Inside Solana Breakpoint
Inside Solana Breakpoint
An overview of key highlights from Solana's annual flagship conference.
If you, like me, were unable to attend Breakpoint @ Lisbon this year - we’ve got you covered with this round up of key highlights.
A quick disclaimer before we begin - this essay is my personal selection of highlights compiled from twitter and the talks uploaded to the Solana YT channel. If you think I’ve missed something important let me know in the comments or via DM, promise to consider updates submitted in the next few days.
With that said, let’s dive in.
Mobile
We’ve said multiple times in previous essays that mobile is the path to mass adoption. It was really exciting to see the amount of focus & progress made, not just on the Solana mobile stack but by products across the ecosystem.
Solana Mobile Stack & Saga
The team spoke about the importance of mobile native experiences, securing the seed phrase using hardware, etc. While they’re focusing on the android SDK they’ve awarded a grant to a team working on the iOS versions. For builders - you can start submitting to the dAPP store from Jan 2023.
Watching the Solflare demo, interacting with a wallet directly from the browser feels like a pivotal moment for crypto mobile. You can watch the full talk below.
For developers and builders, you can find more information on their website or apply for a grant here. As a reminder, SMS is open-source and you can start building right away. Checkout our previous essay on SMS if you’d like to learn more.
xNFTs & Backpack
While SMS is building a new playground for crypto mobile, Backpack is short circuiting the existing limitations in their pursuit to build a crypto superapp.
Armani talks about the importance of Backpack as a piece of shared infrastructure that unlocks high speed innovation. Two recent examples are how quickly Metaplex’s NFT compression standard and Cardinal labs’ NFT enforcement standard were quickly integrated into Backpack.
Apart from the benefits of shared infrastructure, a Backpack mobile app will also remove the overhead of app store compliance from each app and isolate it to the Backpack layer - thus allowing builders to focus on their products. Catch the full talk below.
If you’re looking to build in web3, shipping an xNFT could be the equivalent of “getting in early”. The upside is that you’ll learn a valuable skill, immersed with leading products and builders, get a seat on an upcoming distribution rocket-ship, the downside is tops a week’s worth of effort.
Fun features
Was really nice to see a few cool mobile-first features built by Glow and ChapterX
Security
Now more than ever, we need to ensure products are secure enough that common users are protected. This talk by Thomas Olofsson talks about using 2FA and more to prevent sim-jacking etc.
Call to Developers
This talk by Steven Luscher on the building for mobile is a must-watch for developers.
IRL
If blockchain is a superior coordination technology then some of the most exciting applications are in the atoms domain. Here are the most exciting updates on that…
SpacesDAO
A DAO by the Solana spaces team, this is an exciting experiment in the future of retail. Until now value accrued at the centre and the edges operated at cost, i.e. brands like Nike, McDonalds etc have built global empires by licensing and franchising most business activities. The dynamics in this case are zero-sum and imbalanced, brands are incentivised to pay as little as possible for these outsourcing operations.
SpacesDAO is a novel attempt at building decentralised retail. Now, this may not work in all cases - especially where standardisation matters. But imo “Solana spaces” is a perfect first candidate because there’s no clear definition of what a space should be - co-working, hacker house, merch, meet-up, club, etc? This way they can go global instantly with hundreds of parallel experiments.
As of now, anyone can apply to be a part of the DAO and claim exclusive rights to launch a space within a certain region if you can demonstrate the ability to raise the requisite capital. Catch the full talk below.
Helium
A whole range of updates from Helium,
State of the Helium network, apart from the cellular network excited to see companies around drones, precision agriculture and climate monitoring being built on top of the network. And apparently 10% of the world’s population now has access to the Helium Wi-fi network. Remember this is a decentralised network, powered not by massive towers but lots of small devices used by people like you and me.
Solana migration: Earlier this year the helium community voted to migrate from their own L1 over to Solana. This allows the team to focus on solving their core challenges instead of solving L1 scaling issues. It also frees up $2m worth of HNT tokens to be paid for proof-of-coverage instead of network validators. They’re expecting complete the migration in Q1 2023, and have acquired the team from Strata protocol to work on this and more.
Location tracking service : They’ve launched a location tracking service powered by their network.
ASICS x StepN
In their continued push at exploring this new technology, ASICS is now working with StepN to launch a custom designed sneaker and an accompanying NFT. They were inspired to try this out from the initial blog post announcing Solana pay talking about how payments, commerce and rewards can come together in ways made uniquely possible by web3.
