Episode
Solayer – Hardware Accelerated Finance at the Speed of Metal
- Podcast
- The Crypto Conversation
- Published
- Mar 11, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1253
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/podcasts
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Summary
Joshua Sum is the Chief Product Officer at Solayer, a hardware accelerated network built to move money at the speed of metal. Joshua joins Andy Pickering to explain how dedicated chip-level infrastructure is pushing blockchain throughput into territory no software-only chain can reach — and why that matters as payments, AI agents, and real-world asset tokenization all converge on the same rails. Why you should listen Joshua's path to crypto ran through direct-to-consumer e-commerce, a founding quant role at Treehouse, and building CollegeDow into the largest university blockchain network in the world, spanning around 120 campuses globally. He joined Solayer as a founding engineer and has grown with the company over two years into his current role leading product across multiple lines. He walks through how Solayer evolved from pioneering restaking on Solana — using it as a tool to improve transaction reliability and throughput — into building a full hardware accelerated Layer 1 that uses the Solana Virtual Machine but separates consensus across dedicated machines connected by low-latency, high-bandwidth equipment. The result is battle-tested performance of 200,000 to 300,000 transactions per second using messy, real-world transaction types, not the synthetic benchmarks that get loosely thrown around in the space. The conversation covers Solayer's $35 million ecosystem fund and why the team deliberately avoided a grants model in favour of a venture approach, investing in founders building sustainable, revenue-generating businesses rather than handing out free money for narrative-driven experiments. Joshua walks through three early-stage portfolio projects: Docs Exchange, a full-suite DeFi trading platform; BuffTrade, an AI agent launchpad where bots trade on your behalf…