Rockets, Quantum Threats, Zeros and Ones: Dean Little on Forging Solana's Truth

Introduction

Blockchains are built on lies. That is, polite lies, manifesting in layers of abstraction. There is a world the developer sees, one filled with SDKs, APIs, and frameworks that promise speed and safety. The reality is much more nuanced, littered with registers, syscalls, and bytecode—a reality in which only the maniacal dare to step foot in. In actuality, every abstraction is overhead, and every compiler hides the truth.

Dean Little has spent his career navigating these lies, seeking truth by soldering circuits and flashing EEPROMS. With Bitcoin, he built mining pools, GPU kernels, and SPV tooling, staying as close to the machine as possible, and learning the potential of distributed systems that they could never quite deliver at the time. Then, he found Solana, where he is known for his heresy: writing assembly by hand, disrespecting compilers, and abusing syscalls—not because it’s fun, but because speed is truth.

As Chief Scientist at Zeus Network, he implemented the entire Bitcoin protocol from scratch on top of Solana, enabling the seamless flow of BTC liquidity. And, in a troll-proof flex against quantum FUD, he engineered a Winternitz One-Time Signature vault, with the ability to migrate tens of thousands of assets per second, while others merely dream of six. 

Yet, Dean is also a teacher. From Turbin3 to Blueshift and his recent work as DevRel for the Mandarin and Cantonese Markets team at Solana Foundation, he pulls developers into a world most will never see. He’s taught hundreds of developers to ship on-chain, often in their own languages, starting from scratch. His tension is constant: pull people up with abstractions, then push them down toward the machine. 

I wanted to understand what it means to live in this tension—between education and experimentation, abstraction and assembly, writing code for humans and writing instructions for machines. This interview is about that dialogue and what it means to talk directly to the machine when everyone else is talking past it.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for brevity. 

Interview

Origins and Worldview

Ichigo: Long before Solana, you were repairing hardware, flashing EEPROMs, and writing embedded control systems for rockets. How did working so close to the metal—literally with soldering irons and firmware—shape your worldview as a builder?

Dean Little: I learned to solder when I was about ten years old. I grew up doing microprocessor and microcontroller stuff, and then moved into web and mobile development before eventually joining a rocket startup in Norway.

Working on mission-critical embedded systems teaches you a few really important things. First is attention to detail—because if something fails, it can go very wrong very fast. Second is simplicity: simple, fast, and easy-to-understand systems are usually better than something overly complicated. And third, you learn to think adversarially. 

For me, working on ballast controls for oceanic rocketry means constantly asking: what happens if this controller fails? How do we detect failure? What backups do we have? What if our attitude control is wrong and we think we’re pointing up when we’re actually pointing down? It forces you to design for failure rather than assuming things will always work.

Another thing you learn is not to trust other people’s work blindly. That applies to software and hardware. Hardware manufacturers change specs, procurement might accidentally buy the wrong part, and suddenly, nothing works. There are so many things that can go wrong, and it only takes one small mistake for the whole system to fail. That mindset has stuck with me ever since. 

From there, your career quickly led you to Bitcoin. You worked on mining pools, GPU kernels, SPV tooling, and later Twetch. What did those years of working on Bitcoin infrastructure teach you about building distributed systems at scale, and about the limitations of blockchains at the time?

I went full-time into Bitcoin development around 2017. I built across multiple blockchains—Bitcoin, EOS, and a few others that were popular at the time. With Bitcoin, I started out just using it, but when the fees spiked really high, it basically became unusable. That was the first real rush of retail into crypto, and what I realized then was that once the fees spike, the blockchain becomes useless.

That experience made me rethink the so-called “scalability trilemma.” Honestly, it’s a bullshit made-up problem. Even back in 2017, we could send 4MB photos across the world in under a second. It seemed ridiculous to believe blockchains couldn’t scale beyond 1MB blocks. The limitation wasn’t physics—it was design. 

Because Bitcoin’s base layer is so constrained, you’re forced to innovate in other ways. I ended up diving deep into Secp256k1, building solutions for hiding execution results in signatures. It was a kind of crude verifiable compute, long before ZK started to really take off.

Those years taught me that running a Bitcoin company is really running an infrastructure company. Bitcoin’s protocol can do a lot, but the node software is limited. The UTXO model is great for parallelization since state is segregated, much like Solana accounts, but it’s terrible for shared state and indexing. On the other hand, Ethereum’s account model is great for shared state but terrible for parallelization. What clicked for me with Solana was its segregated account model—it combines UTXO’s parallelization with the usability of Ethereum’s global state model.

