Superteam India Community Update: Jan 2024
Your Marauders map for getting around Superteam
It feels like more has happened this Jan than in all of 2023.
Watching Superteam members — who stuck together to continue learning, earning and building during the bear — come out stronger, riding the wave of newfound attention and liquidity, is validation of Superteam’s core thesis that you should earn your first crypto, not buy it.
This newsletter will celebrate and spotlight the main thing that makes Superteam special – its members. Here’s how it’s structured,
Member Wins
Community Contributions
Project Updates
Welcome New Members
State of Community Earnings
IRL Ecosystem Calls
Thoughts from the Frontier: Mobile
News You Can Use
Member Wins
We’ll kick things off by talking about a humble side project that did over $500K in volume. Kanishq & Yash shipped a single link that anyone can share with friends looking to bridge to and from Solana — the rest is history.
You can read the full story here but as Joel put it — they ended up generating significant value by simply building a working product and employing good SEO.
A lot has been said about the impact of web3 games but we’re still waiting for the breakout apps. Initiatives like the Solana Speedrun Game Jam go a long way in nurturing organic bottoms up developer activity and we’re thrilled to see Abhineet, Elio & Memxor represent India on the podium in the recently concluded 2nd edition.
The event, organised by LamportDAO & Magicblock, saw 300+ registrations and 35 final games submitted – this is impressive when you consider that participants had only 5 days to build their games from scratch.
The kind of numbers we like to see in the bull market are projects crushing their metrics and celebrating new milestones.
Two community born projects – Cubik & Little Unusual – celebrate their one year anniversary. Both projects were founded by members who met each other within Superteam — Cubik by Irffan & Dhruv; Little Unusual by Tushar and Aditya. Both teams have persisted through the bear. We’re incredibly excited to see them expand their team and footprint through the new market cycle.
Now for dReader & our very own Josip Joshi – they’ve crossed 3K verified users on their app across the Saga dApp store and Android Play Store while also booking over $20K in revenue. They’ve secured grant funding from Metaplex & Solana Labs. And while Josip may soon be leading [redacted] he’ll always remain a part of the Superteam India family.
Its bot szn and member Umang has thrown his hat in the ring. Truly a Swiss army knife founder, he’s gone from building a No-code NFT tool to a Payments SaaS product to a casual game and now an NFT trading bot. The early preview gained lots of attention from ecosystem OGs like Toly, Joe McCann, Degen Poet, Metaplex, etc.
OG member Abbas is now leading community for Avax in India. He was previously Bounty Sheriff for Superteam, organised the nationwide Super meet series, ran community efforts at venture fund Hashedem and contributed to IBW.
Yash A has joined Superteam as a researcher and just shipped 7 ideas you can build on Wormhole and also running the Superteam prize track for the Solana scribe hackathon. If you’re participating you should definitely reach out to him, there’s a curated TG group, office hours – the works.
And, our very own Guru Dev Shek has joined the Superteam India core team to drive all things technical education and founder support. If you’re a young developer looking for guidance or a founder looking to navigate Solana tech – would highly recommend reaching out to him.
Karthik, a core contributor to PepperDEX, is making it rain as he found his co-founders & 10+ core team members to gear up for the new season of Solana DeFi.
And after making #itgoodnow Abhishek has joined Superteam Earn full time.
Special shoutout to two friends of Superteam — Saros Finance & Decentralised.
The team at Decentralised wrote one of the most well researched pieces on Solana.
Saros Finance included Superteam members globally as part of their community airdrop and upcoming super app launch. H/t to our friends at Superteam Vietnam for making this happen.
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 Jan.
Code Contributions
The Electric capital report is the gold standard for developer activity across blockchains and so we’re incredibly proud to share that our member Bolt helped audit over 23,000(!!) repos for them.
Anoushk, Aryan & Dhruvraj solved 3 issues on the Jito Stakenet and got a shoutout from the CEO of Jito Labs.
Freshly minted contributor Atreay added social icons to our reputation dashboard and Bolt added a regional filter to the Superteam project showcase. This is awesome because the Superteam operating system is deliberately designed to enable permissionless contributions as an effective mechanism to both identify talented people and improve the quality of our internal products at the speed of the community.
Sabir made a contribution to anchor that helps pick the correct Solana version & Wilfred shipped Solana Scripts, a bundle of misc utilities to help developers.
Suhas contributed to Solathon – a python SDK for Solana development. This was built and open sourced by a previous grantee and it is great to see people from the community pick these up and improve them.
And finally, we all have to start somewhere – Shivank built his first dApp on Solana, a simple program that lets you send payments to any Solana address.
Content Contributions
Harsh, who’s recently joined the Wormhole Fellowship, contributed to their docs by fixing some outdated code snippets.
Raunak wrote a detailed tutorial with code snippets on building an NFT minter mobile dApp using Helius.
Manish wrote an article on the future of stablecoins talking about the need for EURC & the potential of an INRC.
