Pirates Parley

Pirates Parley

Every week, Steve (aka Happy Pirate) sits down with the builders, founders, and OGs shaping the Solana ecosystem. From DeFi protocols and DEX aggregators to wallets, oracles, and infrastructure — Pirates Parley dives deep into what it takes to build on-chain solutions on Solana.

Hosted by

S(Steve (Happy Pirate)

Subscribe & Listen

SpotifyRSS

New episodes weekly

Latest Episode

Coffee on Solana: from a $20 mint to the Miami Heat | Pirates Parley E24

0:000:00

All Episodes(12+)

Coffee on Solana: from a $20 mint to the Miami Heat | Pirates Parley E24
1:01:43
July 16, 2026

Coffee on Solana: from a $20 mint to the Miami Heat | Pirates Parley E24

The Raposa Coffee crew joins Pirates Parley to break down how a $20 NFT mint at the bottom of the bear market turned into the specialty coffee brand of the Solana ecosystem, now pouring at Miami Heat and Marlins games. They cover: Selling out the 10k Kups collection in April 2023 85% of Solana Pay transactions at Breakpoint 2023 from one booth Three years with basically zero marketing spend The unfair advantage of building a brand on Solana Record sales in their first six Marlins games The on-chain loyalty app, badge marketplace and Kups burns Jungles vs cosmics, and Raposa's biggest fumble 00:00 - Welcome and intros 4:49 - Chapter one: from NFT mint to coffee brand 9:04 - Becoming the ecosystem's coffee staple 15:35 - The crypto coffee brand question 17:56 - The unfair advantage 21:25 - Miami Heat and Marlins 27:25 - Why Solana 43:44 - The on-chain loyalty app 53:26 - Jungles vs cosmics 54:56 - Raposa's biggest fumble 59:38 - What's next

Inside mtnDAO: from a 6-bed Airbnb to Solana's hacker house
56:48
July 2, 2026

Inside mtnDAO: from a 6-bed Airbnb to Solana's hacker house

Barrett, co-founder of mtnDAO, joins Pirates Parley to tell the story of Solana's most notorious hacker house: how it went from 25 people crammed in a 6-bedroom Airbnb to a month-long builder summit that has produced 30 hackathon winners and over $30 million in raises. Barrett got into Solana almost by accident. He was building a pre-IPO markets company on Ethereum, found it too slow, and an Ethereum dev who didn't like him pushed him toward Solana out of spite. He and Edgar Pavlovsky started mtnDAO in Salt Lake City in 2021. In this episode: How an Ethereum dev pushed Barrett into Solana out of spite, and it became a golden match The first mtnDAO, 25 people sleeping across 6 bedrooms in an Airbnb 200 applications for the second one, and how it went biannual 30 global hackathon winners and $30M+ raised by alumni What makes a hacker house work: community and a first-in, last-out culture The tweet that captures it: work 14 hours, leave at 8 pm, feel like you left at lunch Why mtnDAO runs a month instead of the Foundation's flash-in-the-pan model The first production Solana Pay, and Metaplex's core standard, both born at mtnDAO Salt Lake as an outdoor Mecca, and the work-hard get-outside culture The one hard rule, and why there isn't really a DAO The 10th edition, August 1, free to attend Triton One: triton.one/pricing mtnDAO: x.com/mtndao

The web janitor of the Solana Foundation on agents, AEO and building on Solana
1:00:14
June 25, 2026

The web janitor of the Solana Foundation on agents, AEO and building on Solana

Harkle, an ecosystem engineer at the Solana Foundation, joins Pirates Parley to talk about the websites that run Solana, making the web agent-ready, and a years-old argument with Steve about RPC pricing that shaped how Triton charges today. Harkle calls himself the web janitor of the Solana Foundation. He runs solana.com, payments.org and pay.sh, came into crypto through NFTs, and spent years building for the New Zealand government before Solana pulled him in. They cover: Why he calls himself the web janitor of the Solana Foundation Buying his first Bitcoin in 2014 through a Second Life in-game currency Making solana.com agent-ready and ranking for AEO, the agent version of SEO Solana holding around 30% of agent mindshare across the big LLMs The argument with Steve about RPC pricing that flipped his whole thesis Why expensive RPC made him realise Solana was a B2B chain, not P2P Triton's pay-as-you-go model and pay.sh endpoints for agents Two years of 100% Solana uptime since February 2024 Whether the Solana Foundation should work itself out of a job Automating a content pipeline so a Google doc becomes a published page Why he hasn't hand-written a line of code since early 2025 His one rule for getting Foundation support: build a good product Triton One: triton.one/pricing Solana: solana.com/data • pay.sh Harkle: x.com/harkl_

