Stephen Hess, co-founder at METAPLEX and director at the METAPLEX Foundation. Welcome. Thanks Peter. Thanks for having me. Um, I have made it a goal to have more Solana projects on the pod. And I probably should have kind of, you know, the second I made that goal, literally it's like, now all these Solana projects are coming on, which is amazing. I met with Arkeum just yesterday and then sent AI and then Colosseum just about an hour ago. Um, and I'm so thankful that. Because we're taking the time to get on the pod and so we could discuss METAPLEX. I'd love to begin with kind of how you got into crypto is one, and then how you got into the Solana ecosystem, because I'm learning. I'm used to kind of people coming into the Solana ecosystem from other ecosystems. But what I'm finding is that people are kind of jumping into the Solana ecosystem, like at the very beginning. And so I'm curious how you got in. My journey with crypto actually starts with Bitcoin, think, as is true for many of us in 2013. And so it was going into a Chase Bank and wiring some money to Mt. Gox in Japan and hoping it shows up on the other side. I then made a little bit of money off of that enough to feel like I was a Forex trader and I was going to take a one-way flight to Puerto Rico and that. Mexico City, like, you know, hanging out in the BTC troll box, like trading Litecoin and Dogecoin. It turns out I had no idea what I was doing. It got wrecked when the market pulled back. I learned a lot through that process and I really fell in love with blockchains as a form of information technology. Like I'm really kind of, you know, at heart, a designer and a builder and what blockchains afford in terms of... in the genealogy of information technology is really profound in terms of having permissionless economic and commercial rails. And so, you know, that I think sparked an interest that carries me and continues to carry me today. I ended up working in a variety of product design and management roles in the digital health space with a focus on AI and sort of using that as an opportunity to explore AI topics. And so my intro to Solana is actually like more, more sort of idiosyncratic and personal. ended up working for Raj at a healthcare company called Amada Health, where I also met Eric Williams, one of the Solana co-founders. So I had an opportunity to be a fly on the wall in some of the early days. And, and then jump on as their first product manager and designer, just doing a whole host of odd jobs, like designing merch while working on stake pools and. Ever since has really been just an incredible creative opportunity. And I think that, like many others, draws me to Solana is the ability to really think and design freely at the application layer, knowing that the technology can really support the performance that's required for us to reach the vision that we're all here for. And you know, that's kind of a theme I'm seeing as I speak with more more Solana developers and founders is that there's no cognitive load that comes with having to not worry about the infrastructure. And that you can just focus on the consumer and the user and the customer and kind of like the user interface and their experience. And I think that's pretty freeing. You mentioned that you worked in healthcare. I'm curious, I guess, how did that experience help you as an entrepreneur and as a builder as you grew Metaplex or founded and grew Metaplex? Yeah, it's interesting. Like healthcare is so polar opposite in some ways and like the pace and the rate of change where in many ways what like Raj, Eric and I and others bonded over at that time was like, we need to move faster. And then we found ourselves in crypto and we're like, we can actually just go now. And like, that was a really like liberating experience for us, which is like, okay, like now we can really, we can really cook, we can really build. At the same time, think working in a highly regulated space though, also served myself well and I know others that have come from healthcare and ended up in crypto because I do think there are a lot of the innovation process is really understanding this evolving regulatory landscape and being able to stay within the bounds of those regulations while sort of living at the edge. like we're very much like. you know, sort of with a lot of attention watching what's coming out of DC and with the new SEC commissioner and what's like happening in the rulemaking process. And I think that's getting us really excited about now being in a similar period again, where there's going to be a whole bunch of really exciting innovation that will open up as that becomes more clear. Yeah. At Omada Health, did you at any point, did develop the product, like work with actual, like, and I guess who was your customer at that point? Was it patients or clinicians? So it's a multi-sided problem obviously in healthcare. So you have payers who... our employers or health plans. And so you're selling them this as a benefit that they can then offer to their populations. But then you have the actual end user. So, you know, for Omada, that's individuals that are managing obesity related chronic disease, like pre-diabetes and hypertension. And then you have the clinical care team that you need to bring in as well to make sure that care is being coordinated between the behavioral pieces and the other parts of that care plan. And so specifically what I was working on was software for remote health coaches and running experiments that we would then use to generate data to train models to then recommend interventions to those health coaches. And actually a very unique market because we could use algorithms to generate and run tests around behavior change in a way that you wouldn't be able to do in other clinical conditions. And so it actually became a really great place to explore some of these AI and machine learning topics within healthcare. which continue to be very fascinated with. It's like obviously really exciting time to just be in technology, but also