Ship or Die at Accelerate 2025: Internet Capital Markets (Akshay BD - Solana Foundation)

All right, good morning everyone. It's

lovely to be here. Can we hear the size of the crowd through the auditory response here?

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for being an amazing audience. I'd ask that the folks at the back come and take a seat.

Uh this will be worth your while. This

segment has been curated over months of really hard work from the folks on the BD team, from the folks in the ecosystem, and I think you're going to get a glimpse into the future of what this space was meant to do for the last

15 years. And so with that, I'm going to

15 years. And so with that, I'm going to kick it off with a talk about what how we think about internet capital markets and what they are in the first place.

You know, if you think about capital markets, today's capital markets don't work for everyone, right? like you've

we've sort of everybody has a visceral sense of it and people may reason uh into it from different places but you can see like you know uh folks like Larry Frank talking to investment

managers saying it it's the most nervous their clients have been since uh you know you have these low bond yields you have asset price bubbles and people don't really know how the traditional

asset allocation model works anymore because the 60/40 portfolio hasn't paid off for a long time and we all get a visceral sense of this Right. And so it

shows up in surveys as well like uh you know 27% of uh folks believe that the American dream isn't uh uh or uh is

still accessible to them compared to say over 50% 10 years ago. And we've seen this uh manifest in sort of like our politics, culture and and so the question becomes if today's capital

markets are not working for people, can we build a new capital markets on the internet that works for everyone? Right?

And so here's one way to think about this. This is um in 1971 you would have

this. This is um in 1971 you would have to work 25 year hours of you know median wages to buy one unit of the S&P 500, right? Today you have to work 195 hours

right? Today you have to work 195 hours to buy the same unit. And why do we invest? We invest so we can buy freedom,

invest? We invest so we can buy freedom, right, of your future like you can buy your future back to do whatever you want to do with your life. And one way of thinking about this is your freedom is

hyperinflating. Here's another chart,

hyperinflating. Here's another chart, right? You know, median or average

right? You know, median or average hourly wages have not kept up with the growth of capital. So if you were part of the c part of the people that owned capital and or owned assets then you

have a disproportionate return on your uh asset allocation versus if you are just uh earning a salary okay so what is the solution right and you sort of end up in a world

where you know hourly wages as a percentage of GDP has trended down and then net worth of the top 1% as a percentage of GDP has gone up right

and so This is an opportunity for us because this is not by design. It's by

accident. It's because you have a massive public debt bubble because of which you need to keep bond yields low so you can borrow cheap and refinance debt and that creates an accidental like

asset price bubble. And so the question is can we solve this because on a long enough time scale where especially as AI is accelerating you're going to end up in one of two worlds. you know uh Vinod

Kla says 80 AI will be able to handle 80% of 80% of jobs and so increasingly those wages will matter less and so the question is which way do we go is it

universal basic ownership or universal basic income where we're essentially creating a welfare economy to take care of those who aren't able to keep jobs or own assets or it's what we propose which

is universal basic ownership where everybody with a mobile phone can own assets and today The only stack technological stack where that is possible we think is in crypto and more

specifically Salana given the sort of the products front run the promises in in our ecosystem. And so an example of this is if you lived in Alaska you get

an airdrop of 70 like of $1,700 last year. You got an airdrop last year from

year. You got an airdrop last year from the profits generated from the uh Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation from all of the natural gas and uh and and businesses there, right? That's an

example of sharing the profits of the enterprise with the people who are part of building it out. And so that's what internet capital market means. It means

we can solve this problem because we have an urgent need to put assets in the hands of people or we end up in a world where the labor class and the capital class have massive tensions between them

which is all the symptoms you see in today's politics and culture. And so how do we put assets in every in the hands of anyone who has a mobile phone? You

need to be able to reduce barriers for investors to own assets. You need to be able to reduce barriers for issuers of those assets. So let's walk through them

those assets. So let's walk through them really quickly. One of the things is

really quickly. One of the things is that has happened over the last 15 years is a lot of the gains have been in private markets because you have you know investors who are accredited investors already wealthy investors get

access to these opportunities because there's not a lot of alpha in public markets and therefore they've crowded out retail investors and they their companies are going public later and later in their life cycle right with

SpaceX and data bricks and all these companies and you don't have the chance you once had to buy Amazon stock when Amazon went public and get a 100x in public markets anymore. So private

markets are private. Public markets are saturated. You're all investing in some

saturated. You're all investing in some version of an index fund. They're all

overheated compared to valuation. No,

you either believe that they will continue to be because this time it's different or we're all crowding into a smaller and smaller part of the public markets raising valuations beyond uh

what what what we think is reasonable.

And you'll hear from speakers later today about why the passive investing um you know trend could be a bubble and 30 cents of every uh dollar you invest in

the S&P 500 today as if you're buying an index fund goes into mag 7. So you're

super concentrated right? So all the retail investors are exposed to a small set of assets. The number of public companies has gone down by 50% over the last 20 years. So we have lesser and

lesser things to invest into as retail investors. Not all public markets

investors. Not all public markets though, right? What you see here is the

though, right? What you see here is the number of token launches on Salana and the capital formation. And this is funny, but remember that this same infrastructure can be switched out to

launch assets that are productive that are by issuers of credit, debt, uh, private credit debt, equity, um, and a whole long tale of assets that don't

exist today in capital markets, right?

