Superteam India Community Update: Feb 2024

Entering the Renaissance

The first global Solana hackathon of 2024 is here in an all new avatar — it is essentially a startup competition with the hackathon as the application process, followed up by an accelerator and armed with a venture fund.

If you’re a developer or founder looking to test an idea or convert a weekend project into a venture backed startup — this is for you.

In this edition of our newsletter we’ll cover,

1. The Solana Renaissance Hackathon

2. Member Wins

3. Community Contributions

4. Project Updates

5. Welcome New Members

6. State of Community Earnings

7. IRL Ecosystem Calls

8. Thoughts from the Frontier: Frames

9. News You Can Use

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The Solana Renaissance Hackathon

The Solana global hackathon starts on 4th March and submissions are due by 8th April. Teams have 5 weeks to build a prototype, test it with customers and perfect their pitch.

Key points to note

1. Over $500K in cash prizes split across 6 prize tracks — Consumer, Payments & DeFi, DePIN, Infra, DAOs and gaming.

2. There are also prizes for public goods, climate focused projects and university teams as part of the total pool.

3. In addition to this there will be other prize tracks from Ecosystem teams like DRiP, Okto, Reclaim, etc. These will be listed on Superteam Earn, so keep an eye out for the announcement on their Twitter.

4. The Accelerator: Winners of the main tracks will be interviewed and eligible to join the Colosseum accelerator that comes with $250K in pre-seed funding, access to mentor networks and much more.

5. Here’s a blogpost from the Colosseum team on how to win the hackathon and a list of resources to get you started.

6. Drop a W for Kash who is part of the judging panel.

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Member Wins

Proto had originally planned to find their first 1000 users closer to home in Mumbai & Bengaluru before taking on “international expansion” — but members from SuperteamNG found the app on Twitter and chose to start mapping right away. A great example of the GTM uniquely enabled by a global network of local communities.

Tweet link

It’s always great to see members land gigs, jobs or take leadership positions in the wider ecosystem. Kash is leading a working group for Jupiter and running their weekly community calls. Kunal has joined Preternatural AI, a startup building consumer AI/ML infra. Shek and Abbas have joined Builders Tribe as mentors. Dhrumil featured on the next billions podcast.

Anoushk, a 19 yr old member, has landed a role as a Senior protocol engineer at Rome. Interestingly, a year ago he was frustrated to see most open roles only for “senior” engineers with 5+ yrs of experience, but he channeled that energy into Tinydancer and proved his caliber at working side by side with some of the best Solana core devs — and has come out stronger for it.

The cherry on top is that he also helped his friend Aniket join Rome, and Tinydancer just received $10K in public goods funding from Dora Hacks and continues to live on as an open source project.

Next we’ve got members crushing hackathons, competitions and bounties across the board. Tushar and the Little Unusual team won the video category of Tensor creator competition. Harsh and Vraj made it to top 7 at the ETH Global Circuit Breaker hackathon by building Myriad, a DAO tooling frontend on frames. They also won 2nd place in the Frames hackathon by FBI for building an in-feed tipping utility.

Speaking of FBI, Farcaster Builders India is a community founded by longtime Superteam member Saumya, Rahul and many others focused on supporting founders and developers who are building on the Farcaster network. In a short span of time they’ve organised a weekend hackathon, sent out some agents in the field and won a grant from PurpleDAO to further their objective. We’re incredibly bullish on the distribution and monetization that frames can unlock for Solana projects and help grow the Farcaster network — but more on that later in this post.

While we’re on the topic of Farcaster, member Aryan along with Cyber Shakti and other members of Lenspost shipped Quack, a Solana client for Farcaster. They actually built this even before the official Solana integration went live and ended up getting featured on Degen News.

Lenspost also airdropped early access to their NFT remixer product to everyone who attended the Feb Ecosystem Call and claimed a POAP.

Friends of Superteam, StockpileLabs, created a custom badge to verify Superteam members so that they can vote in the distribution of DecentraGrants. Props to member Aadil for helping enable this.

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Community Contributions

Our community frequently contributes to the ecosystem through code and content. The earliest and most iconic example of this was glass eaters from the community contributing to the Solana Cookbook. (If you’re new here and don’t know what is — use this an ice breaker to connect with an early member)

Here are some contributions from Feb.

Code Contributions 

1. Avneesh shipped a frame game with BONK rewards that crossed 2K users and an NFT minting frame that did 21K mints.

2. Wilfred shipped LightDAS, a 100% DAS spec compliant utility that makes it easier for anyone to index a specific collection for their application or use case.

3. Dheeraj shipped a Backpack mobile app with xNFT support!

4. Yash G built a frame for the Superteam blog.

5. Abhineet shipped a new game.

6. Atreay made OSS contributions to Earn.

7. Tanishq fixed a category and hydration issue on Earn, and built a bot that sends out periodic Discord updates about open opportunities.