My big takeaway from those years was that systems often fail, and thus, they should be designed to fail gracefully rather than catastrophically. You should never just accept limitations. You should push against them in creative ways people haven’t thought of. That’s the philosophy I’ve carried into my work on Solana.

Now, a lot of people know you in the Solana community as the guy writing assembly and disrespecting compilers. Why stay so close to the machine? Why not focus more on improving higher-level abstractions since that’s where the majority of the developers will be building?

Contrary to popular belief, I’m a contributor to Anchor, Pinocchio, Agave, Alpenglow—basically everything. I’ve worked on cryptography, SIMDs, and low-level programs, all across the stack. 

The biggest thing with Solana development is that everything outside of on-chain programs and infrastructure is totally permissioned. It’s almost impossible for me to get my PRs merged into any official repo. But on-chain programs? I can do whatever you accidentally allow the system to do. Nothing’s holding me back there. It’s permissionless. I can just keep making it better and killing it.

So the question is, if you look at my work and how good it is and what I’ve done for on-chain programs, and you want that to happen to other layers of the stack, start merging my PRs, haha.

For the assembly stuff, quite frankly, the compiler does a terrible job, and the people working on it aren’t doing much better. They’ve never taken the time to actually listen to their end customer, which is developers. That’s why we had to go and roll our own independent toolchain to make our own lives easier.

Unfortunately, most devs are kind of mid. Not in a bad way, but they’re not like Cavey, myself, or the Ellipsis DeFi chads who actually know how to write really performant stuff. We’re this weird little subset of devs who know how to push the limits of the system at the lowest level and make it better for everyone else to use. 

Our feedback could be super valuable, but most of the time it doesn’t get taken seriously. So we just end up innovating on the things no one can stop us from touching—and that’s the VM. That’s why I stay close to the machine in that regard. 

Technical Innovations and Contributions

Talking about working across different parts of the stack—between Zeus, Jupiter, and your own free time—you’ve built and integrated a few advanced cryptographic primitives. Building any sort of on-chain cryptography has notoriously been difficult on Solana. What does the future of cryptography look like on Solana? And, apart from yelling at people to merge PRs, haha, how do we make it easier for others to build out more advanced primitives?

My take is that a few years ago, we had a whole bunch of ZK teams lined up to build on Solana. We basically told them, “Yeah, it’s coming,” and then Firedancer showed up and said, “No, we’re not merging this,” and everything just got pushed back. Some of those teams had raised money and literally couldn’t run their businesses because they didn’t have the on-chain cryptographic primitives required, so they were forced to go elsewhere. That was really rough. Treating devs like that is wrong. The protocol’s customers are devs first—if you don’t take care of them, nothing gets built, and then retail has nothing to use. 

So I just said, fine, I’ll figure it out myself. I went and hacked the Secp256k1 recover syscall, and basically jailbroke the entire curve. Now you can do Schnorr signatures, Pedersen commitments, Bulletproofs, arbitrary elliptic curve multiplication, even tweaked Taproot addresses, all without a single protocol change, and it only costs around 25,000 CUs. That’s one guy, in his spare time. I’ve shipped more cryptographic protocols than Anza, right? Imagine what could happen if it were actually encouraged. Imagine if development were more open. 

The funny part is that most people don’t even realize how big a breakthrough that is. I’ll go to a conference and tell some of the Arcium guys what I built. They’ll be like, “That’s so sick.” But, outside of maybe the ten of us who really get crypto(graphy) at that level on Solana, nobody really notices. 

And with Anza—they’re good people, but they only have one cryptographer, Sam Kim. While he’s pretty good, I think the fact that no one else at Anza knows anything about cryptography is pretty bearish. They’ve pulled me in for the Alpenglow upgrade as a reviewer. I’m reviewing Sam’s code, and for the most part, it’s good and he has sensible ideas. I guess it’s good they’re embracing and leaning into someone else’s skills. But, ultimately, Anza is probably never going to get really good at this. You need multiple competing companies, each with some overlap but with its own specialties. It doesn’t make sense for Anza to try and do everything. Diversification of core development is what we really need.

