Solana OSS, Solana AI, On-Chain Credit Scoring & More

Welcome back!

This is J264G and in this week's newsletter we’ve got these titbits for you:

• Solana & Open Source Software: Current & future developments

• Solana Goes AI: Helius is enhancing the developer experience

• Atadia: Pioneering KYC-free & zero-collateral short-term loans

AI.

Yes, we buzzword bingoed you.

And we know what’s on your mind.

😂

Let's get into it!

Click on any underlined heading / hyperlink to learn more.

Spotlight

Open Sourcing Solana

Open source software (OSS) are a cornerstone of web3.

But when thinking about web2 and the walled gardens that helped companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook turn into juggernauts, it's not immediately clear why OSS would make any web3 project successful.

For this reason, the majority of products and services on Solana are currently not open source.

Having said that, this trend has started to reverse as more and more Solana projects are open sourcing their work.

Here's why:

• Transparency & Security: Open sourcing software can lead to improved security as more eyes are reviewing the code, and vulnerabilities are discovered and fixed more quickly.

• Collaboration & Innovation: OSS allow for a wider community of developers to collaborate and contribute, leading to a faster rate of innovation and improvement.

• Increased Composability: OSS can also foster greater interoperability between protocols, as standards and APIs can be developed and adopted more easily.

• Talent Pool: By open sourcing, existing project teams can tap into a global pool of talent and expertise, allowing them to find and fix bugs and add new features quickly.

• Education & Onboarding: Open sourcing is also crucial for the overall educational progress, as it provides free access to both information and resources. New developers can be onboarded more easily and learn from others by observing how they create, optimise and deploy code.

Bearing these points in mind, it becomes apparent that OSS can push the entire Solana ecosystem forward by bringing in more developers that work on innovative and secure products/services which easily integrate with existing ones — ultimately creating a flywheel.

That being said, forking and vampire attacks are a real challenge in web3.

But as Uniswap has shown, even these issues can be overcome.

It seems, however, that many web3 teams don’t have a clear version on how to build moats which would allow them to open source their work confidently.

In this context, web2 companies have a host of tools at their disposal — low-cost production, high switching costs, network effects, intangible assets, and efficiencies of scale.

However, the benefit of these tools remains limited in web3, in particular with respect to OSS.

So, what can web3 teams do?

Focus on onboarding, user delight and branding.

• Onboarding: Bringing in new users consistently with frictionless on ramps to sustainably grow the user base.

• User Delight: After a successful onboarding, (live/chat) support, guides, and documentation are key. All these interactions need to be appealing crafted and easy to digest — making new users feel at ease and delighted.

• Branding: The look and feel of the onboarding, user delight, and obviously the product/service itself, shape a brand. A consistent and well-designed brand can build trust with users, helping to establish a positive reputation and a loyal user base (user stickiness).

Onboarding, user delight, and branding can’t easily be copied or forked, and therefore enable web3 teams to build true moats (again, see Uniswap).

In the Sandstorm hackathon, open source projects were heavily incentivised and rewarded, and the same can be expected with the Grizzlython hackathon.

Subsequently, OSS will become more and more prevalent on Solana, and the ability to build moats a core competitive advantage — specifically for DeFi projects.

Solana & OSS, a new dawn awaits!

Charts Of The Week

News Bites

Solana Goes AI: Helius, a developer platform, has partnered with Ora to launch an AI programming assistant. Developers can use the AI assistant to ask Helius/Solana-specific questions and get qualified answers, which can reduce their coding time and simultaneously enhance their coding experience.

On-Chain Credit Scoring: Atadia gave a deep dive into Lending Lab, a dApp that underwrites zero-collateral short-term loans based on on-chain profiles — no KYC required. Lending Lab has already given out ~$400k+ worth of loans and the default rate is ~ 2-3%.

Language Interoperability: Solana's ABIv2 project will allow different languages such as C, C++, Solidity, Rust, and Move to plug into the runtime and gain instant composability across the entire ecosystem — vastly improving the overall developer experience.

Secure Ghost: Phantom has adopted “Sign In With” (SIW) standards which are able to prevent the interception of sign-in messages, protect user's privacy, and improve web3 authentication.

NFT Fundraising: The 1:1 NFT marketplace Formfunction launched Campaigns which allow creators to bootstrap projects by fundraising through NFTs. These NFTs give collectors access to perks such as early access, airdrops, physical replicas, and much more.

Bonkeverse: Since its launch, the Bonk token has interacted with more unique Solana programs than any other token, aside from $USDC and $SOL. Additionally, ~ 40% of wallets that swapped tokens on Solana since Christmas 2022 have at least traded $Bonk once.

Swapping Monkes: Hadeswap, the largest NFT AMM on Solana, has acquired one of the most iconic Solana NFT collections — Solana Monkey Business (SMB). Hadeswap will transfer the ownership of the NFT brand to its own DAO, which will continue to build out the SMB brand.

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 to you soon!

J264G