Inside Solana Sandstorm
Key learnings & top picks from Solana's first ever community run hackathon
We looked at the submissions to Solana’s recently concluded and first-ever community-organised hackathon - Sandstorm. In this essay, we’ll take you through some of our favourite projects from the 220+ submissions received. These are not official results. If you successfully shipped a working product to the hackathon – congrats – you are a legend!
Genesis
Sandstorm is the first-ever community-organised hackathon in the Solana ecosystem. It is a practical manifestation of the idea that blockchains are cities, foundations are the city hall and the rest is barren land for builders - not just for making their towers (projects) but also developing infrastructure and public goods (hackathons).
And like with most emergent phenomena, even the people behind it - by their own admission - were insufficiently bullish on the life it would take.
About the hackathon
The key differences between a bottom-up and top-down hackathon are most evident when you look at the organisation of tracks and judges. Most hackathons have 5-6 tracks decided by a small group of people and an esteemed judging panel.
Sandstorm on the other hand has over 25 tracks.
Anyone could create a track by sponsoring a prize of their liking. For context, many tracks start at $1k.
And everyone who sponsored a track is a judge.
The result is creative chaos – bringing in 220+ submissions!
4 Key Observations
Decentralisation in Action
This hackathon has demonstrated a playbook for organising decentralised hackathons while increasing the social decentralisation of the Solana ecosystem.
In a few weeks, they were able to aggregate the attention, labour, and capital of a significant number of projects and contributors. Sandstorm is so culturally relevant that an outsider wouldn’t be able to tell it was any different from a foundation organised hackathon. Maybe the path to decentralisation is by unbundling these critical activities from foundations and core teams, one at a time.
Decentralisation is about the abundance of leadership that enables the creation of value. Mert has emerged as one of the strong voices providing leadership through his ideas and actions. Props and thanks to all the co-organisers!
This sets the tone that anyone can influence the ecosystem through principled ideas and actions instead of ideological larp about decentralisation. QED.
Catalysing Composability
The most common playbook for achieving composability is by offering grants to anyone who is willing to build on your protocol. However it is hard to find distribution and quality for your specific niche. The other approach is to build a v1 product and get sufficient users which then attracts other devs. This is the farcaster approach, but it is risky and expensive.
A community organised hackathon offers an alternative. Because everyone gets a track and benefits from the aggregated attention and cultural spotlight, projects can find a few sincere teams much more effectively. And because teams can submit to multiple tracks, the risk of building on a particular protocol is hedged.
BONK as an Arcade coin
We wrote about how BONK is operating at the intersection of memes, utility and principles in a previous essay. It is also one of the rare occasions where a token’s utility has increased after an airdrop.
There were over 35 submissions to Sandstorm that supported BONK. What’s interesting is that most of these were casual on-chain games like rock-paper-scissors, coin flip, etc.
BONK might end up becoming the first effective virtual arcade (h/t spacemandev) that drives adoption to scores of casual games and apps - because it has a core group of users who take pride in being the degens of the ecosystem and find joy in burning BONK.
For more on arcade tokens, see the link below - shared with a timestamp for your convenience.
Forums over websites for submissions
While scouring through submissions to find the top picks for this essay I suddenly realised that I could ping the teams behind any project I found interesting and likely get a response.
This is unlike previous hackathons that use dedicated websites which are designed specifically to host submissions, that nobody ever looks at. Because discord is inherently sticky,
Lurkers are familiar with dropping a comment UX
Founders are likely to be notified and respond in time
This means teams can build with community feedback instead of being forced to compete on easy-to-game votes. And, judges can gauge the intent of teams to continue building past the hackathon through their actions in these chats instead via a checkbox in the submission form.
Over time forums like Dispatch, Dialect, etc will occupy this space by building more specialised experiences like NFT-gating, smart actions, etc.
Our Top 15 Picks
In no particular order,
Heliport
Heliport is a decentralised wallet that enables payments and transactions on Solana through the IoT infrastructure of the Helium Network.
Check out their submission & upvote here
Our Notes: Heliport unlocks the ability to send payments anywhere in the world without needing a traditional internet or cellular connection.
Staking xNFT by Cogent Crypto
The staking xNFT is your one-stop shop to do any and all staking management. We have included many operations that simply don’t exist in other wallets. This includes sending stake accounts, instant unstaking, splitting and merging, claiming MEV rewards, etc.
It lets you see when stake accounts will become fully active or ready for withdrawal. And it supports staking and unstaking for stakepools via their contracts directly as well as through swapping on jupiter.
Check out their submission & upvote here
Our Notes: Making staking more accessible is critical to enhancing the security of the Solana network. As the xNFT ecosystem becomes more active and Backpack goes mobile, we expect services like this to just get embedded as smart actions within other applications.
Sporting Labs - F1 fantasy league
Sporting Labs is launching an F1 Fantasy League on Solana. They have developed an xNFT and Staking Pool for Solana Sandstorm. The xNFT includes a Leaderboard and Staking page where players can confirm their F1 car on a race day.
They use Switchboard’s VRF to determine the results and tokens are awarded upon unstaking, as the contract automatically checks the VRF result. These token balances are displayed on the xNFT leaderboard as points using Helius.
Check out their submission & upvote here
Caramel (Superteam)
Caramel enables open-source developers to monetise their SDKs by selling them in Solana and SPL tokens. It provides a secure and convenient way for devs to earn money and for users to purchase valuable SDKs with the added benefit of using crypto transactions.
Check out their submission & upvote here
Our Notes: This product makes code natively monetisable. Not only is it a powerful tool to make open-source development sustainable but has the potential to create a dynamic liquid market for code.
