zk On Solana, Apple ❤️ Web3, On-Chain StockX & More

Welcome back!

This is J264G and this week we’ve got these titbits for you:

• Solana Breakpoint: 5 speakers to watch out for.

• Web3 E-Commerce: Mad Lads demonstrates an on-chain StockX.

• Ripening Apple: Cupertino is warming up to Web3 mobile games.

Last week it was mentioned, again, that zk-rollups are the silver bullet to scale dApps in a cost-effective manner while maintaining privacy and security.

The response of Solana devs? ⬇️

Turns out we actually don't need zk-rollups if we want more privacy and security — as demonstrated by Light Protocol’s v3 which is ushering in base layer privacy on Solana.

Read on to learn more!

Click on any underlined heading / hyperlink to learn more.

Spotlight

Breakpoint — Quo Vadis Solana?

Breakpoint is Solana’s largest annual event that brings together the global Web3 community for a couple of days of building, learning, and fun.

This year, the event will take place in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and run from October 30 – November 3.

As in previous years, speakers at the event can give us an idea where Web3 in general, and Solana in particular, might be headed.

Here are 5 Breakpoint speakers to watch out for.

Jules Urbach | Render Network ➡️ Artificial Intelligence

Jules Urbach is the CEO of OTOY and founder of the Render Network. The Render Network was founded with the mission of democratising GPU rendering of digital graphics, special effects, and AI workloads. With the rise of AI, the demand for GPUs has exploded, forcing cloud service providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to limit the availability of their products and services. In turn, many companies and engineers were and are unable to meet their AI goals and targets. The Render Network, however, has an ample supply of high density GPU power that allows engineers to keep building — uninterrupted. Recently, some of the Render Network’s core products and services were migrated to Solana, further enhancing the performance and scalability of the platform.

Nuseir Yassin | Nas Company & Nas Studios ➡️ Developer Onboarding

Nuseir Yassin is a popular internet personality and vlogger. He gained widespread recognition through his Facebook page and YouTube channel called Nas Daily, where he posted daily one-minute videos about his travels and experiences. Nuseir’s companies have amassed over 60 million followers across multiple platforms, highlighting the global reach of his operation. Now, Nuseir has set his eyes on bringing people together through innovative education provided by the Nas Academy. A couple of months ago, the Nas Academy held a free 6-week live course for anyone that wanted to become a Solana developer. The event had more than 25,000 registrations. Attracting developers to an ecosystem requires creating an environment that is appealing, supportive, and offers value. This is exactly what the Nas Academy is helping Solana achieve, in the MENA region and beyond.

Tarun Chitra | Gauntlet & Robot Ventures ➡️ Decentralised Finance

As the founder and CEO of Gauntlet, Tarun Chitra has been active in the DeFi space for years. Gauntlet stress tests and evaluates smart contracts, enabling teams to improve the capital efficiency, fees, risk, and incentives of their protocols. Tarun also runs Robot Ventures with Robert Leshner. The company has primarily invested in DeFi protocols in the Ethereum ecosystem: Aave, MakerDAO, Sushiswap, and Balancer to name but a few. Having said that, Robot Ventures also invested in Jet and Drift — both of which are Solana-based protocols. Recently, the venture capital firm took part in Cega’s $5 million seed extension round led by Dragonfly Capital. This might signal that sophisticated Web3 investors are increasingly looking at Solana and scoping the landscape for DeFi protocols that are able to scale better and faster than they could in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Peter Moore | Unity Technologies ➡️ Mobile Gaming

Peter Moore is known for his former positions at Reebok, Sega, Microsoft, and Electronic Arts. After resigning from Electronic Arts, he became the CEO of Liverpool Football Club. After completing his three-year tenure with the club in 2020, Moore was named SVP and GM of Sports and Live Entertainment for Unity Technologies. Just recently, Magicblock released a Solana SDK for Unity — empowering a vast array of game developers to start building on Solana. The SDK lets game developers easily integrate Solana-based NFTs, tokens, and on-chain programmes within their Unity games, simplifying the process of building Web3 experiences. The focus here is on mobile games, which are set to take flight on Saga — Solana’s flagship mobile phone.

James Tromans | Google Cloud ➡️ Infrastructure Diversity

Cloud service providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have been perceived as not performant enough and too expensive. For this reason, the infrastructure diversity of Web3 has been subpar to date. Thus, many Web3 products and services are either run by bare-metal server providers or just one cloud service provider — mostly AWS. A lack of infrastructure diversity can be detrimental, as the recent Hetzner case highlighted. James Tromans has been looking to foster the infrastructure diversity in the Solana ecosystem by making developers familiar with Google Cloud’s Web3 portfolio. In the long run, the aim is to enhance Solana’s infrastructure decentralisation and diversification and make single points of failure less likely.

Charts Of The Week

News Bites

Base Layer Privacy: Light Protocol unveiled Light v3, a zkLayer enabling private programme execution directly on Solana. Light v3 enables developers to build fast, encrypted, and private payment, orderbook, and game solutions — no roll-ups required.

Web3 E-Commerce: Last week, Mad Lads enabled their holders to mint a NFT that can be redeemed for physical items such as t-shirts and hoodies — for free. Additionally, these NFTs were immediately tradable on platforms such as Tensor, giving us a glimpse into what an on-chain StockX might look like.

Cross-Border USDC: Decaf Pay makes it easy and affordable for anyone to send and receive USDC across borders. Recipients can hold USDC or convert it to their local currency whenever they want.

Ripening Apple: Recently, Axie Infinity announced its availability in the Apple App Store. In a similar vein, Stepn has now revealed that iPhone users will have the ability to buy and sell digital assets, even with Apple Pay, without the need to leave the Stepn app. These advancements could indicate Apple's increasing openness to blockchain-based mobile games.

Attention Economy: As state compression has brought down the cost of minting NFTs on Solana, DRiP has been airdropping free NFTs to thousands of users on a weekly basis. The goal is to promote artists and turn DRiP users into fans that buy their art and merchandise. In the future, this DTC relationship could be leveraged by advertisers as well.

Wearable Wallet: Monstrè demonstrated a wearable wallet at the Taipei Hacker House. Basically, the wallet is an armband which can be tapped to trigger “Tap-To-X” actions such as “Tap to Pay” or “Tap to Swap”.

Learning & Prototyping: Sol Trek has matured into an easy-to-use, node-based Solana platform. The solution offers an interactive interface that transforms how developers learn, teach, and prototype on Solana.

Solana Basics: Learning to code on Solana can be challenging — as new concepts, algorithms, and syntax rules have to be internalised. @0xk2_ highlights the basics of Solana development and has whipped up a thread for anyone who wants to dive into Solana head first.

Caught In 4K

Weekly Take

Keks & Giggles

And that's a wrap!

If you'd like to reach us, respond to this newsletter or reach out to me on Twitter.

Talk soon!

J264G