Making Solana fast: from 33% skip rates to 100M compute unit blocks
58:46
June 18, 2026

Making Solana fast: from 33% skip rates to 100M compute unit blocks

Alessandro Decina from Anza joins Pirates Parley to break down how the Agave validator client went from constant congestion and 33% skip rates to 100 million compute-unit blocks, 200-millisecond slots, and the Alpenglow consensus rewrite. Alessandro spent 15 years in open-source multimedia and audio-video streaming, wrote one of the early XDP packet-processing implementations in C, and then added eBPF support to the Rust compiler. That work pulled him into Solana, where he now leads performance at Anza on Agave. They cover: Skip rate falling from 33% to 0.5% by version 2.3, and outages becoming a non-event The TPU rewrite to QUIC, stake-weighted QoS and why early spam still got through Why one syscall per packet caps throughput, and how XDP writes straight to the network card The invalidator is an internal team that attacks the cluster to surface the next bottleneck Rewriting parts of the Turbine with XDP so that much larger blocks can propagate Block size moving from 60 million to 100 million compute units, with headroom for more Shorter 200 millisecond slots targeted for the 4.2 release around the end of July Shrinking the leader ingest window from 30 seconds to 2.5 seconds with help from RPC providers Why Alpenglow matters most for deleting years of fragile consensus code A candid take on whether running two clients really improves security The Firedancer rivalry and the offsite that made him commit to making Agave faster His five-year vision of open source, permissionless global finance Triton One: triton.one/pricing Alessandro Decina: x.com/alessandrod Anza: anza.xyz

Bringing privacy to everything on Solana: Arcium
1:02:39
June 11, 2026

Bringing privacy to everything on Solana: Arcium

Arcium lets a network run computations on data that stays encrypted from start to finish. The nodes never see what they are processing, not even the operators. Milian, marketing manager at Arcium, joins Steve to explain how that works and what it unlocks. In this episode: The limit of zero knowledge: you can prove you are over 18, but you cannot compute across several parties' data The dishonest majority model, where privacy holds as long as one node stays honest Why TEEs keep getting broken, and where FHE fits next to MPC Training AI on private hospital data without exposing it cSPL, confidential SPL tokens that hide your balance and transfer amounts Why has fully public on-chain wealth become a physical safety problem Try Triton: https://triton.one/pricing Arcium: https://x.com/Arcium Milian: https://x.com/milianstx

Why Solana needs its own hardware wallet | Pirates Parley E18
1:09:45
June 4, 2026

Why Solana needs its own hardware wallet | Pirates Parley E18

Bill Papas spent two and a half years and four Colosseum hackathons building a hardware wallet that only does Solana. He joins Steve to talk through the device, the clear signing problem, and why he refused to launch a token. Bill came to crypto from a PhD in computational fluid dynamics PhD, ran candy machine bots through the NFT era, and then built Unruggable with Adam. His argument is simple. Solana has the most users of any chain, and every other hardware wallet still treats it as a side feature. In this episode: Why a Solana-only wallet beats a thousand-chain one FTX scar and why self-custody drove the project one button, no screen, no battery, $69, and no token The clear signing problem and why Ledger is slow to ship it for Solana Unruggable unboxing: billet aluminium machined in Kansas One Rust app across Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, Android and Seeker, with zero telemetry Swaps through Jupiter, DFlow and Titan with no fees, plus Triton's Yellowstone TPU sender and Jito Open source down to the PCB schematics, and air gapping against AI-driven attacks Unruggable: https://unruggable.io Triton: ⁠https://triton.one/

Why everything will be tokenised, with Mark Yusko of Morgan Creek
1:19:45
May 22, 2026