Do you think it’s more of a cultural issue? For example, Ethereum has entire L2s dedicated to ZK, like ZKsync or StarkWare. Did Solana just write off the ZK stuff as hand-wavy scalability stuff? Like, we’d rather max out the hardware, so that’s our core focus—we’ll scale the chain that way. And, while ZK doesn’t necessarily have to be used on Solana just for scalability, it got written off as such, and now ZK is in a weird spot?

I think the tooling is not good. There are zero tutorials on how to use it. Blueshift will be adding some—we’re just trying to merge in the Little Endian SIMD stuff. Once that’s merged, we will release a simple-to-use, really performant ZK template and a few tutorials because we want to make it easier for people to build stuff and understand how it works.

The problem right now is going from zero to Hello, World! on Solana is absolutely ridiculous. Like if you go and look at Sui, follow the docs for five minutes, and you’ll have a working Hello, World! Solana doesn’t have that. So, that’s the difference between Mysten Labs hiring 10-ish people who understand cryptography and Anza hiring one, right?

My take is that there is this assumption that the Solana Foundation is extremely lacking in technical understanding of like anything. Their concept of technology only goes as far as commercialization, right? Beyond that, they externalize the task of thinking about these things to Anza. The idea is that if the answer says it's good, then it has to be good. The reality most times is that the answer is good performance-wise, but not that good at anything else.

The assumption from Foundation is that things are going really well. But the experience of devs is like, “It’s hard to use.” It’s so fucking painful for the people who are better than the people implementing things at the protocol level, who do the charity work, but can’t get their work taken seriously. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t know, they don’t have the magic Anza badge, let's ignore them and avoid taking on the reputational risk or merging a community PR.” So, I guess that’s why you might notice that I fight hard and advocate a lot for open source devs—so we can get rid of this because I think there are a lot of people in the community who ship really good PRs. Sure, there’s a lot of AI slop and there’s a lot of shit, but there are also a lot of really good people who deserve the time of day.
It’s a blockchain, a distributed network—we shouldn’t need some sort of Anza badge to contribute. They should just have the responsibility to care about good code, regardless of whether they wrote it or not.

Despite all of this, speaking more towards innovation and the cryptography side of things, you’ve also built a quantum-resistant vault on Solana using Winternitz One-Time Signatures. What inspired that project, and how do you see it evolving in the future, maybe whenever quantum threats become more credible?

Honestly, it started from a tweet, haha. A Bitcoin maxi posted at the end of last year, saying, “Solana will be the first victim of quantum.” I read that and thought, “Okay, bro. If we ever need to migrate people from quantum-unsafe to quantum-safe cryptography, our chain can do over 50,000 migrations a second. Yours can do like six. Who’s really going to get wrecked first?”

So I just said, fuck it, I’ll make it happen. 

Ten days later, I dropped the Winternitz vault and quote-tweeted him, like: GG. 

That was the motivator—someone saying it couldn’t be done. I’d already been thinking about post-quantum signature schemes for a while, but that pushed me over the edge.

And it worked. You can store funds in a PDA that’s off-curve, use the Winternitz vault, and no matter what happens—whether the ledger gets rolled back or quantum attacks mess with leader signatures—at least in whatever version we roll back to, your funds will be safe. It’s not an ultimate fix, but it’s a perfect life raft. 

If you’re a fund manager holding millions or billions in LSTs or staked SOL, and suddenly it becomes a regulatory requirement to be quantum-safe, this is no longer a blocker to adoption. You don’t need a protocol upgrade. It just works.

Right now, I’ve built Ledger firmware that signs these signatures, plus a wallet and a web app. Blueshift will probably work on pushing this into something more user-friendly later this year. It’s obviously not urgent yet, but the point is: the option exists today. That’s the breakthrough.

It’s very funny, actually. Toly DM’ed me the next day. Jokingly, he was like, “Bro, I thought when quantum computers came out, I’d have to silently retire.” I was like, “Haha, no bro, don’t retire. We got you.”

Speaking of Bitcoin, you’re Chief Scientist at Zeus Network, where you’ve essentially implemented the entire Bitcoin protocol from scratch on top of Solana. What were the biggest challenges in achieving that? And, do you maybe see a future where other chains are re-implemented on top of Solana?

That’s a super interesting question. In the same way that the Winternitz signatures were extremely computationally expensive, but still just barely doable within a single transaction, Bitcoin is in that same kind of sweet spot. It’s sophisticated enough that we can have things like SPV proofs, but still primitive enough that Solana, a more advanced and performant platform, can take that thing and put it inside this thing.