Suhas wrote a brief overview on content monetization using Access Protocol and its three features — Hub, Sketch & Scribe.
Smit & Kaushik published a deep dive on Wormhole that covers the messaging protocol, its security and governance along with case studies of Pike Finance & tBTC
Project Updates
Curating highlights from projects that members shipped in Jan.
The Proto App
The Proto app is live on the Saga dApp store, Android Play Store and the Apple App Store. You can try it out, contribute to their maps and become a part of their network.
They are also hosting map-a-thons across Mumbai & BLR to source and support local contributors — apply here to host one in your city.
Saganize SDK
The team at Saganize has shipped Flutter & Kotlin SDKs to support teams building mobile apps on Solana.
Little Unusual
The team has shipped the IBW after movie, a launch video for Nume crypto, multiple breakdown videos and sizzle reels for member earnings, Ecosystem call hosts and this update :)
If you have a project, product or event you want a top tier video for — DM them now.
Solana Sync
This is a tool by member Bolt that you can use for managing attendees, engagement and POAPs at your next technical workshop.
If you’re a seasoned Solana dev and want to host one in your local University or Blockchain club — apply to the Superteam education fund now.
Welcome New Members
Incredibly excited to welcome the following new members to Superteam India
Shrikant is the founder of Credible finance. They offer RWA backed USDC loans to real estate and renewable energy businesses.
Manish is a member of the CapX team and a host of the Ecosystem Call in Kolkata.
Rishi Iyer is the co-founder of Shovel company. They are building an on-chain identity protocol and a contact book app on top of it.
Prashant is the founder of Primevault. They offer a self-custodial treasury & risk management solution for enterprises.
Anand is the co-founder of The Burrow. They help South Asian artists with the information, tools and capital that they need to succeed in the NFT space.
Prasanna is a Silicon valley veteran and the founder of 0xPPL. They are building a social network for crypto natives.
Dawn Philip is a member of the core team at Wifi Dabba. They are improving internet connectivity throughout India using DePIN concepts.
Deepak is the co-founder of Top Ledger. They are one of the best enterprise analytics solutions on Solana.
Swaraj is the co-founder of Griffy. They are building a mobile app for on-chain opinion trading and have over 60K active users.
Paul Finney is the founder of Space Kayak. They are a design studio that has previously helped many Superteam members perfect their product and pitch for various hackathons.
Parthiv was previously a contributor and has now joined PepperDEX as design lead.
Shivraj won a wormhole grant for his project, Kyte.
Ashish Pradhan won the Wormhole track in the CoinDCX hackathon.
Joel won a prize for building a cricket betting bot on the Monaco Protocol.
Srijan & Daivitya are building Harbor. An app that puts your fitness data on-chain so that other apps can compose on it and you can directly monetise it.
Athar Mohamad is building Auction House V2. That is an open source marketplace contract for Compressed NFTs.
Milan was previously a contributor and has now joined PepperDEX as a frontend developer.
State of Community Earnings
Community GDP
India community GDP is $1.98M. It represents the value created for & by community members who found earning opportunities through Superteam.
Solana Foundation & CoinDCX India Grants
Superteam now supports the Solana Foundation & CoinDCX Grant program. Among other things, we recommend applicants with high community reputation scores. These are grants designed to empower the Indian web3 developer ecosystem with an exclusive focus on builders engaged in the Solana ecosystem and to advance the adoption of public blockchains in India. Anyone with an idea or proof of work is welcome to apply and receive a funding decision for a $1 - $15K grant.
Areas of focus include:
Developer Tooling: Create tools, programs and hacks making it easier and faster for engineers to build the next generation of apps on Solana.
Mobile: Build Android apps on Solana that can go from 0 to 10K users & ideally help drive new user adoption. Grantees will get priority access to the Okto team & product suite including their embedded wallet.
Tokenization & RWA: Tokenize & integrate digital assets into your business. Grantees will get priority access to the Okto team & product suite to generate a wallet easily within their applications & can leverage CoinDCX’s pre-existing KYC infrastructure to make both real world and crypto-native assets accessible to their users.
Loyalty & Creator monetization: Brands, creators & products can distribute digital collectibles at scale using Solana cNFTs (e.g. community badges, loyalty, in-game assets)
Cause-driven building: We’re also looking to fund projects and research around using crypto to create a more inclusive financial system, and innovative solutions towards climate change.
Promote Decentralization: Create developer tooling, media, content, and community projects focussed on promoting and bringing more decentralization to Solana as well as the world at large.
Research: Create & distribute quality content about the Solana ecosystem. Including but not limited to:
Products: DeFi, Consumer, RWA, Games, etc
Global policy: Stablecoin regulation, Free zones etc
Technical research: Compression, Local fee markets, Light clients, etc
Open Earning Opportunities
The best way to get a pulse of earning opportunities is by checking out the listings on Superteam Earn. You can find short term contracts, apply for grants or compete for bounties.