with AI innovation across the board. Yeah, I asked because I have some experience in healthcare. A while ago, I worked for actually a digital camera company that fields seven pictures of the eye, so different fields of the eye. And then these images were then encrypted and then sent to the University of Oklahoma Eye Center for actual ophthalmologists to then. grade each field of the eye for the presence of the disease. So diabetic, diabetic retinopathy. This was like, so long ago, this was like 20, I'm gonna age myself, I want it like 2014, 2015. And so it's like, back then, I mean, like AI could do all of that now. But back then it was actual physics, like, was looking at these images. And then they would return kind of their grade on the presence of the disease and the disease was further along. And my role at that point was actually working with the patients in helping them kind of get comfortable sitting in front of the camera, working with the primary care physicians to refer their patients to us. And so was a very, it was an interesting role because it was working with directly with people, but also with helping them kind of educate them on, okay, this is why it's important. And this is kind of where you need to go and what to do. And then you'll learn more about kind of like, you know, the outcomes of the eye test. But it taught me a lot around kind of the psychology of human beings and also this idea of fear. Like a lot of folks, one thing we found was that they didn't want to go to the eye center because they were scared of what they would learn. And it's one of those things that you don't like it's really hard to kind of arrive at that if you were to do like proper user research, but that's like, okay, that's a really interesting thing. So how do we kind of combat against that and help them feel more comfortable? And so that was, I was curious about like, if you had any experiences like that, that, you know, as you kind of got, went into an entrepreneurship founder role at METAPLEX, like I'm curious to see if there were experiences like that, that, that maybe kind of helped you as a founder. It's an interesting question. I think as it relates to... behavior change and understanding human psychology and motivation. I definitely learned like a ton in my work in healthcare and having a chance to work alongside like clinical psychologists and experts in the field. And to your point, I think people respond to different types of motivation. And ultimately, if someone is very high agency, they'll respond well to strong coaching. Like you can get on them a bit and they'll be excited and they'll rise to the challenge. But that can be really demotivating to someone who's in a different place. And I think understanding those differences and then being able to sort of tailor and meet someone where there is is really important. I'd say it as it relates to entrepreneurship and just the way that I approach business, probably the most fundamental learning that I took from that period of time is that You generally can't manufacture motivation and it's often not worth your time to attempt to do so. And really where you find the most sort of productivity is in understanding someone's motivation, understanding their values, understanding the vision that they have for their business, themselves as an individual, and then working with that in good faith. And... That means sometimes, even if you could really, like, you really know that there's, some opportunity that would just be incredible, but just the motivation isn't there on the other side. That's often a signal that it's not the right opportunity for you to move past that. And so I think being able to, like, assess that and quickly in conversations, understand where someone genuinely is at, and then work constructively from that, I think that was pretty profound in terms of how I approach business and life in general. And I think as an entrepreneur, that's a very mature level to be at, to recognize that and be able to apply that as you hire people, as you work with developers or product managers or just people on your team, like what motivates them and then getting them excited or just coming to terms with, okay, this is not exciting for them, but there might be something else they might be excited about. that's coming to terms. on that is a very mature kind of kind high EQ kind of thing. So, yeah. and like being being willing to be wrong. Like entrepreneurship is this strange balance of being like so convicted, like 1000 % in your fiber that that what you're doing is going to be work while holding on to that kernel of humility and doubt that lets you like read the field and understand when. your priors were wrong and like being able with no ego to then change your view, adjust your strategy and move forward. And I think being able to recognize those moments and not like be in denial of them is the difference oftentimes between startups being able to pivot and survive versus, you know, sort of, you know, going down with the ship sort of figuratively for an idea that just didn't bear out in reality. And that happens even with the smartest operators, like you can act with conviction and startups are necessarily contrarian, so that is also just part of the game to a degree. Let's switch now to METAPLEX and maybe we could begin with kind of like, how did we get here? Because the METAPLEX today is, well, a lot of it still remains from when you guys started a couple of years ago. You also learned a lot and there has been some changes in the product and the service and definitely as a, you'll probably share some war stories with us with how METAPLEX. stress test the Solana ecosystem to very humbling kind of outcomes. Yeah, maybe take us, I guess, how did we get here? So METAPLEX at its base layer provides the standard for both tokens and NFTs on Solana and now the SVM more broadly. So you can think of it as providing... what ERC 721 or ERC 20 provides to the Ethereum ecosystem. And that unlocks a massive value for an ecosystem