Teleport - Web3 Uber
NFTs & Creator Monetisation
Panel on NFT monetisation, they talk about how royalties are important but currently unsustainable and there’s no one size fits all approach: 1/1 artists are better off pushing for a good price upfront, PFP collections are better holding back a % of the mint, etc.
Metaplex presented their new NFT standard with enforceable royalties, NFT compression to massively reduce the cost of minting and “fusion” - enabling composability of NFTs by letting you combine multiple assets and creating a new one. This feels like their response to SFTs and the marketplace for traits.
The (other) Institutions are coming…
Google Cloud
Google has been slowly and steadily entering the web3 space from the infrastructure side. They support querying blockchain data via BigQuery for 12 protocols. They’ve started running validators for many L1s to get a sense of the real challenges. And now they’re launching a managed service for spinning up RPC nodes, including on Solana.
Three highlights,
One-click service to run a Solana node in a cost effective way
Include Solana data in big query so that you can marry off-chain and on-chain data seamlessly.
Invitation to apply to their web3 credits program, for up to $100k in google cloud credits.
Catch the full talk below.
And, here are 3 feature requests from Toly
Low latency, seamless state transition and tracking across time
Seed phrase storage and recovery within google auth
New biz model for google play to keep it up with changing definitions of ownership
On the consumer side, Youtube is experimenting with NFTs. But more interestingly, they’re watching SMS & Saga closely to see how it works out and inform their product strategy.
Instagram
They’ve recently announced an NFT marketplace where creators can mint and sell digital collectibles to their audiences. An important but under-appreciated point is the UX treatment being given within the app with prime real estate like the profile screen and other elements to help NFTs stand out.
Stripe
After supporting crypto payments and global payouts within their products, they’ve announced a fiat on-ramp product, demo’d with Audius. A seamless experience where you can onboard new users by abstracting out the wallet creation and swap process into their on-ramp experience.
So, as a new user, you can instantly buy any SPL token using your credit and they’ll manage setting up the wallet, conversion etc. They’re also going to be launching web3 developer tooling to make it easier for people to build and integrate crypto payments.
Finance (DeFi, CeFi, etc)
Here’s a quick look at all the major announcements
Circle announced euro coin coming to Solana, along with a cross-chain transfer protocol.
ReFi : capital as a force for good, the impact of transparency in carbon credit markets and more.
Governance and progressive decentralisation . Was refreshing to hear people say that voting is overrated, concentration of power is inevitable but designing the right structures around it is more important. Today there is an over emphasis on proposals - it is ridiculous that people submit a proposal to spend $10 on a business card, the future is independent sub-DAOs with autonomy, etc.
Bringing real world assets (real estate, etc) to DeFi. It takes a lot of non-technical heavy lifting to do this and this varies for each asset class. A key insight is to focus on asset classes where it is hard to find liquidity off-chain, e.g. Credix focusing on private credit in emerging markets.
Auditing masterclass for DeFi developers and founders.
Learning
Building for the next billion users requires onboarding the next million developers, globally. Here are three updates towards onboarding contributors to Solana
SolanaU , led by Dana. Their goal is to build a widely accessible platform to make building on Solana and the upside of web3 more accessible.
C.O.G building a Solana school in Sierra Leone.
Proof of learn, a team working to gamify learning, social and complete with on-chain resumes.
Infrastructure & Engineering
Because we’re all here for the tech….
The most celebrated session, Firedancer building a new independent validator - making the network more resilient.
Dialect announces smart messaging, allowing dApp users to carry out actions like buy/sell/mint from within the context of messages.
Panel on how ZK is more about verifiability , and privacy is just a byproduct of that.
Updates from Render about their upcoming SDK, focus on performance and low-end device compatibility and ownership of renders.
Developer masterclass on building xDApp frameworks.
A panel on why MEV is inevitable and the focus should be on distributing the value equitably instead of prevention, which comes with its own costs.
Misc
Now more than ever, this talk by Alicia about dealing with self-doubt and believing in yourself - exemplified through her own web3 journey is the inspiration we all need.
Business case for the metaverse, but the part I loved most was about the freedom a virtual life can provide to those in unfavourable circumstances IRL
Updates from Star Atlas, first version of the game looks ready and mobile is coming too…
Superteam Members
Last but not least shoutout to our very own Kash and Shek for their panels on community building and social networks.
That’s all folks.
If you think there’s a great session I missed out, let me know (nicely) in the comments or DMs. Happy to consider updates for the next couple of days.
Hopefully we meet at Breakpoint next year.
Until then - stay safe and happy building.
Cheers.