A pro-tip is to use bounties as top of funnel to get a warm intro to a project you’re pursuing or just to build your proof of work. Projects that list bounties are most likely looking for competent and trustworthy individuals from within the community to engage with. They’re also most likely to reply if you DM them about a bounty they’ve listed.
Some opportunities to look out for:
Apply to write technical docs for Okto
Create memes on Lenspost
Participate in the Tensor Creator Competition
Write a deep dive on Coin98
Write about FOMO Mag
IRL Ecosystem Calls
We recently wrote about how contributing to or hosting an event can elevate your Superteam experience. Reproducing the section on Ecosystem Calls from there below.
January was the first time we tested the format where local communities could come together and watch the Ecosystem Call IRL. Local communities came together in 50+ cities all over the world to celebrate wins of the month, meet their online friends or make new ones & get project alpha along with some exclusive earning opportunities.
Check out the recap video from India where community members across 10 cities stepped up at a few days notice to host their local ecosystem. Hosting these events is a great way to start off because you can build your programming and distribution off of the momentum generated by these calls instead of starting from scratch.
Visit the Superteam page on River if you want to attend, host or co-host the next Ecosystem call in your city on Feb 9th.
Thoughts from the Frontier: Mobile
2024 is the year we’ll see mobile apps on Solana take off.
The selling out of the Solana Saga thanks to the BONK giveaway has created the momentum we needed to achieve escape velocity on mobile. To dismiss that as airdropping farming is naive at best but disingenuous at worst.
Here’s what happened since the Saga sold out
Over 15K genesis tokens have been activated.
Teams lined up to offers perks, airdrops and giveaways to genesis pass holders.
The community self-organised to form the SagaDAO and help teams more effectively target Solana mobile users.
Tools like Dust by Underdog are seeing significant traction from teams that want to directly airdrop to genesis holders.
The Chapter 2 device booked 30K pre-orders within 30 hours of opening up.
India is on the pre-order list and Superteam members are getting in on the action.
The Solana mobile team announced a pre-order token that allows brands, protocols and apps to target their airdrops and marketing campaigns.
Our bounty for a technical deep dive for building mobile apps on Solana got 28 submissions! This is probably the highest ever for a long form writing bounty.
The DRiP team teased that Saga users get early access to their Android app.
Two other key drivers of mobile adoption
The DRiP Mobile App — I think most people underestimate the impact this will have both on user adoption and design patterns. The app will likely support sign up without a wallet, require zero gas fees and support web2 payment methods. Anyone can download it and get started without having any context about crypto & other apps can copy key design decisions like embedding a wallet or having a web2.5 in-app token.
The Okto SDK — Developers & companies can use this to embed a wallet in their applications while providing users compliant access to both real world and crypto-native assets.
If you’re a developer looking to build on Solana being early to this trend is the best trade you can make.
News You Can Use
Some highlights from the wider Solana Ecosystem with clear call-to-actions that you can answer to elevate your web3 journey today.
The Solana Global Hackathon — 4th March to 8th April, 2024
The Solana global hackathon is back & it's going to be bigger than ever. The hackathon will be hosted on a new platform — Colosseum.
It has been built by Matty, who used to run the global hackathon at the foundation. It is designed to help you brainstorm ideas, find teammates and eventually capital. Sign up now & create your profile to get a feel of the platform, collaborators and competition.
Grants for Token Extensions
Token Extensions give SPL Tokens wings — specifically, the ability to add features like private transfers, hooks, transfer fees, interest bearing tokens, immutability, non-transferability, rich metadata, etc.
For a limited time period the Solana foundation is inviting grant applications from people looking to build open source tooling and infrastructure applications that help future builders.
Mint your Solfate Solana DevList NFT
The team at Solfate has built the Solana DevList as a public good to help protocols, teams and brands engage with Solana developers.
Anyone can claim a DevList NFT by showing their contribution to a Solana Github repo. The approval process is a mix of automated and manual review. Once approved you will receive a non-transferrable NFT that represents your identity as a developer. We hosted Nick from Solfate to talk about this, you can catch the recording here.
Claim a free Bryan Johnson x Degen Poet Collectible
Bryan Johnson and Degen Poet collaborated to drop a free digital collectible to all DRiP users. Apart from the amazing art you also get access to the Blueprint waitlist
New season of the Network State Podcast
The Network state podcast is back with a new season — make sure you catch Toly talking about his thesis for the future of Solana mobile.
Community Hackathons
Three community run hackathons you can participate in
Solana Scribes for writes — sign up here.
Metaplex announces cHack for cNFT infra & apps and their new startup program.
Bonkathon in Q1
This truly feels like one of the most promising times for the Solana Ecosystem and we’re incredibly excited to help the best developers, founders & operators navigate through it.
Credit to the Little Unusual team for the cover image & accompanying video
Superteam is vibe ❤️
Go Superteam!