of applications and developers that all want to create and use assets that are interoperable. And I think that's been one of the tremendous strengths of the Solana ecosystem is that you see this sort of rapid iteration at the application layer that's enabled by this base asset layer that just works. And so that's why we have so many incredible, you know, and of course it's the efforts of these teams individually, but one of the reasons why you just see so many incredible leading consumer applications and wallets like, you know, Phantom Backpack and Soulflare, like incredible NFT marketplaces like Magic Eden and Tensor, and then exceptional exchanges and indexes. And building on top of that, you know, to your point about making it easy for developers and really focusing at the application layer, the METAPLEX program library attempts to make it so that developers that are launching token projects, building on Solana, don't need to write smart contracts. that they can interface with trusted audited programs that are again integrated throughout the ecosystem. And they can interface through that with SDKs that they choose and increasingly natural language interfaces through like a genetic developer tools that are gonna make that base layer even more accessible. So there's the standard that allows for this interoperable ecosystem. And then there's the METAPLEX program library that provides that. utility library of on-chain smart contracts for creating, selling, and using digital assets, and then Aura, our data network, that provides the read side. to build performant applications. And so at the end of the day, vision, our mission, our customer focus is on accelerating development of decentralized applications on Solana. a lot of that has come from the glass chewing of just years of working with teams and just incrementally solving these problems. And I think it's that attitude of just like aping forward into the next problem that's allowed us to build this incredible platform technology. You know, just met with Clay from Colosseum and he said the exact same thing. He used the phrase glass chewing Is that a common phrase in the Solana ecosystem? 100%. I think, you many of us that have been working in the ecosystem for years have like, know, we were, you know, we've been through the outage days, you know, one of which like caused by just insane bot activity on candy machines. You know, we've, we've had the, the scares of, of, you know, contracts that potentially have exploits and like catching it at the very last minute. And we understand that like we're, in a game that demands urgency and that requires us to take on risk but to make calculated risks. But the glass chewing sort of ethos is really about like accepting that, like accepting the hard work and like the grit that's required to go through that process and like be able to sit in the pocket under tremendous amounts of pressure. as the market's going up and down and being able to stay focused on the vision that pierces through all of that. So I think it's a reminder, it's kind of a way for all of us to get up with a smile and be like, okay, we're ready for whatever is next. the, I spent some time at Amazon and one of, people ask like, how long were you at Amazon? And the answer is always not in years, but it was in, it was always described as I was, I've been at Amazon like for Christmas seasons or something like that. It was, it was always like, it was always in using that as the, as the currency is like, how many Christmas seasons were you at Amazon? And it feels like it's Solana. It's like, you know, the glass chewing kind of language is, you know, it shows resiliency that you were there early, that things were breaking, but you just kind of stuck it through. And here you are. That's right. Yeah, that's exactly right. And, you know, it's, it's, it's a reminder in both directions. Like, you know, you, when, things are going well, like you have to stay, stay focused and not take it for granted. And when things are going poorly, like, you know, having conviction, uh, and, having the grit, like understanding that those are the points where most people give up and like taking motivation from that as a way of, creating separation. Um, I think, you know, it sort of captures both sides of that, which is like, you you just keep pushing. think totally is an incredible example of this. Like, you know, you know, he is like, he's continuing to set the pace. And, you know, despite all of the success, demonstrating that, like pushing the ecosystem forward to make hard decisions, to kind of push for innovation, not get too settled on where we are. And I think that's, that's had a huge impact on the way that like, you know, builders and projects throughout the ecosystem approach this as well. Take us through the kind of one of the difficult times of Solanas, during Solanas, I guess, life where there was so much stress on the system. And I guess what role did METAPLEX have during that time in kind of stressing the system, learning from it, and then becoming resilient coming out of it? There are two that come to mind here. think the first would be the candy machine era. So the Degen Ape Academy launch with the Ape and Tosh where it was like this global audience, like ready to go. And you just have a tremendous amount of load. Just the amount of demand is just way outside anyone's expectations and RPCs are falling over and, you know, front ends are getting DDoSed. And I think, you know, that really battle tested a lot of the application infrastructure. So METAPLEX in many ways, while we are known for defining the standard for tokens and NFTs, also really pioneered how to build applications on Solana through the first storefront application. And then in deploying candy machines really kind of continued to evolve on that model. And so I think that produced a lot of really good info on the read side and on the RPC side, but also in terms of the application stack. The second that comes to mind is just going through this bear