With second-generation blockchains like Ethereum, it’s trickier. They’re a lot less primitive, much more complex. So the question becomes: can Solana keep getting faster, while also allocating more and more resources to single transactions? 

Right now, it’s still hard, though not impossible. The main thing missing from EVM compatibility today is the BigModExp syscall. If we enabled that, I think we could get pretty close to full parity with Ethereum at the VM level, which is kind of crazy to think about. 

The bigger question, though, is why bother? 

With Bitcoin, the answer is obvious: it’s got trillions in value, it’s the gold standard for money, and it’s primitive enough that Solana can replicate it cleanly. 

Ethereum? Not so much. 

“Ultrasound money” is a meme. For a brief moment, Solana’s security budget actually surpassed Ethereum’s, so does that make Solana ultrasound money? Wrapping ETH onto Solana doesn’t add nearly as much value as wrapping BTC does.

So yeah, I think Bitcoin was the right first target. It was technically feasible and economically meaningful. As Solana keeps improving, we might eventually see other chains re-implemented too. But, honestly, the more performant Solana gets, the less need there is to bother with other chains.

The ability to wrap all of this functionality into a single transaction is really interesting. Recently, you were nerd-sniped by ultra-efficient oracle updates, pushing the boundaries with Doppler and its 21 CU updates. How do these low-CU feats demonstrate Solana’s edge over other chains? We’ve seen analogous developments on other chains with gas golfing, but what are the unique unlocks on Solana?

Oracles are a really interesting case study because everyone kind of treats them as “solved.” 

If you look back roughly a month ago, Cavey took my noop program and hit 100,000 transactions per second on mainnet. That was cool. Now, we’re going to see if we can push that further. More specifically, 100,000 oracle updates per second on mainnet. 

If that’s possible, then it completely blows away this whole narrative of “we need faster block times to compete with Binance.” Like, if you can update an oracle one hundred thousand times a second, who cares about 20-millisecond Binance updates?

That’s really the point of hyper-optimization. Prop AMMs are already kind of using this style of update—not exactly the same thing that I’m publishing, but if you know, then you know. Right now, they’re embedding that logic deep in their trading strategies. 

With Doppler, there’s not much reason to keep that complexity inside their programs. The oracle update can just be stripped out entirely and run on its own.

The footprint is also tiny. The Doppler oracle is only about 480 bytes. I’m even cooking a TypeScript SDK so devs can deploy their own customized version straight from TypeScript without needing to touch Rust. You just define a Borsh schema, publish it, and you can start smashing oracle updates at full speed. Obviously, Rust devs can do the same thing, but I think it’s interesting that even a TypeScript developer can now access that level of performance using hyper-optimized assembly under the hood.

As for use cases: randomness oracles, perps, oracle AMMs, prop AMMs—they all benefit. But also things like payment channels or L2 scaling. If you can open and close channels with practically zero cost, that’s huge. Basically, you don’t need some giant overbearing Anchor program just to update an oracle anymore. 

Abstraction, Assembly, and IBRL

Given your reputation for writing assembly, do you think most developers should ever actually touch it? Or is this one of those things where only a few people push the limits so the rest can safely build higher up on the stack?

I think everyone should learn it, at least a little. George Hotz, probably the best programmer alive, has this line that everyone should learn Python, C, and assembly. 

If you don’t understand assembly, you don’t understand what the compiler’s really doing. If you don’t understand C, you don’t appreciate all the conveniences Python gives you. I don’t think Python is that great, but Rust, for example, is a very expressive language that can be used at both a high level and a low level. It’s a great choice.

So yeah, I’d say learn some assembly and Rust. At some point, you’ll also need to learn TypeScript if you want to write frontends. At the end of the day, you’re building products for people, and if your users are developers, then TypeScript ends up on your radar whether you like it or not.

When I first started writing assembly on Solana, literally nobody was doing it. I went and built the tooling, put out examples, and now there are a few hundred people who’ve tried it. Maybe ten or so are really good. Some have even written more impressive programs than I have. It’s mostly just about spending the time to make it happen.

Most of what I do is small, elegant, hyper-performant, single-purpose stuff—places that I see a potential 100x cost improvement for execution. My role is more about exploring, inspiring, and letting others carry it further. At this stage, I don’t really gain much by self-promoting everything I build, so I’d rather highlight others, retweet them, and help them make a name for themselves.

So yes, I think everyone should at least learn assembly. It’s a great exercise. But at the same time, it’s also true that a handful of people pushing hard at the lowest level can create improvements that everybody else benefits from. 

