Lightspeed Newsletter: Harnessing Solana to inspire a better world

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Howdy! 

Today is indeed a fun Friday, as we’re bringing you an opinion piece from Jeffrey Albus for today’s lead item.

In hip-hop terms, this is like when Dr. Dre stepped away from the keyboard and got behind the microphone to record his sophomore solo album, ‘2001.’

Now, it’s time I pass the mic to Jeff:

Opinion: Solana should host the next generation of self-improvement apps 

This cycle’s big innovation probably isn’t memecoins, because they don’t actually solve any problems. In fact, they might be the culmination of all the bad behavior that has come before—the final boss of anti-utility. 

Memecoins, for the most part, make no grand promises. They exist simply to exist, rewarding risky behavior justified only by the one-in-a-million chance of a moonshot. 

But there is one problem that the current market cycle might be able to finally solve: incentivizing behavior by rewarding self-improvement and the positive impact we each make on the world.

We’re already seeing some of this. Move-to-earn apps like STEPN, Walken, and Genopets incentivize people to live active lifestyles — effectively paying users to be healthy. 

But the concept can go far beyond that use case. Imagine a world where people are rewarded for their role in reducing and recycling single-use materials. That’s exactly what IBM’s Plastic Bank initiative has been working towards. Launched in 2019, Plastic Bank provides tokens as a reward for collecting and recycling plastic waste.

Picture being rewarded for maintaining a healthy diet, or for completing your yearly medical check-ins. What if we incentivized intelligence by rewarding people who teach themselves new subjects and skills, and then used their verifiable subject matter expertise to weight their voting power within applicable on-chain governance mechanisms? When was the last time you volunteered at your local homeless shelter? What if you received reputation-based attestations for your charitable work, and that in turn translated into higher on-chain yield and status? 

None of this has ever really been possible before, because how would you track it? But now, blockchain has solved the issue of accurate, transparent record-keeping. 

So why haven’t we seen more work on utilities like these being done in the 15 years since its inception, and why is it different now? Well, the problem is twofold.

Firstly, it’s an issue of scalability. Blockchains have historically struggled with transaction throughput and high fees, making real-time tracking of behaviors and attestations impractical. 

This is where Solana can come into play. At long last, we have a user-friendly blockchain that’s lightning fast and dirt cheap, making it a viable platform for these types of applications.

With that problem solved, there’s still at least one more battle we need to fight: Persistent identity management and the prevention of sybil attacks. These occur when bad actors create multiple fake accounts and use them to exploit the sorts of systems we’re talking about to unfairly maximize their gains.

Developers are attempting to fix this by implementing proof-of-humanity and persistent identity systems. Proof-of-humanity involves verifying that each participant is a unique human being, typically through methods such as biometric data and social proofs. Persistent identities, meanwhile, are digital identities that remain consistent over time and across different platforms, making it difficult for bad actors to create multiple fake identities. 

The people working on this problem believe that if users were made to use persistent IDs to participate in rewards schemas, it would reduce the number of bad actors over time. 

Under such a system, networks would only need to catch someone cheating once and simply ban the offender. Users would not be able to get around these bans by infinitely creating additional accounts, making the risk of bad behavior higher than the reward. Bans might be temporary, or they might be permanent. 

Either way, the result is that platforms train participant behavior by rewarding the good and excommunicating the bad.

This is similar to what solutions like Worldcoin — with its biometric ID system, currently operational on Optimism and Ethereum​ — are looking to achieve. It’s certainly not alone in the race to solve this problem. Competing projects like the Galactica Network have chosen to take a more decentralized approach to self-sovereign identity management and digital citizenship​​. 

Solana developers have a few digital ID solutions of their own in the works as well. For instance, Identity.com is a user-first identity platform that integrated with Solana back in 2021.

Social maintenance has long seemed like an unsolvable problem. But because of the fidelity of efficient networks like Solana, this may finally be possible. If that is true, it could mean that we no longer have to accept the reputational damage that comes from the high-profile actions of bad actors, or wallow as our industry’s innovations are reduced to gimmicks and get-rich-quick schemes. 

Self-executing systems that reward individual positive impact are the true promise of blockchain technology — and they are finally within our grasp.

— Jeffrey Albus

Zero In

Something interesting is once again happening with Solana’s transaction numbers.

Solana’s vote transactions suddenly skyrocketed by more than 50 million on a per-day basis this week, according to Blockworks Research. There were over 200 million vote transactions sent Thursday, far above the roughly 140 million daily vote transactions Solana has hovered around for the past few months. 

Vote transactions tend to receive less attention in Solana commentary because they are not sent by users and bots; those are classified as non-vote transactions.

Validators submit vote transactions to confirm entries sent from the leaders of different slots are valid, which helps the network reach consensus. 

I’ve sent out the bat signal about this sudden increase in validator voting, but I haven’t gotten back any firm answers as to what’s causing it. It’s worth noting that more than 90% of validators switched to an updated software version in recent days, so that could be a promising place to investigate further.

— Jack Kubinec

The Pulse

If you want a fun weekend read, I recently enjoyed this 2021 blog post on Solana written by the popular tech and startup newsletter ‘Not Boring.’ The piece unpacks some of Solana’s early history, and it’s interesting to see how the narratives surrounding Solana have evolved over the past three years (see: SBF). For those who don’t necessarily want to read 10,000 words, I’ll drop a couple moments I enjoyed below:

• “ …when crypto started taking off in 2017, minting millionaires and creating network congestion, Anatoly was perfectly prepared. In October, he had the realization that made him manic: blockchains have the same issues as communications networks, and they might have the same solutions.
• “It wasn’t obvious back then that this would work. One VC I spoke with showed me a calendar invite for a December 2017 coffee meeting with Anatoly to discuss the project. After the coffee, he passed. There was a lot of competition to be the next big blockchain. This VC told me, ‘You had Dfinity, Polkadot, Tezos, and Cosmos, all of which had lots of hype and lots of funding.’”
• “In July 2020, though, Solana hit its first major turning point: crypto trading platform FTX announced that it was going to build its DEX, Serum, on top of Solana.
  The specific DEX was less important than who was behind it. There are many DEXes, but there’s only one Sam Bankman-Fried. SBF is somewhat of a deity in crypto … In Serum’s decision, Solana picked up not just a new project, but essentially landed Crypto LeBron as a spokesperson in the process.”

— Jack Kubinec

One Good DM

A message from Philip Forte, CEO of Elixir Network:

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