8. Jayesh and Aarushe built an internal Superteam metrics dashboard.

Content Contributions

1. Ronak published a technical guide on building Android apps using Solana.

2. Yash published a giga piece on the State of Solana DePIN and Token Extensions.

3. Scriblooooor hosted Andrew, the mobile lead at DRiP, to talk about their upcoming mobile app.

4. Kash dropped five Solana favourites with Mert and Vibhu.

5. Little Unusual shipped a video for Moonwalk, an app that gamifies good habits.

6. Shek dropped some ideas that you can build at the intersection of AI x Solana.

7. Shivank wrote an essay on SonarWatch and Jupiter.

8. Rahul K wrote about RFQ based DEXs on Solana.

9. Madhan wrote about micro-payments, with help from Savior and Killerthief.

10. Avneesh wrote a post explaining how he built his NFT minter frame.

11. Shek hosted a space talking about Sora and defending reality at the speed of light.

12. Abbas hosted a space on decentralised social.

13. Jayesh and Kushal shipped alternatives for all your favourite fonts.

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Project Updates

Credible Finance

Credible finance is building India’s first CeDeFi product by lending global DeFi capital to real estate and energy companies via a regulated NBFC.

Avici

Avici is a mobile-first, self-custodial, DEX and they’ve just shipped to the app store and added native support for Solana including gasless swaps.

Cubik

Cubik shipped their new design and is onboarding projects faster than you can say quadratic funding.

Solidity on Solana

A self-paced course for building on Solana with Solidity.

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Welcome New Members

Incredibly excited to welcome the following new members to Superteam India

1. Ram is the founder of Avici and is building a mobile first DEX.

2. Vraj is building crosschain frames using Wormhole.

3. Swami was prev at Juno and is currently running 824 Club.

4. Shubham is writing about Solana's new ZK token proof program.

5. Pareen is building Open Books and was previously at Buidlers Tribe.

6. Sandeep is the founder of Wootz App, an iOS browser with Solana checkout.

7. Neel is building a boilerplate for NFT minting via a Farcaster frame boilerplate along with a guide for developers.

8. Yash Garg is building a frame for the Superteam blog.

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State of Community Earnings

Community GDP

India community GDP is $2.1M. It represents the value created for & by community members who found earning opportunities through Superteam.

About Bounties & Projects

Not all Earn listings are the same, and in this section we’ll quickly tell you how to think about bounties & projects both as a sponsor or an applicant.

• Bounties are ideal when you want many people to generate competing versions of output and choose the best ones. They are typically used to source Twitter threads, deep dives, product feedback, designs, videos and memes, etc. These are great for a) projects who want to generate awareness or community source creativity and b) applicants who want to build proof of work.

• Projects are ideal when you want to work closely with one candidate on a problem statement that requires more context or access to your project and team. They’re also a great way to try before you buy — i.e. work together for 4-8 weeks before taking on a larger commitment. They are typically used for sourcing community managers, developers, growth roles or specific development projects.

It is also worth noting that Earn is open & free to use for everyone, i.e. whether you’re an applicant or a project you can just create an account and get started.

Drop a W for Superteam Earn, #itsgoodnow

Two big wins for Earn this month, they

• crossed 10K verified users.

• hosted Solana’s first ever hackathon for content creators, Scribes, which saw over 1000 participants make 2500+ submissions across 54 tracks competing for 100K+ in prizes.

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IRL Ecosystem Calls

In Feb, our community hosted IRL Ecosystem calls in 12 cities, up from 10 in Jan — with Indore and Kochi joining the action.

Here’s a recap of what went down….

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Thoughts from the Frontier: Frames

Farcaster recently announced Frames and completed their integration with Solana. And while these are technically unrelated there is a lot that you can do with frames using Solana.

Frames basically allow you to embed mini-apps within a social feed, and this is especially powerful when that feed has lots of users and the frames can complete transactions. Warpcast has ~10K users who likely own and transact in crypto — and this is it will prove to be an important distribution channel for developers, creators and apps.

Here are some useful links to help you learn more

1. The original frames spec.

2. Our essay on ideas for frames possible today.

3. A blog on how to mint an NFT in a frame.

4. Sign up on Warpcast and explore hundreds of frames.

5. Provide feedback on the spec for enabling transactions in frames.

6. Build frames on Solarplex.

7. Follow the FBI crew.

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News You Can Use

Sign up for the global Solana hackathon

For the 3rd time in this newsletter, register now.

The Indus App Store is live

One of India’s largest payment apps, PhonePe, has launched has launched their Play Store competitor, the Indus Appstore with

• 0 fees on in-app purchase

• no restriction on payment methods

• a nominal listing fee

This comes at a time when google is ramping up the enforcement of their in-app billing policy and delisting non-compliant apps.

If you’re a developer or project building mobile apps on Solana, make sure you try it out and more importantly — list your apps on there.

Superteam Earn is open source

Not only is it good now, but it is also — and has been for a while — open source. And there’s tens of people who have joined Superteam by contributing to the Earn product.

The team recently hosted a space with Chase on OSS contributions as a career hack and have also lined up hundreds of open issues for you to fix, so raise a PR now!

A cNFT spam filter

If you’re building an application that loads cNFTs from a user’s wallet whether as in-game assets, a gallery, profile elements, etc. — this open source spam filter by Solarnius can help improve product experience and app load times.

March is going to be all about helping the best teams and founders from India ace the hackathon and launch their companies — if that’s you, be sure to get in touch.

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Credit to the Little Unusual team for the cover image & accompanying video