If you look at the vast majority of improvements that have happened to Pinocchio in the last six months, they all came from assembly optimizations. Febo has triaged every single PR like an absolute Chad and got some really good stuff merged. Like, look at p-token—it’s the same concept. 

Do you see low-level coding not just as a technical choice, but maybe as something more ideological?

Yeah, I think it’s both. Like, why do people want to put a JPEG on Bitcoin? There’s something primitive and intrinsically interesting about using this really limited system for something it was never designed to do. It’s kind of hilarious, and also kind of beautiful. 

Curiosity ends when you stop asking questions. 

And so, if you’re a curious person, the logical endpoint of your curiosity is probably something along the lines of “I wrote something in TypeScript that consumed an Anchor program. How does Anchor work? How do macros work? How does Rust work? How does assembly work?” 

Perhaps you then start to deep dive the Rust compiler, then MIR, then LLVM IR, and how it compiles down to eBPF. Then you ask what eBPF is, and read about its assembly. Then you’re finally staring at the raw bytecode, realizing you can shave off a few bytes because the compiler didn’t automatically optimize something. That’s the logical endpoint of their inquiry. There’s definitely an ideological aspect to that.

You’re also working with the Solana Foundation, helping Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking teams onboard, debug, and build. You’re working with all these teams, helping them by making things simpler and more accessible. At the same time, you’re known for advocating for assembly and abusing syscalls. How do you reconcile that tension? How do you balance pushing developers closer to the metal with the practical need to onboard them through higher-level abstractions?

If you look at Blueshift, we’ve basically designed a continuum of beginner all the way to expert. My take is simple: you get the level of developers that you train for. If you only ever teach Anchor or TypeScript, then you only attract the kind of devs who think that’s enough. But if you start talking about shaving off single compute units with hand-rolled assembly, you attract a different caliber of dev—people who actually understand what those words mean.

Our strategy with Blueshift is to aim at the middle of the curve first. That’s where the numbers are, and where you get the best ROI. Then we shift them rightward, help them level up, and eventually you have an army of strong devs who can turn around and support the left side of the curve—the absolute beginners.

It’s just more scalable that way. I could spend hours every day teaching noobs how to CPI into the Token Program, which is 90% of all Solana programs. Or I can train a hundred people to do the same thing, and each of them can onboard a hundred more. That’s how you scale. 

We want to bring people in at whatever level they’re at and keep shifting them to the right. Blueshift, Solana Foundation—it’s all the same goal.

Education, Knowledge Transfer, and Community

Speaking to Blueshift, you’ve cofounded that alongside Turbin3, both with strong educational missions. Where do you see these initiatives going in the future? 

There wasn’t much to Turbin3 when I joined. I came in, wrote all the programs in the curriculum, and started running things. I think I ran three or four cohorts and trained all the people who are the teachers now. Within nine months, to go from nothing to replacing myself with good training, there wasn’t much left for me to do. Training up people with good training shows that there’s a scalable flywheel effect there.

The problem is they’ll get a thousand applications every quarter and reject maybe 800 to 900 people. The people who get in go through a six-week course where they have to show up to class three times a week. At the end of it, they don’t get a certificate or anything that proves that they graduated—maybe they’ll vouch for you, maybe not. But six weeks is a long time for nothing to go wrong in your life. Your dog could get sick, and you have to take it to the vet and miss a few classes, then all of a sudden, you’re behind, and you get dropped.
Traditional bootcamps cost a lot of time and money to run, and they don’t actually optimize for the best devs. You’re either helping people who didn’t really need the bootcamp in the first place and just need a starting point for their career, or you’re probably hand-holding people who wouldn’t have made it through without that constant support. Neither of those paths really scales developer onboarding in the way Solana needs today.

So the better question is: how do you take the 800 to 900 people who get rejected from bootcamps and give those who are actually capable a chance? 

With Blueshift, the answer has been to build high-quality self-guided learning. If you can follow the material, you can finish it on your own time and get an NFT to prove it. Everything’s open source, and we actively encourage community pull requests, shouting out people on Twitter to help promote and bootstrap their careers. People submit improvements, we merge them, and it makes the whole platform better.

Instead of saying, “Sorry, you didn’t get in, better luck next time,” we say, “Here’s the curriculum, go crush it on your own time.” We’ve got lessons translated into eight languages already, so people can run meetups or bootcamps anywhere around the world. Superteam can use it. Forma can use it. At the end, you have an objective standard: people earn the same NFT, you know what level they’re at, and you can hire them or challenge them accordingly.

