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.

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Sunsetting the mempool: Lucas Bruder on Jito, BAM, and betting long-term on Solana

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Sunsetting the mempool: Lucas Bruder on Jito, BAM, and betting long-term on Solana
1:09:33
August 13, 2026

Sunsetting the mempool: Lucas Bruder on Jito, BAM, and betting long-term on Solana

Lucas Bruder, co-founder and CEO of Jito Labs, joins Pirates Parley to break down why they shut off the public mempool, how BAM works, and what confidential block building on Solana looks like inside a secure enclave.Lucas got here via Tesla body controls on the Model X, an Xbox controller for surgical robots, a 50,000 pound bulldozer at Built Robotics, and lidar firmware at Ouster, before falling down the MEV rabbit hole and starting Jito in 2021.They cover:- Lucas's path from Tesla and Built Robotics to lidar and then Jito- how the Jito block engine works, and why the best analogy is Cloudflare- the peak day the Trump token launched, when Jito generated the network $20m and made up more than 50% of Solana REV- why they sunset the public mempool, and why Steve thinks it's the biggest pivot any blockchain company has made- BAM: transparent, verifiable, confidential block building inside a secure enclave- the maker priority plugin, and BAM running on just under 33% of stake- Jump running Bison as the number one prop amm on Solana- what has to happen for tokenised securities to work: Clarity, an SEC exemption, and users- why Jito Labs built JTX and how they think about execution- restaking, the honest reflection, and where Jito is focusing now- 100m CU blocks activated last week and the road to 200ms slots and Alpenglow- advice for new builders coming into Solana--------------------------------------------------------------00:00 - Welcome and cold open01:14 - Lucas's path: Tesla, hardware consultancy, cadavers05:13 - Built Robotics and the bulldozer06:46 - Ouster, MEV, and falling down the rabbit hole11:12 - What Jito does today: the market layer16:40 - The Jito block engine explained21:11 - The mempool: what it was, where it went wrong24:49 - Sunsetting the mempool: the biggest pivot in blockchain28:05 - BAM: block assembly marketplace31:10 - Maker priority, 33% stake, and consistent execution36:41 - Tokenised securities, Clarity, and what has to happen46:34 - Why Jito built JTX48:52 - Team size, focus, and letting restaking run54:11 - 100m CU blocks, Alpenglow, and shipping at Anza speed1:04:47 - Advice for new builders

Streamflow: solution first, problem later, and the alpha on equity-backed tokens
57:55
August 6, 2026

Streamflow: solution first, problem later, and the alpha on equity-backed tokens

Malisha Stanojevic, founder and CEO of Streamflow, joins Pirates Parley to walk through five years of building the token distribution platform on Solana, and to drop the news on what they are turning it into next.Malisha joined Solana in May 2021 via a hackathon, built a Sablier-inspired token streaming protocol before he knew what problem it solved, and raised his first check at the Breakpoint 2021 closing party by typing a note on his phone because it was too loud to talk. Streamflow has since had over 40,000 tokens go through its programs and peaked at two billion dollars worth of tokens in escrow.They cover:Building the solution before finding the problem, and why he does not recommend itThe first check raised on a phone screen at Breakpoint 2021A 15-person VC call that turned into an interrogationSolana Ventures backing Streamflow and two of its competitors at the same timeWhy ETH, Aptos and Sui conferences felt like a different planetThe $1-a-day customer stream that got topped up with $15,000What it feels like to sit on two billion in customer escrowStride, Asymmetric Research, and how AI is now inside their CI/CD and code reviewWhy mental health is a founder virtue, not a weaknessThe alpha: equity-backed tokens, a Cayman Islands legal framework, and Streamflow becoming an onchain capital formation platformThe STREAM token transition and the Solana Summit Belgrade rollout00:00 - welcome and intro00:30 - how Malisha found Solana via a hackathon in 202103:40 - solution first, problem later: the Streamflow origin story08:50 - raising the first check on a phone screen at Breakpoint 202113:55 - the 15-person VC call about stolen open-source code18:20 - bias for action and why perfect is not that important21:20 - ETH vs Solana culture, and Solana Ventures backing three competitors26:20 - what Streamflow actually does: vesting, locks, airdrops, staking29:20 - the $1-a-day topup that extended a stream by 11 years33:20 - two billion in escrow and the top two fears in life37:40 - Stride, Asymmetric Research, and AI in the security stack42:40 - mental health as a founder virtue48:00 - the numbers: 20 people, $2.5M in 2025, still profitable50:20 - the alpha: equity-backed tokens and onchain capital formation56:00 - Cayman Islands framework and the STREAM transition58:00 - Solana Summit Belgrade, and next week on Pirates Parley

Sharded order books, and a $150K raise that filled in 5 seconds | Pirates Parley E26
55:03
July 30, 2026

Sharded order books, and a $150K raise that filled in 5 seconds | Pirates Parley E26

