Balaji Srinivasan Says Cloud Real Estate is Next for Solana

Former Coinbase CTO, Balaji Srinivasan, took to the stage to kick off Solana Breakpoint.

With Token2049 closing its doors the day before, Solana Breakpoint welcomed the global Solana community to its two-day event on Friday in Singapore, after previous editions in Amsterdam in 2023, and Lisbon in 2022.

Speaking in a fireside chat with Raj Gokal, co-founder of Solana and COO of Solana Labs, Srinivasan discussed his views on the Solana Network State.

Describing Solana as an "important infrastructure," Srinivasan said the community needs to focus on "quantifying decentralisation."

He suggested that between tier 1 and tier 2 there are other states, and that just as cloud curriences reflect fiat currencies, cloud countries could reflect real-world real estate, population, and annual income.

"If you created an NFT that proved how much real estate there was and you set up a proof-of-space NFT, it could give you the footprint of a digitalized decentralised real estate," he cited as an example.

While Srinivasan praised Solana for "solving problems on the blockchain" he said it has yet to "wade into non-blockchain technology."

"The technology, capital, and population are there," he said. "But we can have polarising views of what a society should be."

He further explained that crypto serves as parallel finance to fiat. "Crypto is parallel finance, acknowledging that fiat fundamentally flawed and we're going to fix it by inverting it."

"Decentralisation is good and inflation is bad - both are inverted in crypto," he said.

The Network State, which is defined as a "highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states," is essentially about real estate, Srinivasan argued.

The Network School, which Srinivasan set up near Singapore last month to "articulate a vision of peace, trade, internationalism, and technology," is also designed to build up other tech communities, he said.

"We only broadcast something if it's scaling up to 10s of thousands," Srinivasan said. "as we scale up we will put everything we can on open state and open source."

Srinivasan then likened Solana's ideology vector to the sorting hat from Harry Potter. "We ask polarising questions like 'what's your position on nuclear power?' and from that set up mini cities," he explained.

Recalling lockdowns during the COVID pandemic, Srinivasan said the world "flipped to an internet-first world and the physical world came second." He praised Solana for being well positioned for it.

Further building on digital society, Srinivasan said that "once you have accounting on-chain, you can have an on-chain SEC. If you have an SEC you can have on chain investment etc."

In particular, Srinivasan said Solana can help smaller countries. "Big chains and small countries can do amazing deals together," he said. "We can give them the followers and capital they don't have but they have institutional soverignty license."