Amjad has spoken about planning to implement this concept within Replit (I think it was on the Moment of Zen podcast but can’t seem to locate the clip - please drop it in the comments if you find it)
UDM
Unique Delegation Manager is a toolset built for managing a “master-delegate” relationship between 1-to-many wallets. Protocols that implement it can allow the safe execution of numerous actions for users without exposing their assets to any risks. You can watch the product demo here.
Check out their submission & upvote here
Our Notes: We’ve long said that wallets are a feature, especially in the context of mobile. Applications like this demonstrate the same principle in the context of today’s products. Keychain is a similar product submitted.
This enables a single person to have a unified experience despite using multiple wallets or a friend to share their profile/access temporarily and securely. It currently supports read-only access, i.e. you can’t spend on behalf of the delegated wallet. UDM was nominated to this list by Dhrumil.
Bokken – Solana Program Debugging Tool
Bokken is a developer debugging tool that assists in the detection and correction of errors in Solana programs. Bokken has the ability to hit break points, step through transactions, modify values, view the pertinent property and logging information, and much more.
Check out their submission & upvote here
Our Notes: Nominated by Superteam Glasseater and giga-chad Anoushk.
Monstrè x Elusiv (Superteam)
Enables private payments on Solana pay. For example, a user can purchase coffee privately at Solana Spaces by entering the amount of SOL they wish to send, the Elusiv Key, and generating a Solana Pay-compatible QR code from their mobile phone. The merchant can then scan the QR code, sign and send the transaction, and the SOL is transferred from the user's private balance to the merchant's wallet.
Check out their submission & upvote here
Our Notes: An incredibly useful product at the intersection of mobile, payments, and privacy. Their recent partnership with Solana Spaces for a pop-up series through Singapore will be an ideal sandbox for taking this to customers.
SolPyre
A platform built for creating NFT burning campaigns. Users create campaigns for any selection NFTs they choose, create a reward pool, and then all other users are rewarded for burning NFTs in the campaign. For e.g. projects who want to allow holders to burn Gen-1 collection NFTs to receive WL tokens for Gen-2 collection.
We weren’t able to find a demo video and the campaign creation flow is wip, so for now we’re taking the team at their word.
Check out their submission & upvote here
Our notes: In our essay on BONK we wrote about how burning as a value accrual mechanism is likely to become more popular. Building a utility that allows projects to run many quick experiments will help the ecosystem iterate and observe what works.
Another interesting project on similar lines is Sol Pi. An NFT collection where the price and rarity of each item are set by the amount of SOL burned in computing the value of Pi up to the farthest decimal place.
The principle of setting the price of each item in a collection based on some verifiable proof of work feels powerful and might set the stage for a new model of value accrual. If you think about it, your Superteam member NFT is as valuable as your work and that of the community.
Medici The Gig Platform on Smart Contracts
Medici is a gig-based platform with an NFT focus. Safe escrows, easy on/off ramps, and automatic art generation/mint page creation.
Check out their submission & upvote here
Our notes: Medici stands out because of their focus on building a niche marketplace. We think the future is made of many (private) specialised front-ends on top of a public composable backend. Additionally, their focus on new users by integrating magic link wallets is commendable.
Solpin
Solpin is a decentralized Instagram/Pinterest type Social Media Platform built on Solana Blockchain using Spling Protocol.
Check out their submission & upvote here
Our notes: We love the fact that you can experience the product immediately without needing to connect your wallet. It is also refreshing to see content and users already on the website - the product feels a bit alive. We hope to see them take this to mobile soon. It works as a PWA for now.
Crossbow
Google analytics for Web3. Search for any DApp, NFT, or token for actionable insights. No code, no integrations, no manual work. Powered by Helius & Flipside.
Check out their submission & upvote here
Our notes: If the next cycle is about consumer products, analytics, and tracking usage will be more important than ever. We’re excited to see a suite of products emerge in this space like spindl, slise, raleon, etc.
We expect consumer products to deploy a mix of on-chain and gated products and new capabilities are needed to stitch a holistic customer journey and track key metrics.
Amethyst
Amethyst aims to be a zero slippage, zero price impact DEX, without an order book or AMM. It allows users to enter positions with no slippage and price impact, a position always gets filled at the available oracle price. It also allows users to swap between assets available in the vault.
Oracle price feeds are used in a number of different ways, such as calculating the total asset value in a vault, being the benchmark price for when a user is entering/closing a position, changing a position's size, while swapping between assets available in the vault or even during liquidations to determine if a given position has exceeded the maximum allowed leverage for a vault's configuration.
Check out their submission & upvote here
Intersect by Triggr (Superteam)
Intersect seamlessly brings on-chain data into any workflow through a Zapier integration. Helius and Intersect's API + Zapier app brings Solana data into +5000 apps. Learn more through their website and product demos.
Check out their submission & upvote here
Our Notes: The best consumer products will incorporate the best of on-chain and off-chain elements. No-code tools will catalyse rapid experimentation and accelerate the journey to finding the right balance for different types of products.
Surf - ChatGPT for your Smart Contract
To onboard the next 1bn users, we have to make the learning process simple. Surf seeks to solve one of the critical aspects of the web3 world - Smart contracts
Check out their submission & upvote here
Our Notes (courtesy Mr. Y): It is great for speeding up program development and building no-code or low-code tools. It is important to review with code depending on the risks of the application. But it is a very interesting assistant to have in your dev arsenal!
Dominari
Dominari is an on-chain real-time strategy game where players compete and collaborate across a variety of game modes to win BONK prizes. It is built on the principles of “layered open source gaming” and the ARC Framework. Watch the product demo here.
Check out their submission & upvote here.
Thanks for reading and happy hacking!
Project descriptions have been sourced from their submissions in the LamportDAO discord. Cover image by Irffan. Thanks to Akshay BD for his feedback on drafts of this essay.
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.