On Growing Solana City
If blockchains are cities, we need a different playbook for growth
The analogy of a blockchain as a city or a protocol as a country has been around for a while. In this essay, we’ll take it one step further and talk about the implications of this on growing a blockchain globally.
Pre-read: Emergent Systems
Before we proceed, it is important to understand the concept of emergent systems. Once you get this, and I mean really get this - not just the academic idea, it fundamentally shifts your worldview. You understand how things get done, how new industries are created, why large & seemingly timeless institutions fail, etc.
This is hard because most of us spend our childhood in deterministic systems. We transition from one grade to the next. Our “result” at the end of the year is a simple sum of all the exams we’ve taken along the way. A sum of individual parts. And there are a few entities (education board, school board, teachers) who are collectively in charge of how things are conducted.
This is the exact opposite of real life.
Outcomes are non-linear, the largest gains are compounded over time, and as we’ve all learned through the last couple of years - no one is really in charge. Instead, we rely on various independent actors to coordinate effectively for anything to happen. For e.g., we needed municipal, medical, police, and elected officials to all step up for Covid response. In the happy cases (e.g. Mumbai), they made thousands of small policy decisions independently but coordinated on the bigger picture.
Here’s my summary of Wikipedia’s definition of Emergence. TL;DR - it feels like magic.
Systems are said to have emergent properties when the “whole” has properties that can’t be reduced to its parts. When something new is created through a series of p2p interactions. And you can “feel” the whole come together and persist over time once it achieves sufficient scale. You can’t simulate the system or predict its behaviour through a set of rules; you can only observe it. These systems depend on feedback loops to refine or remove individual elements.
A few examples of emergent systems:
Life.
While we study physics, chemistry and biology we can’t break down life into a simple sum of their functions. There’s something magical about our existence and evolution over time that we can feel and observe but not simulate or predict.
Democracy.
What makes a thriving democracy? A strong judiciary, a free press, fair elections, involved citizens, competent bureaucrats, honest politicians, etc.
Some of these? All of these? We know the answer lies here, but not exactly. There are many successful democracies that have varying degrees of each of these elements - it is how they coexist that determines the end outcome.
Markets.
Independent individuals and institutions act based on their time preference, risk appetite, and information which results in the movement of prices, transfer of goods and services, and creation of industries. In sufficiently large markets, no one can really predict what will happen in the future. This is why portfolios of stocks selected by a monkey or index funds end up beating most actively managed funds.
App Ecosystems.
Once Apple & Google launched the Android & iOS app stores, they couldn’t predict which apps would gain lots of users and generate revenue. They simply created a platform for users and tools for builders. It was mostly after observing apps succeed that could they decide to react (e.g. by launching competing services etc.)
What about companies?
The reason why it is important to emphasize the analogy of a blockchain as a city & not a company — is that companies are not emergent systems. They are designed to be predictable and safeguard innovations born out of start-ups or garages. They are optimised to provide consistent quarterly financial reports and predictable forward-looking guidance.
Just look at recent examples of the stock prices of Meta & Netflix to see how much companies are penalized if they can’t predict the future. This is why early-stage ventures are characterised by more uncertainty compared to mature companies. And this is why mature companies typically separate “Innovation” and “Business as Usual (BAU)” functions. This is also why “CEO-led” companies go through extra hoops (e.g. create dual-class stock) and ensure they can swim against the tide before they turn it or drown.
Nothing wrong with this. But this isn't the way to scale a blockchain.
You can predict what generates value for a company as it matures. However even as the underlying protocol matures, you still can’t predict ahead of time which applications will be important, how they’ll compose together and the value they’ll create. The Solana blockchain has technically matured significantly over the last couple of years but that doesn’t help predict which applications built on top of it will generate the most value.
Why some cities never sleep…
Cities are emergent systems. It is hard to pin down what makes a great city to one or two specific things. Yet some cities attract the best talent & capital despite being overcrowded and expensive.
We can observe that cities need infrastructure, law, finance, commerce, etc. But you can’t predict success based on any one of these. Many cities thrive without many of these elements. Many cities don’t despite having all of these elements.
Cliff Ellis has written a blog on the History of Cities. In that, he talks about Kevin Lynch's - “A Theory of Good City Form”. He argues that there are 5 dimensions of city performance,
Vitality: Provide a safe environment for the survival of your citizens
Sense: Well-organised so that citizens can perceive a coherent form & function
Fit: Provided the infrastructure for your citizens to thrive in their individual pursuits
Access: Strive to enable equal opportunity
Control: Good governance
In addition, he says that cities also need to be efficient in making the trade-offs needed across these goals & just in distributing fruits of progress across their citizens.
I found this para particularly inspiring:
“These criteria tell aspiring city builders where to aim, while acknowledging the diverse ways of achieving good city form. Cities are endlessly fascinating because each is unique, the product of decades, centuries, or even millennia of historical evolution.
As we walk through city streets, we walk through time, encountering the city-building legacy of past generations. Paris, Venice, Rome, New York, Chicago, San Francisco -- each has its glories and its failures.
In theory, we should be able to learn the lessons of history and build cities that our descendants will admire and wish to preserve. That remains a constant challenge for all those who undertake the task of city planning.”
