📣 Inside Solana Summer!! 👀
Our top 35 picks from 618 amazing submissions
THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
We looked at the submissions to Solana’s recently concluded global online hackathon. In this essay we’ll take you through our favourite projects from the 618 submissions received. These are not official results. We have no relationship with the chad on the judging panel. If you successfully shipped a working product to the hackathon – congrats – you are a legend!
About Summer Camp
There are six prize tracks with a total prize pool of $5m.
Mobile for the Solana Mobile Stack
Payments to help everyone pay for things in Crypto, by Stripe
DeFi, by Orca
Web3, by Brave
Gaming, by Fractal
DAOs to enable organisation without bureaucracy, by GRAPE
The online hackathon was complemented with IRL Summer Camps across the globe.
Big thanks to Alevtina and Matty for providing us with pictures from the various Summer Camp events around the world.
Some Interesting Stats about the Submitooors
There were submissions from around the globe, with a strong presence from emerging markets.
Here’s a closer look at the top 20 submitting nations. The US retains a sizeable lead.
A whooping 25% of submissions are from people in university
And finally, here are the submissions split by the prize tracks. General web3 apps & infra is by far the favourite track. Important to note that since teams can submit to multiple tracks, we’ve counted all tracks a project was submitted against. The general trend remains the same even if we only picked the first track.
Judging Criteria
For reference, here’s the official judging criteria that’ll be applied. We’ve tried to apply a similar lens.
Our Top 35 Picks
In no particular order..
Sphere One - Enabling cross chain payments on top of their one-click checkout experience. This team had a working demo of sending $1 from an eth wallet to a sol wallet, on a mobile phone via Solana pay.
Our Notes: The ultimate payment is one that lets users or merchants seamlessly transfer USDC (or other tokens) across chains, and easily off ramp into any fiat currency, in any country of their choice. Sphere one is touching on the early version of this, and we’re optimistic that they’re onto something if they continue building. You can follow the founders Ryan & Chris. Checkout their website here
FRIDAY.
Their end product is NFT licensing of consumers data. They’ve built what I think is a valuable & creative intermediate step. Most web2 platforms allow users to “export” their data; we had spoken about this in our essay on loyalty programs. They are reading this data & implementing business rules on top of it. In this example, if you watched a Kanye movie on Netflix & heard his album on spotify – you get access to an exclusive NFT drop from Adidas.
Our Notes: We are not going to get to a world of open-data overnight. One way to think of this is as a data bridge between web2 and web3 platforms. Just like how Wormhole makes it possible to send tokens (bits) between Ethereum and Solana chains – apps like Friday allow us to send data (also bits) between web2 and web3 databases. This is an exciting development since it is grounded in the reality of where users actually spend their time (v. wishful thinking on where they should), and building around that.
Raid.
It allows you to build & manage automations for on-chain activity. Their claim is that it is not easy for smart contracts to talk to each other & that most teams end up having to build this in-house. This is redundant & doesn’t scale well. Their product allows devs to build logic based on on-chain events using just a few lines of code.
Our Notes: Composability is one of the biggest unlocks of web3 (We think of Solana as an API Killer rather than ETH Killer). This is the ability for builders to go beyond restrictive APIs and plug-in directly at source. It can unleash the “bazaar” of developers and projects who have been stifled by closed platforms. A plug and play module for building applications on top of on-chain events is an invaluable tool for developers and has the potential to be spun off into a no-code tool as well, e.g. access an NFT mint access based on DAPPs used, games played, NFTs held etc. Follow the founders Aryan & Ayush.
Stan World.
This is an app for community streaming of K-POP. They are building everything you’d expect from a fan engagement app - virtual rooms, avatars etc. They are now integrating NFTs & a crypto token into this app to drive engagement & monetisation. It is exciting to see traditional platform products adopt web3 capabilities to drive business goals.
Our Notes: The most engaging apps will start off trying to solve a problem and incidentally use the web3 toolkit. We’re much more likely to see a breakout consumer app or game from a team that is trying to build something their users love & web3 is one of the tools at their disposal. The Stan app is a good example of this. It can thrive without crypto, NFTs or any web3 capabilities. However, their team is leveraging web3 to feels that they can turbo-charge engagement by giving ownership to their fans. We can’t predict success in specific examples but this trend of traditional apps adopting some web3 elements will be a key lever for user-growth & one we’re cheering on for. Follow StanWorld & their CEO Aidan on Twitter.
Stream Money.
A protocol to rent utility NFTs and split the earnings-generating income for owners & access for renters.
Our Notes: This is particularly useful as we see adoption of NFTs as in-game assets, loyalty programs and other value-accruing constructs - whether digital or IRL. This could be a handy plugin for applications to leverage instead of building “renting” as a feature themselves. For more info click here.
Dispatch Forum.
A tool that allows for token-gated community engagement.
Our Notes: This is an important primitive as web3 looks for alternative digital homes to twitter & discord. The nature and depth of engagement will be uniquely specific to each community. But one thing in common will be membership enforced via tokens (including NFTs). Checkout their website here.