Avhi and Arjun from Ordr join Pirates Parley the day after their futarchy raise on Futardio closed at 50x oversubscribed. We get into how the four of them met in a Solana Twitter space, why they think open market making beats prop AMMs, and what happens when you give every market maker their own book. They cover: Why Ordr gives each market maker a private book instead of one shared state Write-lock contention on Solana and how sharded books route around it ACE via Jito's BAM plugin, live in production today Repricing near-free via hot paths hand-written in sBPF assembly Colosseum honorable mention in the DeFi track and what it taught them The Futardio raise: $150K target, filled in under 5 seconds, 50x oversubscribed at the time of recording Their thesis on OpenMM: proprietary AMMs are closed black boxes, Ordr opens the same performance tier to anyone Mobile-native market making on Seeker, no infra required Codebase in Pinocchio, "developers who have lost their training wheels" Roadmap: audit first, public mainnet in four to five months Avhi finishing his four-year degree the day before the raise closed 0:00 Welcome and the day after Ordr's raise 1:45 Meet Avhi and Arjun, four founders from India 4:50 Meeting in a Solana Twitter space and shipping to Colosseum 10:35 Why Solana needs another order book: write-lock contention 12:00 How order books work and where aggregators fit 15:45 Sharded books: every maker gets their own account 21:00 Archer, price updates, and CU-level efficiency 22:00 Toxic order flow and ACE via Jito BAM 25:35 Fully onchain matching engine 26:30 Solana's read layer, Alpenglow, and finality 29:55 Triton infra and where Ordr sits on the read layer 31:30 The $150K raise, filled in five seconds 34:05 Avhi graduating the day before, and the team's ages 35:25 Why futarchy: betting on the belief 37:35 Token distribution and the ICO close on 31 July 40:10 Audit-first roadmap, public mainnet in four to five months 42:30 Pinocchio, sBPF assembly, and lost training wheels 43:45 Building in public and the audit proposal 45:10 OpenMM thesis and mobile-native market making on Seeker 50:55 Relentless teams and hard problems 51:55 Website walkthrough and Yellowstone Shield

The $100k exploit, the attacker who tuned in, and six hours to recovery
1:04:12
July 23, 2026

The $100k exploit, the attacker who tuned in, and six hours to recovery

Anas Khader, co-founder of Flash Trade, joins Pirates Parley hours after one of the more instructive exploits Solana DeFi has seen -- a forged buffer account in the Magic Blocks ephemeral rollup SDK that exposed $100k in user deposits. Zoheb Shahzan, co-founder and the engineer who handled the response, joins mid-episode to walk through the root cause, the five-minute noop deployment, and how fund isolation kept the pool TVL untouched. Anas has been in crypto for 11 years, started at BitMEX, and moved to Solana via SBF's Serum threads. Flash Trade was the first DeFi exchange to integrate with Magic Blocks' ephemeral rollup, which drops execution latency to ~50ms by removing consensus overhead. The exploit was a direct consequence of that novel architecture -- and so was the recovery. They cover: What Flash Trade is and why 500x leverage is mostly a stress-test Why Solana was the only chain capable of serving a full order book What scheduler wars and oracle skipping look like from the exchange side (5--10 second pricing delays at peak) How the ephemeral rollup works: finality and trust from Solana, unlimited speed on a dedicated SVM The full exploit RCA: a forged buffer account passed as the canonical PDA on undelegation How fund isolation (no co-mingling, isolated collateral token accounts) limited exposure to user deposits only The noop instruction -- why every upgradeable DeFi programme should have one -- and how it was deployed in five minutes via Triton's RPC and transaction sending service How the attacker attended Flash Trade's own Monday livestream and extracted the exact withdrawal cap Why the team had an alert and a response within a minute of the withdrawal hitting AI as a defensive tool -- the frontier models that built the monitoring bots that caught it Tracking the funds: Monero → ChangeNow → Mayan Finance bridge → Ethereum, address flagged across all CEXes Percolator (Armani Ferrante) and CERN (Asymmetric Research) as recommended reading on risk engine design The $1.3M NFT raise, how all revenue was returned to holders, and the FAF token's 50% rev share flywheel What's next: 24/7 markets and a UX where users don't know they're onchain 00:00 - Anas Khader and Flash Trade00:53 - What is Flash Trade? The 500x leverage question03:04 - From BitMEX to Solana: how Serum and SBF threads changed everything08:29 - Why perpetuals exist (futures were invented for farmers)10:35 - Solana was the only blockchain that could serve a full order book12:35 - The move to Magic Blocks: what the ephemeral rollup actually does16:26 - Scheduler wars and oracle delays: 5--10 seconds of pricing lag at peak21:03 - Triton dedicated channel and building rapport in a trustless world22:07 - The elephant in the room: what happened yesterday?22:37 - Xoheb joins to explain the technical root cause25:43 - The buffer account PDA vulnerability: how the exploit worked32:07 - $100k withdrawn, PagerDuty fires, team on desks in under a minute33:21 - Noop deployed in five minutes via Triton RPC; Triton transaction sending lands it in seconds35:20 - Malicious state reconciled; limited trading reopens36:01 - Trading fully live again within six to seven hours36:50 - The attacker attended Flash Trade's Monday livestream and knew the exact cap38:13 - Comms were spontaneous; AI-built bots caught it in under a minute39:21 - AI levels the field: it's not just for hackers43:05 - Seal Team 911 and tracking the funds: Monero → ChangeNow → Mayan → Ethereum43:56 - Percolator and CERN: the risk engine reading list49:23 - Team size: about 10 people50:32 - Bootstrapped vs funded: why being on your toes drives output53:24 - The $1.3M NFT raise, revenue returned to holders, and the FAF token58:34 - What's next: 24/7 markets and invisible onchain UX1:02:19 - Outro and next week's guest

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

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