Serum, Solana and the Importance of Scale — OKExTalks Recap

25 ago 2020 • 3 min read

In the interview, Sam shared the motivations and goals behind the building of Serum, why the team chose the Solana Blockchain, innovative features on Serum, as well as future collaborations with OKEx.

Here is a brief excerpt from the fireside chat.

Lennix Lai: You mentioned that you’re picking the Solana blockchain. Do you think that just potentially solves liquidation problems or can it do something more — like password validation?

Sam Bankman-Fried: It’s an excellent question. The basic answer is: If you make particular decisions, you can do, basically, what you want — but you have to start from the beginning. You have to ask, “Alright, how many transactions per second does this thing need?” It’s not like the engines need a million transactions per second. They need to reliably go off within a few seconds and be able to, kind of, get size off there. You’re talking about getting a minimum of five to 10 transactions per second, reliably. The answer is that, if you use the fastest blockchain in the world, you can do it. So, that’s sort of what we did.

We’re on a call with the Solona team, which is the chain we’re building on — sort of like, the home base — and, you know, they’re claiming these high transaction numbers, and it’s like, “Oh boy, you’re, like, the fifth blockchain that’s claimed a billion transactions per second.” We had our devs spending hours to check if this is real. The weird thing is, it was real. They actually did and we started taking it seriously… like, let’s think about this at the scale you have. Can you make this work? And the answer is, yes! Solana has something like a 100,000 transactions per second — you know, 50K-100K… something like that for the blockchain. In that scale, you actually do have enough to have a matching engine, to have an order book, and innovate.

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