Seahorse. Allows you to write Solana programs in python. A useful tool to bring in more devs to the ecosystem.
Our notes: Onboarding the next billion users onto web3 begins with onboarding the next million developers first. There’s millions of Python developers around the world, and particularly in India – and this may prove to be an important lever to bring them onboard. Chase Barker tells us this is the next best thing after sliced bread – so keep an eye out! Checkout the repo here.
Slise.
A tool that analyses wallets from an allow-list to provide pre-launch insights & lookalike wallet targeting capabilities.
Our notes: The core insight here is that the web2 user databases are owned and maintained by the platforms; whereas web3 user databases are owned and maintained by the users. Tools like Mailchimp and other CRM and analytics tools were built over centralised customer databases. In web3, they will be built over user wallets and Slise is a great glimpse into the possibilities. Really promising project, and we expect this to be the first of many in this category. Checkout the website here.
Ora.
A blockchain search engine, they claim to be more user friendly than explorers and analytics tools.
Our Notes: Like we said with Raid, tools that make on-chain activity more accessible to humans and programs will be valuable.
MintAir.
They want to leverage tokens & Helium’s distributed network to collect air quality monitoring data.
Our Notes: Products like Helium & Hivemapper are networks built on proof of physical work. Since they rely on distributing physical devices to users, they will take longer than your avg. web3 project to achieve visible success. But they unlock a powerful layer of infrastructure. One that is distributed and censorship resistant. That projects like MintAir can build on top of.
Metapass (A Superteam Project).
Their goal is to provide access-as-a-service. The first product they’ve launched is ticketing for events.
Our notes: Let's start by saying, you can do most ticketing with web2 platforms better than any web3 alternative. However, imagine a world where users are able to showcase via NFTs what events they attended (this is a practical example of the rhetoric of “users own their data”); and then any brand or artist can query the chain and target discounts or other exclusive offers to those users. Eg., Tanmay Bhat offers tickets to his stand up show at a 20% discount to anyone who has attended and supported an open mic show in the last 60 days. Ultimately, web3 will create a peer to peer advertising marketplace for “pixels” as Anatoly puts it.
XPipe.
Building off-ramp rails for DAOs. Allows you to create proposals and manage fiat payments directly from a multi-sig or treasury account.
Our Notes: DAOs are a new way for people to organise projects. Controlling shared funds is a key part of this process. We’re still discovering their pros & cons as various experiments unfold. Making it easier for DAOs to use their collective funds IRL will unlock massive efficiencies. It will allow individual DAOs to focus on finding & achieving their core goals instead of worrying about financial ops. Follow them on Twitter.
Bastion Community.
Building a more seamless & open DeFi experience for DAOs. Just like you can “connect a wallet” to a DeFi protocol, you can also connect a DAO multisig you have on Realms.
Our Notes: As DAOs implement on-chain governance, they need a toolkit to experiment quickly and find out what works for them. Realms is a tool that DAOs are already using for on-chain votes. By building this on top of realms & integrating with the top DeFi apps this is useful from day-0. A real example of the value unlocked by composability.
Truts (A Superteam Project).
A reviews & discovery platform for web3 communities. One of the few community led products in the hackathon that have already generated some traction from real users.
Our notes: If web3 lives up to its promise, hundreds of thousands of communities will form over time with their own intellectual, economic, political or social pursuits, and their own idiosyncratic structures and membership rules. Truts may prove to be an excellent discovery platform for people looking to join a community, while also creating a review mechanism. Over time, they could monetise by providing services to the communities on its platform. Checkout their product here.
Mato SDK.
Enables game developers to add on-chain collectibles and marketplaces to their games.
Our Notes: Web3 gaming has been a hot topic over the last year. It’s common belief that teams experienced with gaming are more likely to successfully integrate web3 capabilities than vice-a-versa. Tools like the Mato SDK are useful because they reduce the cost for a traditional game to test the impact of NFTs & player-owned assets on their games. Just like Razorpay & Stripe have emerged in the payments space because they allowed businesses to focus on what they do best instead of boiler-plate payments integrations. Similarly, we could see massive projects emerge in this space. This way game developers can focus on building great games instead of doing boiler-plate NFT & marketplace development. Checkout their website here.
StellarSol (A Superteam project)- They’re a browser extension which allows you to pay in USDC on ANY website. They do this by buying gift cards in the background & automating the site’s checkout process.
Our Notes: Spending crypto easily continues to remain a problem. Being able to spend directly from your browser extension without clunky, delayed off-ramps is a big opportunity. StellarSol is a pretty clever product that uses gift cards in the background allowing you to spend your USDC-SPL in your Phantom on e-commerce websites like Amazon.
Alpha Wallet.
An open source solana wallet. Heard this is the need of the hour… something something supply chain hack something. Checkout the repo here.
Stream-RTC.
A decentralised real time media communication protocol, with wallets as a first class citizen. Their goal is to become the communication layer of the metaverse. They’ve written a miner - which contains all the code needed to send media. Anyone can sign up to operate a miner, they get paid out based on usage from an escrow.
