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_
The web janitor of the Solana Foundation on agents, AEO and building on Solana
Making Solana fast: from 33% skip rates to 100M compute unit blocks
Inside mtnDAO: from a 6-bed Airbnb to Solana's hacker house
More from Pirates Parley
Who's Selling Your Swaps? Benjamin Boulin on Order Flow, MEV, and Getting Paid Back
Benjamin Boulin was running Minecraft servers at 11 and paying developers in Bitcoin by 2015. Today he's the founder of Circular, built after his arb team hit 30 million transactions a day and no tool on Solana could keep up. We get into how a simple swap leaks value to whoever controls the order flow, why platforms selling your swaps are earning double on you, and how Circular's monetization layer sends 65% of recovered arb profit straight back to the trader's wallet. Ben breaks down where a landing tip actually goes (Jito, Harmonic, SWQoS, direct to the leader), why every launchpad ends up building its own AMM, and why "we don't do MEV" is not the user protection it sounds like. Also: Counter-Strike skins lost to casinos, Valve's total control over your inventory, and what happens the day GTA 6 puts its cars on-chain. Fast transaction landing: landfast.io Circular: circular.fi 0:00 Welcome — one of my best friends in the ecosystem 1:40 Entrepreneur at 11: Minecraft servers, PayPal bans, and a broken financial system 7:07 A dev demanded Bitcoin in 2015 — and Ben didn't get it until Ethereum 12:00 Nifting: Steam meets Twitter for NFT skins 15:08 Who owns your skins? Valve's power and the GTA 6 on-chain test 21:45 Stablecoin arb on four chains — and the no-approval swap that sold him on Solana 27:30 Selling your swaps: why Triton won't, and the extortion nobody talks about 29:45 30M transactions a day: building Circular to track themselves 33:24 How your swap leaks value: AMMs, order flow, and the arb you never see 36:45 The monetization layer: what you're losing and how much comes back 44:28 Why every launchpad builds its own AMM 46:23 Integrating Fast: 1-cent tips, where they go, and 65% cashback 52:16 Colosseum builders: casino cranks, traders, and where to get RPC 56:33 Hidden fees and ignored priority fees: why validators should be angry 1:00:31 Counter-Strike, Trackmania, Risk — and next up: Ellie on Breakpoint
$250K in Hidden Fees: How Imperial Built a 1bp Perp DEX on Solana
Imperial started as a Jupiter Perps wrapper that just told you what you were actually paying. Jordan Prince built it after finding he'd paid a quarter of a million dollars in fees, part of it in swap charges the front end never reported. Now he and Hunter run Armada: a prop-AMM perp venue native to Solana with 1 basis point taker fees and books up to 20x deeper than the competition. We get into Jordan and Bartosz's early Solana Labs days (Metaplex, Candy Machine, the first hacker house in a Lisbon horse stable), Hunter's road from a DC lobbyist family to Teleport, the four perp ideas that flopped first, and why a failed MagicBlock L2 experiment pushed them to hedged, delta-neutral liquidity. Plus why traders stay loyal to more expensive venues: perp DEXs behave more like NFT collections than markets. Also: closing a $1.5M round from Foundation Capital a week before bankruptcy, and the no-paperwork $25K wire from Brian Long that bought them two more weeks. Trade at imperial.space. Armada needs an access code, so start in their Discord. Follow-ups and codes: t.me/piratesparley 0:00 Welcome — Imperial isn't just an aggregator anymore 2:11 Citadel hell to Solana Labs: Jordan, Bartosz and the first DeFi commits 4:00 The first hacker house, built overnight in a billionaire's horse stable 9:41 Hunter: lobbyist's kid, Ritz-Carlton basement, $15M for Teleport 17:13 Four failed perp ideas: BTC volatility perps and memes too dangerous to trade 20:14 $330K in trading profits and "Jupiter lies about fees" 24:54 People don't want choice, they want the perception of choice: routing explained 29:24 The MagicBlock L2 experiment that got their pool farmed 31:02 Armada: 1 basis point fees, and why 10x leverage turns 5 bps into 1% 34:06 Perp DEXs are NFT collections: why traders don't switch to cheaper venues 41:18 20x deeper books, hedged and delta neutral: how the prop AMM works 46:12 $1.5M from Foundation Capital, a week from bankruptcy, and Brian's $25K wire 54:25 "We are a premium RPC company": Helius vs Triton 57:39 How to get an Armada code, pre-IPO Anthropic perps, and gacha perp packs 1:02:01 Closers — Breakpoint, Telegram codes, and the Circular tease
"Go Hack That Bank": Asymmetric Research's CEO on Wormhole, Drift, and Bad OPSEC
Jonathan Claudius, CEO and co-founder of Asymmetric Research, started his first real pen-test after guys in suits picked him up at the airport, dropped him at a bank, and told him to go hack it. Twenty years later he's the person Solana calls when something blows up. We get into his path from breaking into banks to running offensive security at Mozilla, and why his second day at Jump Crypto was the day Wormhole got hacked. He explains why AR doesn't call itself an audit firm, and why AI knocked out the bottom of the audit market without touching the top: "when execution is free, you end up with a huge human attention bottleneck." He also walks through STRIDE and SIRN, the proactive and reactive programs AR runs with the Solana Foundation. By his count, about 60% of Solana TVL has gone through STRIDE, and SIRN has saved north of $5M so far. Also: wrench attacks and why AR now runs protective services with an ex-Secret Service agent, Lazarus versus the 14-year-old with $200M, and the boring afternoon of policy work that would have prevented this year's biggest hacks. 0:00 Welcome — Jonathan from Asymmetric Research ("we're not an audit company") 1:34 From breaking into banks to Mozilla: what offensive security actually is 5:05 Day two at Jump Crypto: Wormhole gets hacked, and the 2.5-year recovery 8:37 Founding AR at Block Zero Amsterdam: "the first rule of BD is we don't sell anything" 13:18 Audit firm vs. security firm: being the inside guys, and "Be Boring" 16:53 AI ate the bottom of the audit market, and judgment is the new bottleneck 21:24 Can AI replace your auditor? Agreeable models and waves of AI psychosis 25:21 Re-audit every commit? Threat models, Mozilla's RRA, and where to start 32:10 STRIDE and SIRN: the Solana Foundation's proactive and reactive security programs 37:05 Is it always North Korea? Attribution, AI-enabled attackers, the 14-year-old with $200M 40:56 From leaky code to bad OPSEC: why 2026's big hacks were human failures 47:07 Wrench attacks, Tom's mustache, and AR's protective services 51:50 Eden's question: the bank bathroom trick and the "running man" 57:45 The question you should've asked: boring policy wins, hardware keys, branch protection 1:01:02 Pirates Parley Telegram + see you in London