Anatoly Is Playing 4D Chess, Bankless Loves Solana & More

Welcome back!

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

• 4D Chess: We discuss what MKBHD missed about Saga.

• Payments: Helio & WooCommerce to supercharge e-commerce.

• Vitalik Drain: We highlight how Phantom helps to avoid wallet drains.

Builders build, and that's why registrations for the Hyperdrive hackathon got off to a scorching start.

This is the time to buckle down and ship an MVP which users can play with asap, giving you enough time to absorb feedback, adjust, and pivot if need be.

Mainly, we’d all love to see apps come out of Hyperdrive which abstract away all things blockchain and address real pain points of a vast and global population.

Hyperdrive will conclude in little over a month — approx. 4 weeks to ship an app that replicates friend.tech’s scaling success outside of web3/crypto (´⊙ω⊙`)

Let’s get cooking!

Click on any underlined heading / hyperlink to learn more.

Spotlight

Payments Reimagined

I just landed in Taipei this morning.

As soon as I set foot on the island, I paid for all my purchases with Line Pay: Starbucks coffee (in-app vouchers FTW), Uber drive, metro tickets, and lunch — gua bao and bubble tee, of course.

Line Pay dominates everyday life in Taiwan: The app does not only allow you to pay at most restaurants, food courts, and street markets, it also allows you to pay utility bills and insurance, take out loans, buy non-essentials at Ikea, shop at Uniqlo online — you name it.

This got me thinking: How can web3/crypto win against the current payment ecosystem, incl. Line Pay, WeChat, and PayPal?

In the last couple of weeks, both Shopify and Visa released their Solana-specific announcements.

Don't get me wrong, both these developments are seismic for web3/crypto as a whole. However, I can't help but think that they might not ring in a real turning point just yet.

Here’s why.

The Solana Pay integration allows Shopify stores to charge and receive USDC for their goods and services. Moreover, Visa aims to leverage USDC on both Ethereum and Solana to optimise the speed and cost of transactions and settlements.

As such, customers need to have USDC in their possession to take advantage of Solana Pay on Shopify, while Visa plans to piggyback USD on USDC to increase its business efficacy and efficiency within a closed loop system.

My hypothesis: Solana Pay on Shopify will not significantly increase the TAM of web3/crypto as it caters to existing crypto-native users, stablecoin settlements via USDC, however, might just do so on the enterprise level.

The real unlock, however, will come when we're able to address both push and pull use cases:

• Push (leveraging web3/crypto): e.g. stablecoin settlement

• Pull (using web3/crypto): send, receive, and spend stablecoins/cryptocurrencies

It seems we’re making inroads regarding the push use case.

But what about the pull use case, i.e. why would people want to send, receive, and spend stablecoins/cryptocurrencies directly?

 Simple.

Because it would allow them to surpass high credit card processing fees, price gouging FX transaction costs, and generally slow transactions which might not even go through after 5PM or on weekends (Servus, Deutschland 👋).

However, WeChat and Line Pay already offer these benefits — today. What they don't offer are self custody/censorship resistance, privacy and security, and access to DeFi.

Thus, if we can infuse stablecoins/cryptocurrencies into the existing global payment infrastructure — as incumbents dominate consumer relationships and distribution — and offer the same benefits and more than apps such as WeChat, Line Pay, and PayPal, web3/crypto mass adoption might truly be reached.

In this context, auxiliary crypto-centric payment services such as Meso, Beam, and TipLink already exist — but they mainly offer crypto on- and off-ramps and mostly lack both crypto-fiat swaps and direct spending options.

Code and Sling, however, might be able to bridge the gap.

Sling allows users to send and receive fiat fast and cost-effectively, as transactions are settled via USDC on Solana. Going forward, Sling will also allow for the sending and receiving of stablecoins, giving users the best of both worlds. The biggest driver of adoption for Sling is probably the direct spending option: the service allows users to pay for goods and services through the app or by sending links to payees — retailers or individuals — which don’t have the app installed.

Admittedly, this might currently be a bit bothersome for retailers and their respective POS systems. But if we could integrate Sling with, let's say, WeChat, Line Pay, and PayPal, or neobanks such as Wise, Revolut, and Monzo, we could send and receive fiat and stablecoins/cryptocurrencies, swap among them, AND directly spend them at retail stores … 🤯

The future of payments on Solana is looking bright! ✨

Chart Of The Week

News Bites

4D Chess: One of the biggest YouTubers, Marques Brownlee, released a video review of Saga — Solana's flagship phone. Generally, his take is fair, yet some strategic and tactical aspects — e.g. that the SDK is open source and can be extended to support any blockchain — are not mentioned. If you’d like to get a more holistic view, read our Saga spotlight here.

Global Payments: You’ve heard all about the Shopify and Solana Pay news. Up next: Helio partners with WooCommerce to enable merchants who run their website on WordPress — 3.5 million stores globally; making up 24% of the top 1 million e-commerce websites — to integrate decentralised payments powered by both SOL and USDC.

Vitalik Drains: Hackers gained access to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s X account and posted a malicious link falsely promoting a free NFT. Victims who clicked on the link got their wallets drained and suffered losses exceeding $691,000. Here’s what Phantom is doing to prevent this from happening to you ⬇️

Fees.wtf: As we all know, transaction fees in the EVM ecosystem can be steep. But how do EVM transaction costs compare 1:1 to Solana? Well, head over to fees.wtf to find out 😏

Getting Bread: Lancer, a platform for freelancers, has officially launched. Initially, the focus will be on matching contractors to developers. What’s unique is that developers will be able to get paid in either fiat or crypto.

Caught In 4K

To our subscribers
~ Ryan & David ~

💜

Sincerely,
Solana Community 🫰

Weekly Take

Keks & Giggles

And that's a wrap!

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

Talk soon!

J264G

_{DISCLAIMER
None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research. Lastly, please be advised that we discuss products and services from our partners from which our team members may hold tokens / equity.}