Raj Gokal, co-founder of blockchain protocol Solana and chief operations officer of Solana Labs, started his career in venture capital with a focus on
Raj Gokal, co-founder of blockchain protocol Solana and chief operations officer of Solana Labs, started his career in venture capital with a focus on high-growth tech business.
For seven years, Gokal focused on health tech, first with wearable sensors using Bluetooth Low Energy as a wireless protocol, then leading product management at Omada Health. He aimed to address the fractured, challenging United States healthcare system but “encountered challenges with health plans and regulators, leading me to recognize the industry’s persistent issues,” he told Cointelegraph.
After meeting Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and seeing his “vision to resolve scalability in crypto,” Gokal immersed himself in the crypto industry. “The journey has been rewarding over these past five years.”
Recently, Gokal sat down for an interview with Cointelegraph to discuss Web3, scalability, tokenization and more.
Cointelegraph: There has been a noted absence of substantial real-world use cases in the Web3 domain. This contributes to the perception that there’s no product-market fit for the industry. What are a few real-world use cases Web3 is currently prioritizing?
Raj Gokal: A real-world use case that comes to mind is decentralized physical infrastructure networks, or DEPIN. Developers often lead the way, as seen with projects like Helium, which established a decentralized 5G network with 1.5 million hotspots before transitioning to Solana. Similarly, Hivemapper launched its decentralized maps, utilizing a distributed global workforce equipped with dashcams. This is now an alternative to a centralized organization like Google deploying tens of thousands of cars that it owns to map the roads.
The Hivemapper network remapped 8% of the world’s roadways in just a few months, which is very much a real-world application of Web3 on Solana. These ventures showcase the viability and significance of leveraging low-cost, scalable blockchain technology to create innovative solutions. Developers across the world come together without any central authority and create successful business models with tangible value.
CT: Your ambition was to resolve scalability challenges within Web3. What architectural considerations are essential when building real-world solutions on layer-1 platforms?
RG: The benefits of parallelized transaction processing and validation are foundational, offering various advantages for developers and users. Solana pioneered these features, optimizing for speed with 400-millisecond block times and near-instant confirmations. We hear testimonials from users that a transaction was completed on Solana even before they could switch tabs. This fast, seamless experience builds trust and user satisfaction. Additionally, low transaction costs are crucial.
Compatibility and composability are essential, too, allowing various applications to work together. Decentralization is a linchpin, ensuring longevity and reliability. For instance, on Solana, we have close to 3,000 validators and the highest Nakamoto coefficient of 33 across all blockchains. While achieving these feats within a decentralized, high-performance network is challenging, it has been achieved through rigorous effort and innovation.
There are several such architectural decisions that make real-world solutions possible on blockchains. It is often not just one feature — it is the convergence of several architectural considerations that make it viable and scalable.
I also think blockchain networks must be battle-tested across multiple cycles. As ecosystems thrive through difficult market conditions, it provides developers, users and investors confidence that the network is here to stay.
CT: Let’s move on to Web3’s approach to mobile and payments. Solana has taken steps to introduce Solana Pay. You also recently launched the Saga phone. What are the motivations behind this, and how does it impact the broader mobile and payments landscape?
RG: The Solana Saga phone has shown that there is a huge opportunity for handset and operating system makers to create a sandbox where developers can build what they want with token incentives and without any restrictions on nonfungible tokens. Since the launch of the Saga, Apple and Google have eased their stance on digital assets in their application stores.
We have seen similar initiatives in the past, when Tesla created a new market for electric vehicles. It started with the Roadster, which initially only sold a few thousand cars. But over time, it has made it a more accessible mass-market product. We should see a similar trajectory for Web3-friendly mobile phones over the coming years, and Saga is just the beginning.
Solana Pay, on the other hand, operates at the crossroads of fostering a more accessible and open payments ecosystem. If you look at the Bitcoin white paper, the initial purpose of Bitcoin and the whole idea of digital money was to facilitate permissionless peer-to-peer online payments. That was the…
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