And the reason you need to do this is because we are hurtling towards a world where if you don't solve the labor capital gap that exists, you have violence on the streets. This is kind of

why revolutions are are are sort of fostered. And this and we should take

fostered. And this and we should take wisdom from from history, right? And

this is part of what we're working on.

On one end, it feels inane and it's all these meme coins. On another end, it's bootstrapping all this infrastructure where you can get companies to start going public directly on Salana. right

here. Even like Uber wanted to pay its drivers in equity when they went public, they could not because of SEC regulation. Similarly, we have crypto

regulation. Similarly, we have crypto has solved this problem. The way we have is if you wanted US dollars outside the US, you either had to get cash or you fill one of these long forms and get

access to an offshore bank account. But

today, you download a browser extension or a mobile app with a picture of a ghost on it and you get access to US dollars unfettered. Right? We've

dollars unfettered. Right? We've

massively collapsed the ability for or the the barriers to own assets. But bare assets aren't new. This

assets. But bare assets aren't new. This

is uh bringing back a practice we always had where you could whoever held those bearer certificates. Historians of

bearer certificates. Historians of finance here and enthusiasts will know that that used to exist. Whoever held

them owned the shares to the company.

And so we're bringing back bare assets but digitally. And so the next part of

digitally. And so the next part of uh the the transformation on the financial side will be one where we can bring all these private assets that were mark that are in private markets and

bring them on to uh Salana. All right. So that's on the

Salana. All right. So that's on the investor side where anybody with a mobile phone can own assets. This is on the issuer side. Today it takes about $10 to $30 million to go public which means a lot of the smaller companies who

are super profitable don't have any incentive to go public because it's too expensive for them and they have this high compliance burden right but we we think in the in 5 years from now you should be able to walk into a coffee

shop and you're like I love this coffee shop I want to support them there's a QR code on the wall you scan the QR code and you buy a few tokens that entitled you to some ownership in the coffee shop

and you get streamed dividends every And that is an inspired vision for what capital markets should be doing for small businesses and businesses in in uh

on Main Street. Right? And so it is not Main Street versus Wall Street. It's

rather getting Main Street access to the new internet wall street. All right, let's keep rolling.

street. All right, let's keep rolling.

And today you have, of course, you have alternatives. You have regional

alternatives. You have regional exchanges. Those regional exchanges

exchanges. Those regional exchanges don't have a lot of liquidity and they're burgeoning. But guess what? They

they're burgeoning. But guess what? They

can get distribution by you can go public on a regional exchange which lowers the cost of compliance and then tokenize on Salana, get access to a global bunch of investors. And of course, you also have

investors. And of course, you also have like these exceptions that have always been there in law. We stand on the shoulders of giants where you could technically go mini IPO. The Jobs Act

helped us get this regulation, but the technology stack was not available until today. Uh, we can cue the video real

today. Uh, we can cue the video real quick so you get a sense for what this world looks like.

When you have a model that heavily incentivizes private equity groups to basically be building these cookie cutter development complexes, dropping in a Whole Foods, dropping in a papyrus

store, you're creating an economic development on paper that doesn't actually feel like economic development when you're walking down the streets of these communities themselves. My name is Nick Matthews and I'm the CEO and co-founder of MainBest. Small businesses

are the foundation of the American economy and access to capital is the number one challenge that small businesses across America face.

Mainst gives communities, not corporations, the ability to build the main streets they want to see. Mainst

isn't crowdfunding. Mainst is investing.

People are coming on not just to support local businesses, but also as a means of diversifying their portfolio into a new asset class. So, what this gives you is

asset class. So, what this gives you is entrepreneurs have tried this in the past. There was a company called Main

past. There was a company called Main West that unfortunately got shut down during COVID where they tried to allow people to invest in their community businesses that were cash flow positive.

And guess what? They didn't have the technology stack that was global that we do now today. And so we're very excited as you'll hear from the rest of the session to take advantage of some of those prior efforts that have happened.

Of course, you have direct listings and you'll see uh later in the day folks talk about why that's going to save you money. Um I want to get to the end state

money. Um I want to get to the end state here and invite on the amazing speakers that are going to follow. The end state I thought was captured by this tweet that's kind of funny but also true which

is sort of the way crypto tends to be.

It starts with the inane and very quickly becomes profound. And it is this idea that like oh tech finance is kind of vanilla. Jim Simmons gave us quant

of vanilla. Jim Simmons gave us quant driven trading. Milkin gave us junk

driven trading. Milkin gave us junk bonds but what did Silicon Valley give us? YC safe notes with a discount.

us? YC safe notes with a discount.

Boring right? Wake me up when I can buy defense tech junk bonds collateralized by andural secondaries. I want to see stripe employee option pool securitized and sold with triple leveraged exotic

swaps. Right? That's a joke. But what

swaps. Right? That's a joke. But what

gives you is the ability for you to financialize all of the productive assets in an economy. So you can have anybody who participates in that economy be an owner of that economy. And that's

part of what you're going to hear for the next three hours and I hope you enjoy this. We're incredibly excited to

enjoy this. We're incredibly excited to uh think of what this dream about what this end state looks like. It probably

is one where capital markets are a feature. They're seen as a good thing.

feature. They're seen as a good thing.

Just like you're now as Instagram user, it took it made everyone a photographer.

So, Salana will make everyone an investor or a trader over time as these productive assets in our economy trapped in private markets come onto the blockchains. So, we hope you enjoy the

blockchains. So, we hope you enjoy the programming for the next three hours.

Thank you very much for having me.