15 years in crypto: from Bitcoin remittances to tokenising RWA on Solana
George has been in crypto for 15 years. From inventing crypto remittances in Hong Kong, to the Bitcoin block size debate, to building Step Finance when Solana had barely three DeFi projects, to surviving FTX and acquiring a company to tokenise real-world assets.
Along the way he also built Solana Floor as a media arm, grew Solana All-Stars to 10K attendees a month, and launched Crossroads as a major Solana conference.
15 years in crypto: from Bitcoin remittances to tokenising RWA on Solana
Anchor, Pinocchio, and the state of Solana open source
Making Solana's entire 400TB transaction history searchable
More from Pirates Parley
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 streaming explained: how Deshred delivers transactions before execution
Rafael from Triton One works on streaming and Geyser optimisations. He started on Solana in 2021, built a light client called Velos, and got pulled into Triton after a Twitter exchange with Wilfred. He breaks down how Solana data gets delivered to clients, why the network streams shreds instead of account state, and where the SVM fits in replay.
How Colosseum turned Solana hackathons into a $250K venture pipeline
Matty Taylor and Clay Robbins, co-founders of Colosseum, join Pirates Parley to break down how they spun out Solana's hackathon program into an independent venture platform -- right when everyone thought Solana was dead.They cover:- Why 85% of VC-backed Solana startups trace back to hackathons- How the accelerator works (8 weeks, $250K, SF office, demo day)- Their new AI-powered Copilot tool for idea refinement- Why Frontier dropped all predefined categories- The rise of non-technical "vibe-coded" founders- Gaming on-chain: why it hasn't worked yet and what might change- Post-quantum crypto submissions and timing risk- Finding co-founders through the Colosseum platform