Atomic.
A decentralised no-code website builder & CMS. Uses NFTs as primitives and allows you to compose a website using them. Use cases include better monetisation for templates, stock images, content etc.
Somos-datum - A primitive for decentralised token-gated data. They are composing on top of Genesysgo shadow drive for storage and Lit protocol. Try out the product here.
WiHi - In their own words, they want to build a decentralised weather forecasting and climate monitoring solution that issues tokens as a reward to weather stations providing data to the network, with rewards proportional to the corresponding data's usefulness in forecasting.
Ironforge - Simplify the Solana developer experience by automated deployments, monitoring & infrastructure management. Checkout their website here.
Lightning Bridge ATM - A payment system connecting Bitcoin’s lightning network & Solana Pay. Their goal is to make crypto payments seamless and easy. They’ve integrated with web3 auth for seamless onboarding.
DMXD Private - Making Solana transactions comply with US Healthcare data standards. This has the potential to be a primitive for healthcare applications built on top of Solana.
Mirror World - An SDK to abstract out boiler-plate code and improve the Solana mobile and web development experience.
Townesquare - They are building a social network with a slick interface & useful functionality on top of Solana’s social protocols like Grape, Squads, Bonfida etc.
Solana Mobile x Capacitor JS - In their own worlds, they are building open source tooling to drive adoption of Solana Mobile and web SDKs at scale.
CandyPay (A Superteam project) - They are powering mobile native NFT experiences. Their product was already used to dispense SOAPs across many IRL summer camp events & NFT Berlin.
SolIndex - They are building a volatility index for Solana. Has the potential to be a useful financial primitive as on-chain trading grows over time.
Nomis - An open source credit protocol. It scores wallets based on a range of parameters like activity, token value, transaction frequency etc. It can prove to be a valuable tool in building spam resistance & better DeFi products. Find out your Nomis score here.
OpenSerum - A data project that provides insight into the Serum order book for specific markets. Allows users to see who is placing a given order, along with other market information. Try out the product here.
Solcery - A no-code on-chain game engine that allows anyone to launch a game with web3 digital assets.
Gbits Pay - Apparently Switzerland is moving all invoices to a QR code standard. Our friends at Gbits Pay are integrating this standard to support Solana Stablecoins. The current product only works when both parties are onboarded with USDC, but we hope to see more off-ramps and payment options integrated in the future to support invoicing at scale.
Algoz - An SDK that prevents bots from accessing your smart contract. It uses a captcha, the SDK converts transactions into multi-sig & it only signs once the captcha is completed. Follow them on Twitter.
Ingl-DAO - Decentralising the process of running a Solana validator. It enables anyone to contribute compute towards a validator, and enables trustless coordination using NFTs to represent the staked SOL. Follow them on Twitter.
Jungle DeFi - In their own words, Jungle Finance brings new levels of capital efficiency to DeFi by using derivatives to separate the productive value from the intrinsic value of supported staked assets. Follow them on Twitter.
Same stats, but for our top picks
While 24% submissions were from the US, 38% of our top picks are based in the US. This signals higher maturity of talent in that geography. It’ll be interesting to watch this trend over time as projects start relocating across the world. E.g. notice portugal has only 2.3% of submissions but 6% in our top picks.
While 25% of submissions were from teams in university, 15% of our top picks were from that group. This is actually pretty impressive when you think about it. These are young students with little real life or work “experience”. And yet, they shipped products like SeaHorse, CandyPay, SolIndex, Ingl-DAO & Algoz. Mega bullish on this cohort.
On avg teams rated themselves ~7.5 when it came to their development experience on Solana. There was a rather small gap of 0.4 between the average self-reported developer experience rating across all projects vs our top picks. Make of this what you will ;)
Closing Thoughts
It was a delight to go through these submissions and share our favourites. Some interesting trends:
Web 2.5: We’ll continue to see products that incorporate some elements of web3 while continuing to walk & talk traditional web2 platform products. Products like Stan are building strong communities while finding the best of both worlds. Products like FRIDAY, Mato SDK, Stellar Sol etc are helping bridge the gap, and bring users and their data over to more open systems. See a recent podcast by Mable Jiang explaining this idea in more detail.
Physical Work: As distributed physical networks like Helium & Hivemapper achieve scale, they will unlock a whole new suite of applications that weren’t possible before. Projects like WiHi & MintAir are an early glimpse into this. Multicoin has a good blogpost explaining this thesis.
Multi-chain: The future will be multi-chain, at least for a while. Applications like Sphere one & Lightning ATM are solving this for payments. Many of the other projects like Raid, Metapass, Truts etc are incorporating this from inception. They abstract the complexity of operating between chains, and deliver a seamless user experience.
Tooling: Building for builders continues to be a thing. There continues to be a massive opportunity in building tools for developers, but also DAOs, protocols etc.
Thanks for reading and happy hacking!
Disclaimer: This post is not financial or investment advice. It is meant for informational & educational purposes only. Please do your own research about risks and compliance before buying, investing/ or trading.