Why everything will be tokenised, with Mark Yusko of Morgan Creek

Mark Yusko joins Pirates Parley to walk through three decades of investing in innovation, why he went all in on Solana, and why every asset on earth will eventually live on-chain.Mark started in the Notre Dame endowment world, allocated to the venture fund that put 500K into Google and turned it into a couple of hundred million, and now runs Morgan Creek Digital. His framework is the ABCDs of the digital age -- AI, blockchain, chips and data. 80% in equity of businesses building the future, 20% in the liquid protocols themselves.He and Steve first met in 2022, when Solana was getting dunked on for "vaporised transactions" and Mark was one of the few people on the outside trying to understand instead of name-calling. Steve set him up with a phantom wallet and sent him $10 of SOL live on stream. Mark lost the seed phrase. The $10 is still on-chain.They cover:- The five internet protocols and why the wealth all went to the application layer in Web 1 and Web 2- Why about 85% of Web3 wealth has gone to the protocol layer this time- AI is artificial, not intelligent -- it fails all four definitions of intelligence- Why prompts you type into the context window get rewritten before they ever reach the model- Tokenisation as digital property rights, not squishing assets into coins- Eric Voorhees on permissionless systems- One-of-one always has value -- Mickey Mantle's signed card, the Constitution DAO, Magic x Lord of the Rings- How Solana held up during the Trump coin launch- The Morgan Creek Solana journey -- pennies to $265, sold 75% near the top, sold most of the rest in the high hundreds- Five Web3 protocols, the bridges problem, and why Frame's pitch did not click- Mark has reviewed thousands of pitches, and not one was building on XRP or Cardano- Tim Draper, World of Warcraft mana, and the FBI Silk Road Bitcoin auction at $601- Fundraising for founders -- fast yes, fast no, slow yes, avoid the slow no- Builders are rare, promoters are plentiful- Sales is simply transferring your enthusiasm to another

The new financial OS from Squads: building FinOps on stablecoin rails
53:35
May 20, 2026

The new financial OS from Squads: building FinOps on stablecoin rails

Phil Jacobson joins Pirates Parley to break down Altitude, the Squads team's new product, recorded 15 minutes after their fundraise announcement. Phil joined Squads full-time at the beginning of January. He spent just under two years as VP of operations at Tensor, was an angel investor in the company before that, and is now leading commercial work at Squads. They cover: - $18 million raise and what it will fund (team, product, growth) - Why Altitude is a financial operating system, not a bank - The functionality split between Squads (tokens and programs) and Altitude (financial operations) - Non-custodial multi-sig architecture and nested smart accounts - Default 2-of-4 user signers with account-level 3-of-5- Privy and Turnkey integrations for pass keys and multi-email backups - Altitude Rewards yield via Bridge, backed one-to-one by T-bills at BlackRock and Fidelity, T+1 withdrawal - ACH, Swift, SEPA, Wire and QuickBooks integration in a single stack

Realms team on the governance layer on Solana and the Sowellian prediction market
1:13:37
April 24, 2026

Realms team on the governance layer on Solana and the Sowellian prediction market

Dean, Taki and Chris from Realms join Pirates Parley to break down the governance layer of Solana: the Realms DAO platform, their new Sowellian prediction-market system, and IslandDAO V4 in Koh Samui this June.Realms is the DAO platform of Solana. It's the program behind Jito, Metaplex, Pyth, Marinade, Bonk and more. The team are self-described "governance nerds". Dean is the director at Realms. Taki works on on-chain coordination. Chris focuses on syndication and pooled capital, and caught a real governance attack the day before recording. They cover: What Realms actually does: DAO-controlled treasuries, program upgrade authority, and on-chain coordination on Solana The Sowellian mechanism, named after economist Thomas Sowell, where good decisions are rewarded and bad ones are penalised via prediction-market bets A live demo on beta.realms.today: a member bets ~$5 to $8 of their own capital, the DAO trades around $200 to $500, and the better takes 30% of the profit in 24 hours if they're right A governance attack Chris vetoed yesterday: a proposal disguised as a trade tried to transfer the whole treasury to a single address, stopped in real time using Realms' veto tooling Delegates: proxy voting on-chain, without the $10,000 to $25,000 lawyer fee you'd pay for proxy voting a stock in the US An audience question on running a Futarchy launchpad (MetaDAO) alongside a Realms DAO with a 4-of-6 multisig for upgrade authority Why all three went Bitcoin first, then Solana, mostly skipping EVM The Kelp DAO attack and Arbitrum freezing funds, and what it says about decentralisation's ethos IslandDAO history: V1 in a villa on Crete, V2 in the Solana villa in Thailand after Breakpoint Singapore, V3 back in Greece IslandDAO V4: Solana villa in Koh Samui, 3 June to 28 June. Early-bird until 1 May. Free VIP pass if you hold all 12 IslandDAO animal NFTs On-chain event tooling: check-ins, media upload via IslandGram, decentralised governance for food and activities, and NFC-based autographs that update NFT metadata on contact

Solana nutzen
Entwickeln
Unternehmen
Produkte
Ökosystem
KI-Agenten
© 2026 Solana Foundation. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.