I think that's gonna bring a lot of attention to soon. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. so tell us, guess, on the roadmap. So you've launched Maynet. It's about two months old, I believe. What, and you mentioned earlier the way you think about SOON Network is kind of like the optimism stack for Solana. And so I envision kind of like, so SOON Network is like both a, kind of a toolkit that other developers can kind of plug into and use for their own kind of applications. But it also is considered an ETH L2. And so, when you kind of straddle two communities, the Solana community and then also the Ethereum community, how are you communicating and like working with the Ethereum community as an L2? there's, I imagine the competition there is extensive. Everyone's in L2. Yeah. Yeah, so I think on the out to, I guess, out to narrative out to war, right? So my personal feeling as part of the, you know, out to kind of phenomenon, right? You know, throughout this like, 2020, 2021, 2024, I'd say era is, is all the outtos out there are just know, undifferentiated and actually creating this grand farmer culture, right, that actually are plaguing the ecosystem. And at end the day, what we strive to do is being a playground, an innovation hub for developers to come in and build where it is and the strangest stuff. We love applications that kind of on the out look, it's a bit of a weird, a bit of an out ball. I think we have seen all these L2s play the TBL game. the same playbook, everybody kind of like used the VC money to pump up the TVLs of the ecosystem and quickly that became unsustainable. I don't even need to give you the names, you know who I'm talking about, right, that eventually died out. And, you know, all these, yeah, essentially the, yeah, companies that have one TGE with high... DV low flow, eventually kind of now back to where the actual valuation would be. So we don't want to be part of that, the past, right? So what we're trying to do is with the SVM, now you can, we're talking about real time, about 10 times real time than Solana itself. We are actually 50 milliseconds, which is a huge step from the 400 milliseconds from the Solana. text itself. As mentioned, as L2, we don't need the consensus layer. So we actually decoupled that from the user threads, user execution threads from the voting threads, which counts about 30 to 50 % of the overall Solana mainnet transactions. So with that, like we were able to really increase the not just TPS, but latency. That's something I think, especially in today's world when we talk about, AI agent becoming the number one user, or not yet, but will be, number one user of the blockchain. That's what matters, because we can actually build these actual inference models and LLM models on chain with the kind of tech set that can enable it. So yeah, so on the TPS side we have achieved and this is not in theory, right? Remember this is all in practice We've been you know around for two months with the 9-minute without any downtime not even once so 30k TPS is a large Improvement from the usual, you 2k 3k that you see from the existing ETHL tools out there That's massive. of this is actually enabling these developers to now talk about building these new on-chain order books that allows market makers to plug into it. So far, market makers are still only making these on-chain orders on the centralized change. That's because of the agency issue. And as mentioned, even for Mr. Nana, because the son of... embedded, kind of get car coded the 400 milliseconds as a limitation in the proof of history consensus, right? They cannot go further down. So with our design, we can improve all that. And basically experimenting with all these new metrics that can. allow people to build brand new categories. yeah, so I think AI and consumer have been just happened to be like the two natural use cases that we see can benefit the most from this tech stack. You know, we talk a lot on the show about going to the user to learn about their needs. And oftentimes in crypto, it's kind of the opposite. You come up with a solution and then you find a problem later. And it's backwards, right? But it sounds like with Sunetwork, like, you know, your background in, you know, in currency trading, like you're well aware of some of the issues that like what is preventing from like traditional finance from going on chain? Exactly. latency is one of the key ones. And you just mentioned it, that market makers don't typically market make on DEXs because it's slow. And so they primarily spend their time on centralized exchanges. But now with SOON Network, because it is so fast, there's hardly any latency. can now. And so DeFi is one of those consumer applications that make sense for SOON Network. When you think about... kind of consumer adoption. Actually, let me back up. When you think of developer adoption, a lot of these L2s that you've mentioned are undifferentiated, and I agree with you. I think there's, you know, on the one hand, it's a positive that you can spin up an L2 fast, but on the other hand, it's very negative because now you've got so many L2s, and they all look the same, not differentiated. And as I thought more about that, One of the kind of the key, the reason why it's so easy to spin up an L2 is because of kind of roll up as a service providers. So you've got Altlayer, you've got Gelato, Conduit, and they're providing a great service. In Caldera, they're providing a great service. But I think what these L2s need to be doing is like, even though it's easy to spin up an L2 through one of these roll up as a service providers, They need to be thinking about how to differentiate themselves. SUN network is clearly differentiated as an ETHL2 with Solana on top. There's no one else like that, right? And so that is so unique. Are you thinking about, or maybe you have, I'm curious if SUN could become part of, could be used these roll up as a service providers as a distribution model perhaps. So we are already doing that. I love how you're, yeah, what you're thinking is like. basically the same way that I was thinking when I started the company. Yeah, so we already have integration done with all the, I think, Sep Gelato, all the other RAS providers out there that you mentioned. So some of them are actually early angels in us, like Allaire and Caldera. Very much to your point, right, believe in the vision, because we're talking about a huge upgrade. You're leveling up the ECL2 stack, right? from like a two seconds block time. OP stack or 400 milliseconds Arbitrum orbit which are the only two options they have right as a a out to provider today, so you know we can we can hugely improve those for application purposes right so I think you know personally I've always been bullish on app chains for one reason because I think all the all these application that have found product market fit eventually will want to become its own chain because all the customization, right? All the... tokenomics just makes sense when you think about really using your own token as your gas token that will accrue to its own ecosystem. And by the way, yeah, all the applications eventually will start building their own ecosystem. I think that happens every time, right? You