market. Obviously, the last market cycle had a number of structural macro components. sort of Bitcoin related sort of cycle timing and whatnot, but a lot of unique stuff with the collapse of FTX that shook people's confidence in the ecosystem. And I do think that a large part of what allowed Solana to persist through that were the on-chain communities. It were these NFT projects, was the entrepreneurs and builders. And so when I look at NFTs, I view that in many ways as like part of the social layer. meme coins now as well of the ecosystem and that social layer played a really important role of keeping people motivated, focused and optimistic and that I think it was part of the resilience that allowed Solana to rebound in the way that it did. And the social layer, I mean, keeps people like, it becomes part of their identity. They become part of a tribe. And it also allows them to kind of support each other. And visually, you don't really realize it, but you you change your PFP and then you see others with the same PFP. And you're like, you become, you feel kind of part of a group. And that has a, especially, you know, during really hard times, it helps you kind of get through. And you come out of it much stronger. I met with Josh last night at Send AI, and he shared something really interesting with me that I'd love to talk to you about. He said just in passing that, NFTs could be AI agents. I'm like, oh. And he said, like, yeah, METAPLEX is doing something around that area. I'm like, oh, I'm talking with Steven Namar. I should talk to him about that. So I'd love to hear more about that, because that is quite unique. I have not heard that, at least on the Ethereum side. Tell us about NFTs. AI agents, what's going on there? So at a high level, I'm like a hyper AI bull. I think all of our AI ideas and product ideas are probably not weird enough. So I'll just sort of like say that as context. And so we've spent the last several months having a chance to work with Yash and the SendAI team. a number of the other AI platforms like AI16Z and AIpool and Grafane and Arc and others. There's an incredible cast of products and projects that are being built at the intersection of crypto and AI. And one of these concepts is the idea of agents having wallets and being able to execute transactions. And we've built the ability for agents to do that. by instantiating themselves effectively as an NFT on chain. And that affords for a number of different interesting things that are now being experimented in the ecosystem. so you can have, you know, with AI pool, you have the ability to manage liquidity positions. But you could also have AI agents that are executing trading strategies where their NFT is effectively holding the escrowed wallet. You have gaming use cases where Those NFTs are NFT characters and NPCs that could be holding their own unique items and tokens and collecting items, interacting with one another, signing transactions, could even be deploying programs. They could be creating their own AI agents that are now being held inside of their own wallets. You can have swarms and sort of like fractal. AI agents on chain. so it's been interesting. It was one of those things, honestly, that came up kind of in a whiteboard, something that we had been considering for some time with Core. I think people are starting to realize why we named the program Core, right? We're starting to add these extensions and these capabilities, these plugins and Execute being one of those. And then we found this audience of developers within the crypto AI community that have had some really interesting ideas that are now getting experimented with. You mentioned swarms. Tell us about that. For the audience, a lot of this is new concepts. People are just getting used to the intersection of AI and crypto. But now we're talking about NFTs as AI agents. We're increasingly getting more both interesting as well as complex. So I think we need another word for swarms, because I will say AI swarms just kind of terrifies me. So we would call them like AI collectives. But the idea is that you can have agents that have basically are instantiated in sort of multiple different agents. the benefit for that is if you're interacting with a base model where you have a system prompt, you can effectively create unique system prompts for a number of different agents. that are specialized, unique in some way. And then the hypothesis is that that collective has like an emergent behavior or performance that would outperform an individual agent. And so I would view this as like an area of research and exploration, but that would be the general concept is that you could have an agent that's given a high level goal or function, and then is creating agents that are taking on the sub routines or taking on the different components of that overall. task. I do think that though this is sort of adjacent or one component of a larger push towards on-chain autonomy fully and it's important to understand that while Core allows the agent to have an NFT that can then execute transactions, Like what you would consider the agent itself is still like running as like as a model on either a centralized compute environment or a decentralized compute environment. And so I think what we're going to see is, a push towards like autonomous AGI on chain, which is a combination of the on chain assets and asset management, decentralized compute and decentralized data networks. But I view that as a very different than building natural language interfaces and natural language computing. And so we are kind of exploring and pushing in both of those directions, which is how can we make it easier for people to interface with the on-chain technology through natural language computing, while also supporting developers that are exploring these topics around on-chain agents and like autonomous agents that can use on-chain rails to to interact and do business and sort of deliver value to users. The, I think that's fascinating and this whole area is just super