In practice, the greatest cities are built around a catchment area for producers. In the past that was fertile land by the Nile & today, it is through housing, infrastructure, and tax policies. But no one has been able to predict the trajectory of a city looking forward. It emerges through the shared efforts of its citizens, nurtured & enabled by the city administration.
Communities + Economy + Governance = City?
Let’s bring this all together and understand how it plays out in launching an L1, through the example of Superteam in India.
Community, not Circus.
Kash covered a lot of this in his blog on Building communities that ship. Arguably the most important of all decisions was keeping membership gated by #proof-of-work. This creates the right kind of friction for enabling a community of producers to thrive.
People make one of two mistakes, the first one is to invite everyone in. The problem is that they either end up with noise when times are good or become ghost towns when times are bad.
Or, they end up selling memberships through NFTs or tokens. In this case, you end up with members who are somewhat rich but not necessarily aligned with your mission, and who also expect some kind of financial return. To quote our very own Akshay BD - “Raising money from misaligned/unknown people isn’t community, it is circus.”
So the first step at seeding Superteam was creating a space for people who have demonstrated both the capability and the intent for being digital producers.
Economy, not Vibes.
The next step (although these don’t happen sequentially) is to unlock earning opportunities for these members. Today one thing most Superteam members have in common is that they’ve earned $$ online, through Superteam. This happens through grants, bounties and jobs from sponsors like the Solana Foundation & several other ecosystem projects.
This is measured as the community GDP.
This is even more impressive when you realise that there is no Superteam treasury or entity that benefits from this. There is no treasury that takes a cut or a token that accrues value. All value accrues to members and the companies/projects they start. This might not be sustainable in the long term, but for now, it allows everyone to focus on the Superteam community instead of the “platform”.
Building Superteam Earn is the next step in this direction. After running the program for a year using Airtable and Notion - the team decided to productize it and unlock scale. You can read the announcement essay on our blog.
Min Governance needed for Smooth Production
One of the key principles of Superteam is individual sovereignty & the freedom to associate. Members are free to contribute as much or as little as they please. Teams organise and dissolve around projects that peak the passion of individual members. Each team can implement its own structure which could involve voting or a hierarchical structure. From observation - projects with a clear lead are most likely to ship.
What’s great is that members can be part of multiple teams in different capacities and teams form and dissolve quickly.
That doesn’t mean there is no governance. The core team makes decisions like organising Discord roles, laying out shared values, and occasionally removing members if needed.
For example, a key value of Superteam is winning together -- we build each other up not pull each other down. There are no rules for how to do this but when instances of behaviour are observed the core team will intervene. A sign of a thriving community is that over time other members spot these and speak up themselves.
You can crystallise this into the principle of intervention only when absolutely necessary, i.e. where the community is unable or unwilling to do what is needed. And we believe this extends to the role that the Solana foundation should play within the ecosystem as well.
At the same time, the core team recognizes that not everyone might agree with their approach. In such cases, members are encouraged to fork Superteam. Eventually, when Superteam does get forked, it won’t be a failure but a win. To quote the essay, it’ll be celebrated as “friends moving to a new city”.
Superteam Vietnam, Turkey & Germany
Having observed Superteam India grow over a year, allowed the core team to double down on things that work and discard things that don’t (refine and remove).
These learnings have informed the approach to launching Superteam in 3 new markets. The playbook is simple,
Attract the most motivated and talented producers
Enable them to learn-earn-build on Solana
Get out of their way
Vietnam
Led by Anh & Minh, the 2nd Season of their coding camp is going strong with 1000+ registrations. They’re also conducting many IRL coding sessions, speaker panels, and private mentoring sessions with folks from the ecosystem. You can catch the recordings of their sessions here.
Follow them on Twitter for more updates & check out the website for earning opportunities.
Turkey
Led by Gulcan, Navennet & Ezgi in partnership with Patika.dev. They’ve launched a self-paced learning program for young developers to learn and build on Solana. It is accepting applications till 1st Feb 2023, click here to apply.
Two open bounties you can submit right now, Step Finance deep-dive & Solana Turkey Ecosystem Map. There are prizes worth $1000 up for grabs & submissions are open till 15th Dec. Once again, if you’re not a dev, this is one of the best ways to earn membership, apply now!
Follow them on Twitter for more updates & check out the website for earning opportunities.
And finally, hearty congratulations and a warm welcome to all the newly minted members of Superteam Turkey. ICYMI, drop a shout-out here.
Germany
Led by Tamar, they started off by sponsoring hackatum, the hackathon of the Technical University of Munich.
They’ve since launched a series of developer events to create a catchment area for the most talented developers in the region and help onboard them to Solana. You can sign up for the IRL events here.
They’ve recently given out a string of instagrants & concluded submissions for 3 bounties: a product review of Magic Eden, a Solana Germany Ecosystem Map & a Superteam Germany T-shirt design contest.
Follow them on Twitter for more updates & check out the website for earning opportunities.
As you can see, all the 3 new markets are currently primarily in the learn phase and will evolve into the build and earn phase as the first crop of graduates from these programs become citizens of Solana city and start building their own projects.
Thanks to Akshay BD for providing the inspiration for & reviewing drafts of this essay.
Cover image by Yash B