In a wide ranging conversation on The Blockopedia podcast, Neon Labs CEO Ivan sat down with The Blockopedia’s Co-founder Mohammad Ahmad Khan to walk through a decade of building across Ethereum, Polygon and Solana, and to explain why his newest project, Parasol, might be the missing piece for sophisticated DeFi on Solana.
Few people in Web3 have watched as many ecosystems evolve from the inside as Ivan has. Long before he became CEO of Neon Labs, he was an engineer who stumbled into crypto almost by accident. In 2015, after discovering Ethereum through its ICO, his team built an email platform on top of it called Lemon Email. It launched in 2017, right as ether’s price exploded, leaving them with what he jokingly calls the world’s most expensive email product. It wasn’t a financial success, but it hooked him permanently on distributed systems.
From there his path wound through some of the most influential corners of Web3. He became an early contributor to Polkadot, worked closely with researchers who went on to found Polygon, and later served as an angel investor and VP of strategy at Tenderly. That breadth of exposure, he says, shaped his current thinking about infrastructure.
Why Tribalism Holds Web3 Back
One theme Ivan returned to repeatedly is how much friction in crypto comes from projects refusing to acknowledge trade offs. Every chain makes compromises, and pretending otherwise only fuels the kind of tribalism that keeps ecosystems talking past each other. Having built across Ethereum, Polygon and Solana, he sees the appeal and the limits of each rather than treating any single chain as a religion.
He also pointed to a deeper structural issue in how projects fund themselves. Too much capital in Web3 comes from investor pools rather than real end users, which he argues quietly distorts incentives across the industry.
What Neon EVM Actually Does
For newcomers, Ivan broke Neon EVM down simply. It is an EVM running on top of Solana, letting developers deploy Ethereum style Solidity applications while tapping into Solana’s speed. The idea began in 2021 as a way to combine Ethereum’s mature tooling with Solana’s parallel execution.
Enter Parasol
But as Solana’s own native ecosystem matured, Ivan and his team noticed a gap. Complex DeFi applications that thrive on Ethereum often cannot run natively on Solana due to compute limits and consensus constraints. Rather than porting more Ethereum apps over, Neon Labs built Parasol, a network extension that expands what Solana native programs can do, without users ever leaving their Solana wallet or noticing anything changed under the hood.
Parasol’s first target is central limit order book perpetuals, largely because building general purpose zero knowledge circuits for every possible use case would take years. Ivan wants to be in the market now, building specific products first, then broadening the framework over time. He also emphasized that Neon Labs is open to developer collaboration on zero knowledge tooling for Solana.
Betting Big on Network Extensions
Among current Web3 trends, Ivan is most excited about network extensions themselves, the idea of expanding a mainnet’s capabilities invisibly rather than routing users through a separate layer. He would like to see similar approaches eventually applied to Ethereum, not just Solana.
Advice for Builders
Asked what matters most for founders in deep tech infrastructure, Ivan’s answer was refreshingly practical: play to your strengths, and never build in isolation. If you are not technical, focus on the application layer and leave protocol work to specialists. If you are technical, find a cofounder who understands customers. Above all, talk to real users early and often. Waiting until a product feels perfect before showing it to anyone is, in his words, the most dangerous way to build.
He also credited Solana’s regional Superteams as one of the most genuinely supportive builder communities he has encountered across any ecosystem, and encouraged anyone building on Solana to connect with them early.
Looking forward, Ivan sees real world assets and more sophisticated onchain finance as one of the more interesting frontiers for Solana DeFi, and believes Parasol is positioned to help drive that next phase.
Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phWCGwEEQrs&t=3s