interesting. Right now you mentioned it's kind of an area of research, least Swarm's is, or Collectives. What, I guess, what role is METAPLEX? What is METAPLEX's role in kind of advancing this, the whole idea of kind of NFT as AI agents? Are you guys building a set of libraries that allow other developers to use or? We've been largely actually committing to other projects, making sure that METAPLEX is well integrated into the Solana agent kit, into these other frameworks. So our primary interest and our view on this is that agents and agent systems will become, if not, the largest a significant demand driver or source of the creation of on-chain assets. And so we want to make sure that METAPLEX is very well integrated into those systems and like consumable by those systems. So, you know, we're looking at things like MPC protocols and whatnot, like how do we actually make sure that the on-chain capabilities that METAPLEX provides and the access to Solana's on-chain economy is easily consumable by agents and AI application developers. From that, that just process has inspired some of these ideas where we're builders and we're just curious by nature on these things. So, core execute and some of the ideas there have really come organically from that starting point. So Metaplex infra, I mean, it's pretty ubiquitous in the Solana ecosystem. mean, so many projects use Metaplex libraries and SDKs and infrastructure in general, right? What is, I guess, how do you see the rest of 2025? And I know with the Metaplex foundation that supports the Metaplex protocol, I'm curious to... to hear from you on kind of like the role now that you see METAPLEX playing in the overall Solana ecosystem. Is it, I don't wanna call it a public good necessarily, but it is, it's really in service of developers building on Solana. And METAPLEX just becomes a core part of kind of like whatever they choose to build, like METAPLEX infra is gonna be part of that. I don't even know if that was a question or a comment really. Yeah, it's true. Like we, we support virtually the entire Solana ecosystem. It's like 99 % of NFTs and tokens. And so, you we have an opportunity to really work across on chain gaming, NFT projects, meme coins, DeFi, D-Pen, AI. And so we are responsive and sort of sort of keenly tuned into our developer ecosystem and where they're inspired and how can we build tools that accelerate that process and let them really focus on the innovation process at the application layer. And most recently that has been this emphasis on AI systems. But going forward through the remainder of the year, I expect we'll be largely focused around TGEs and like helping projects launch new tokens and experimenting with new mechanics in that realm, similar to the way that we've re-innovated and have been supporting the ecosystem on NFT launches. And then really watching this opening up of the regulatory landscape in terms of IP tokenization and RWAs and bringing new types of assets, both crypto native assets and RWAs on chain. And we hope to be a big part of what will accelerate the development of new applications in that space as that clarity is given to the market. That's really cool. Maybe to end here, I'd love to hear a story from you since you've been here at the very, very beginning, in the Solana ecosystem from the very beginning. And I don't know how much you've experienced on the Ethereum ecosystem. Excuse me. I'd to hear from you on kind of your thoughts on... the developers that the Solana ecosystem kind of attracts versus Ethereum. And just your general thoughts on that. you know, I think there are, are like earnest and talented developers in both ecosystems. Uh, I do think that there is a difference in user experience and vision. Um, that's pretty stark between the ecosystems though. Like, I think there's a lot of conviction with Solana builders that like the L2 roadmap was, was always a mistake that like having different levels of abstraction between L1 and L2 and this idea that consumers really even know or care about settlement, like beyond just the consensus of the network that's executing the transaction. I think there's a really strong belief within the Solana ecosystem that that's just a failed strategy. It's not what end users want. And so that's why you do tend to have more of like you know, this sort of conviction and like start with the end user experience and work backwards. Like it's that Steve Jobs adage and determination to then fix the technology problems that get us to that end result as opposed to, you know, just trying to work around what's ultimately the best experience for the user. Yeah, excuse me, I tend to agree with you. This idea of focusing on the end user, I definitely see that. And also level of pragmatism in the Solana ecosystem versus the Ethereum ecosystem, where a lot of mind share and focus is still on the infrastructure side, which is important, but it stays there. Whereas on the Solana, in the Solana ecosystem, sorry. I'm seeing a lot of just really interesting innovation because they're so close, applications are so close to the end user. And I think it's really motivating and it's quite interesting as I'm learning more. And I'm kind of brand new to the Solano ecosystem and so I'm quite excited. Mountain Dow, I live in Salt Lake City and we had Mountain Dow last week. I believe Metaplex was there the first week. That's right. we, you know, we love the, Mountain Dough guys. So yeah, we, had a chance to go out earlier. And yeah, that's like kind of a regular one that we have circled on our calendars. That's awesome. Well, I'm really looking forward to kind of getting more involved in the Solana ecosystem and learning more about the projects that are kind of like holding the banner for Solana. And METAPLEX is clearly one of those underpinning almost every project. So Stephen, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. I will be sure to share in our show notes links to METAPLEX as well as to your X handle. But thank you. Thanks Peter, I appreciate it.