Solana will host its first major conference, Breakpoint, in Lisbon this November 7-10.
Breakpoint will be attended by a long list of big names in crypto who will be leading panels in three different conference locations on the future of Solana, DeFi, and NFTs.
Speakers at the event will include Balaji S. Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at a16z, Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Circle, Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX and Alameda Research, Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO and Founder of Solana Labs, Raj Gokal, COO and Co-Founder of Solana Labs, and Meltem Demirors, Chief Strategy Officer of Coinshares, among many others.
The Solana network, which currently boasts the highest throughput for any public blockchain (65,000 TPS), has also invited key members of its ecosystem to learn from each other and network during the conference’s packed agenda.
Over the course of three days, some of Solana’s best developers will be meeting at Breakpoint’s Developer track venue, SUD Lisboa, to hold workshops beside Lisbon’s beautiful Tagus river.
Breakpoint Kicks Off with Dev Workshop from Seasoned Pro
One of Breakpoint’s first workshop slots, titled Maintaining Global State in Solana, will address an important issue for successfully running smart contracts on Solana. The workshop will be led by Hubble Protocol’s project lead, Marius Ciubotariu, a veteran programmer who spent eight years developing FinTech solutions in Bloomberg LP’s London office.
About his experience at Bloomberg, Ciubotariu shared, “I was writing code to price exotic derivative products using Monte Carlo simulations in C++, built the derivatives lifecycle engine using OCaml (a functional language sharing a lot of similarities with Rust), and acted as a Tech Rep advocating for internal usage of Rust and OCaml and building infrastructure libraries in Rust and OCaml for the Bloomberg devs to use.”
Ciubotariu found his way to the Solana community by participating in Solana’s first hackathon, Season. During the hackathon, he single-handedly coded the Rust smart contracts for ZeroInterest, a project that gained acclaim from the press and received an honorable mention from the hackathon’s judges.
In It For The Tech: Why Ciubotariu Launched Hubble on Solana
After parting ways with ZeroInterest, Ciubotariu decided he wasn’t finished with DeFi. After giving it much consideration, he tendered his resignation with Bloomberg to pursue DeFi full-time and founded Hubble Protocol on Solana.
Ciubotariu explained that he found working with Rust on Solana made more sense than building a DeFi protocol on any other network for several reasons. “Rust and Solana have a similar philosophy when it comes to running things in parallel, both of them having learned the lesson from years of computer science research,” he said.
“For example, Rust does not allow the programmer to run a computation in parallel—eight cores, for example—that would modify the same piece of memory without a locking system. In the same fashion, Solana does not allow transactions to be run in parallel if they touch the same account IDs. That’s in stark contrast with Ethereum, which does not parallelize any transaction at all.”
Ciubotariu went on to say that, “Solana’s Sealevel runtime knows what accounts will be affected by what transaction, allowing for non-overlapping transactions to execute in parallel. Since most users or contracts are pretty independent of each other, you have a chain that runs thousands of transactions per second without any conflict or threat to safety or performance. This is one of the core eight innovations Solana has pioneered that make its network an outstanding home for DeFi.”
About Hubble Protocol: Building the Future of DeFi on Solana
Hubble Protocol aims to become a leading provider for the next generation of DeFi services that will leverage Solana’s high latency and low costs for the benefit of its users. Ciubotariu hopes to combine Solana’s powerful speed with his years of experience coding Rust and other languages for Bloomberg to create truly useful and sustainable DeFi products the whole world can use one day.
Hubble will begin its mission to bolster DeFi on Solana by developing a crypto borrowing platform that allows users to yield interest on collateral deposits of multiple assets like SOL, BTC, and ETH. Hubble will be a zero-interest platform for borrowing, and users will be able to mint USDH, Hubble’s stablecoin pegged 1:1 with USD, for a low one-time fee of 0.5%.
As a fee-sharing protocol, Hubble distributes nearly 100% of the fees collected by its services to users who stake HBB, Hubble’s native token, on the platform. A small percentage of these fees are returned to the protocol for maintenance and development, but the lion’s share is returned to Hubble’s DeFi community.
In Phase 2 of the protocol’s roadmap, Hubble will begin providing Solana’s DeFi community access to structured products, which its project lead, Ciubotariu, spent years developing during his time with Bloomberg. After that, in Phase 3, Hubble will focus on developing undercollateralized lending services, which could become a revolutionary service that attracts more mainstream attention to DeFi in the future.
Captained by a project lead with years of experience coding financial products for Bloomberg, it will be interesting to see what innovative services Hubble will introduce to Solana’s blooming DeFi ecosystem as it powers through the future phases of its roadmap.