Blueshift solves all these problems by focusing on the devs who are motivated and capable of following high-quality self-guided learning. We embrace the fact that if we open source everything, then people will be more critical of it, and it’ll result in the wisdom of the community shining through. So, we merge their PRs and end up with the best educational platform and content out there.

You’ve basically answered this implicitly, but to make it more explicit: Do you view developer education more as a translation problem—making complex ideas more accessible—or more as a bootcamp problem—getting lots of people to a baseline quickly, or something else entirely?

Yeah, the main problem with developer education right now is that the resources we put out for free are shit. A lot of it is outdated. Everyone is basically writing in Anchor or Pinocchio. Nobody’s using solana_program. Everything goes out of date very quickly. So, with everything open source, we can quickly and meticulously craft good content and maintain it. It seems like nobody else really wants to do this, and so, we’re going to do it because nobody else wants to. 

Even Mert recognized this six months ago when we were talking about it. From his perspective, he was happy someone had decided to care about this problem. And it’s like, who better than us, right? I’m privileged to be one of the more influential devs in this space. Everything is open source. We have no moat, haha. We don’t have a giant Foundation grant—we’re self-funded. We did it all ourselves, and our only moat is execution. 

Education is a continuum. You need to meet people where they’re at with things that are challenging enough that they learn something, but easy enough for them to understand and approachable, so they keep coming back. Then you start nerd-sniping them to the right. I think I do a good job of that, so Blueshift is the ultimate nerd-sniping platform. Then all of a sudden you’re like, “What the fuck? Why am I writing assembly now?” 

The Blueshift Discord also offers DevRel services to help people build out their projects when they get stuck on things. The most important thing is that I don’t even answer most of the questions in there—the community does. And it’s a lot better than StackOverflow or whatever because you have a strong and involved community.

What does the future of Blueshift look like?

The future of Blueshift is basically two products: Coursera and LeetCode. We have an okay—well, better than okay, but not ideal—version of these two products already, but it needs to be better. We’re working on a V3, so it’s going to get a lot better. 

We want to be extremely effective in terms of catering to devs who are capable of following self-guided learning. And, honestly, that’s the kind of devs I would rather have in the ecosystem. 

I want people who just roll their sleeves up and have a go. We want to make it as easy as possible for them to do that by giving them good resources. So, let’s not waste their time with outdated shit with broken dependencies and whatnot. 

The end goal is to have a platform where people can learn what they’re interested in without being pigeonholed, and then can prove it by completing different challenges. 

Rapid Fire Questions

What music have you been listening to recently while writing assembly?

Haha, usually death metal.

What’s the best syscall to abuse on Solana?

secp256k1_recover

Would you rather write C# or Java for the rest of your life?

No.

What’s better: a UTXO- or an account-based model?

A UTXO is worth more.

If you had unlimited resources, what’s your dream educational initiative that you’d launch tomorrow?

Blueshift plus IRL. 

What’s one tip for teaching low-level Solana concepts to new devs without scaring them off?

Self-deprecating humor.

Conclusion

In a world of high-level abstractions and their acceptance as “reality” to lure in the masses, Dean Little stands as a rare bridge—a low-level alchemist who forges tools using the most basic elements to hoist others onto his shoulders. His journey from rockets to proliferating hyper-optimized oracle updates reveals a builder’s ethos. An ethos unyielding in its pursuit of truth: design for failure, innovate against limits, and never blindly put your trust into anything.

Whether he’s willing quantum vaults into existence or scaling Blueshift to nerd-snipe the next generation of cracked Solana developers (hopefully they can stand on the shoulders of giants and not do as much glass chewing as the rest of us), Dean embodies the purist’s fire, tempered by the community’s warmth. It’s a reminder that true progress isn’t just about throwing more wood on the fire, stacking layer on top of layer—it’s about stripping these layers back to reveal the hum of the machines, and teaching others to dance with it.

As Solana hurtles toward its next leap, whether that be full EVM parity, Alpenglow, or 100,000 oracle updates per second, Dean’s work whispers a challenge to us all: Why settle for polite lies when you can solder your own reality? If curiosity is the spark, then people like Dean are the accelerant.

Dive in, abuse a syscall, overload a transaction with complex functionality, and who knows—maybe you’ll emerge with your own quantum life raft.