saw it with Uniswap, saw it with DYDX, et cetera. Hyperliquid, great example of that too. So yeah, so I think it's really interesting to be on the forefront, being kind of like the high performance stack that can replace the existing EVM tech stack out there for all the tap chains. Yeah, that's really good to hear. I haven't been on one of these Rollup of Service provider sites in a while, and so I'm not familiar with the options that they provide for L2s, but that's really good that Su Network is one of those options, which then leads me to think, I wonder if there's a way within one of these to kind of surface up or maybe sort, because I think having spent with lot of L2s, they have an idea, they wanna build an L2, they wanna build their own chain, but they don't quite know what to do. And so they oftentimes, once they go into one of these roll up of service providers, pick the first one. They don't sort necessarily and it's just there. And so it's one of those things where it's like the first option becomes the most used one, it's almost by accident. And so, which then you gotta think, okay, well, how can we surface Su Network up in these? RAS providers because you know I think it could serve a lot of their needs more so than probably the other options I'm guessing. So anyway that's just an aside. Yeah, yeah, I think we need to look at how that option is being presented to your point and see if we're almost like the SEO, the marketing thing, right? I'd have to make sure that your name pops up as the first thing on the search result. No, it really is. I it goes back to like when I was at Amazon early days and people would manipulate the stars. They know the star reviews all the time and it actually works. You manipulate those and it's like you get more sales. And so now you've got like this marketplace of like, know, provider service providers on these RAS, you know, roll up as a service kind of providers, right? And you're almost seeing the same thing. It's like, it's so interesting. Like the issues in web two, now, we must be growing up in crypto because now we're seeing the same issues that web two has seen for a long time. And we're just now kind of seeing it. And so we're kind of growing up. That's a positive thing. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. think we need more professionals to move over from the Web2 world. As much as I love the Gen Zers, I mean, I do hire all of them on my team. yeah, I oftentimes get really excited to talk to somebody who has a career before crypto, like yourself. Well, Joanna, this has been such a fun conversation. Now, what are some last, I guess, last words you'd like to leave with the audience with a soon network? Because you're now in main net. I imagine you want to continue developers to learn and build on soon. What about other types of users? Maybe users that might be interested in applications on soon. Yeah, yeah, I two things I want to leave the audience with one really back to, how we're always been community owned and community first project. So we do have 51 % of token supply reserved for the community. And we have Yeah, we have been, you know, committing to that, right? distributing that through the NFT. and also we have done two rounds of quests so far. One was on our own platform. One is with OKX wallet. So we have two new ones coming up. I can't say the names yet, but yeah, big, you know, platforms that will facilitate these quests coming up. So yeah, stay tuned on, you know, new incentives, incentives, design and new incentive campaigns. one. And then the second, I think, is coming back to on the developer side. Right. So I have pledged from day one to be the CMO as a hire or CMO as a service to all my ecosystem partners. I have actually personally spoke to every single one of them, I think. Because we're still young, right? We're still a new ecosystem. I think I know everybody. So given the fact that there is a beat above native applications on SOON, so I think the main thing for me is to do a good job promoting them to the ecosystem, to the people outside of the ecosystem. So. Yeah, so that could be just design of the product self or having actually working with a few teams to do VC funding, to get them intros to VCs. And also just to get them into one of these incentive campaigns I mentioned. So I think the end of the day, we really want to be the chain that promote the next killer app. So some of them, I mean... We're actually about to release information on this. One example of this is a company called Airnex. They're a D-Pin project. I call it Consumer D-Pin. That's another big focus of ours, is seeing all these applications using everyday device. So not your heavy compute, like GPU type of device, but things like a Wi-Fi router. I wish I had it in front of me right now, but I usually put it in my backpack. It's like a decentralized Wi-Fi router. You can use it for obviously like, you know, Wi-Fi VPN use, but also because it's connected to the chain like in a real time, right? We can check your staking on that. without the fear of being slashed. So this really interesting DeFi kind of application on top of a D-PIN device has really been catching on. And we've seen people just claiming tokens and staking them every day, just thousands of transactions. So I think that's a type of application I want to see more, right? More of a unique use cases that you can now see elsewhere. And what is that called? It's called Aaronx, A-E-R-O-N-Y-X. Yeah, exactly. that. Yeah, applications like that can go very, very viral. I'm familiar with an application that I, sadly enough, I just learned about recently and then turns out it's like in the top 20. And it's like every Uber driver talks about this thing. I don't want to mention it because I'm, you know, but I'd never heard of it ever. And then someone mentioned it to me the other day, like, you heard of these guys? I'm like, no. I looked it up, it turns out it's in the top 20. It's like this, I still don't know anything about it, but it really led me to question like, am I out of touch that I didn't know about this thing for it's now in the top 20. And it turns out that it's like really, really big in a very specific kind of region of the world. And it's like every like Uber driver uses it. And it's like, wow, I had no idea. But you know, this project that you're describing, what was the name again? Erin next. ARINX. That's definitely something to out for because that has the potential to get very, very viral and create tons of transactions on su network. Exactly. Yeah. So we're going to prioritize applications that has what I call these microtransactions, high transaction volume, but maybe low notional. So not your typical whale type of transactions, DeFi transactions, but these microtransactions that can really benefit from the high TPS low latency environment. Awesome. Well, Joanna Zeng, thank you so much for talking to us about Soon Network. We're excited for what you guys have accomplished. Two months in Mainnet and it sounds like really amazing projects that are building on you, on Soon. So thank you. Thank you. Yeah, appreciate it. And looking forward to coming back and talk about the ecosystem again, maybe in few months time. Thanks, Peter.