I recently got into the Solana India Fellowship. It is an 8-week hands-on program to learn, earn and build on Solana. There is a new theme each week, from NFTs to DeFi to Gaming, followed by quests, exercises, and Q&A sessions by experts. And you get a $2500 stipend!
# How I discovered Solana
I came to know about Solana last year when I was learning Rust. That's when I started diving deeper into the crypto ecosystem and web3. I bought some SOL, created a wallet, started using dApps on Solana and read a lot.
Looking back, I feel that Solana spoiled me. I expected all blockchains to be fast and have great wallets like Phantom. I tried Ethereum next, and the experience was significantly worse. I was paying $80 gas fees and waiting for transactions to complete, and Metamask wasn't very intuitive. Solana and products in its ecosystem were the only ones I looked forward to using.
# Getting into the fellowship
After all this experimentation, I wanted to work full-time in web3 and see what was possible with this new technology stack. Around this time, I came to know about the fellowship on SuperteamDAO's Twitter.
Superteam is a collective which helps the most promising projects in the Solana ecosystem in the ascending world (India, South East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa) launch and grow. I had been following Superteam for a while, particularly their podcasts.
The fellowship looked exciting and aligned with my goals, so I applied. I had to fill out a few application forms and give an in-person interview. About a week back, I got an email from them welcoming me to the fellowship. Yay! I am excited to dive into the world of web3 and learn from a fantastic team of mentors and supporters.
If you have any questions about the fellowship, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or Email.
# Week 1: Getting Started
The first week's goal was to brush up on Rust concepts, Solana's programming model and tooling.
# Solana ecosystem and the fellowship
The week started with a talk by Chase, who works at Solana in developer relations. He talked about the Solana ecosystem, its growth over the last year, especially in India and where he sees it going. There is a lot to be optimistic and excited about! Do follow him to keep up with the ecosystem and learn how to get started with Solana. Also, check out SOL dev_ for everything you might need for developing on Solana.
Then, we got to know more about the fellowship, its structure and goals from Neil and Gnana Lakshmi.
# Rust
I knew some Rust before starting the fellowship. I like learning new languages, and Rust was the one I chose to learn last year. Like most resolutions, it wasn't very successful. But I ended up using it in a small side project and also got to know about Solana.
I spent the 2 weeks refreshing my Rust knowledge. I enjoyed going over exercises on Rustlings and Exercism. They both have short, progressively tricky exercises you can easily do on your local machine. Simple and engaging. If anyone prefers video, have a look at these: Rust Programming Tutorials and Introduction to Rust for Solana
# Solana
The previous week, I read Explaining Solana with The Simpsons. It's one of the best introductions to Solana I have come across to date. It talks about Solana and its unique innovations. I had previously gone through the official blog posts written by Solana developers to understand why it's so fast and secure. But they were dense and a bit difficult for me to understand. But after reading the Simpsons post, it started to make sense. Kudos toJonathan Ferreira for putting it together.
This week was about learning the programming model, how to deploy to Solana and how to work with interfaces to Solana like the spl token cli. It was a fun experience to actually use the technologies that I had read about, to experience them, and to see how they worked.
# Week 2: Creating mini dApps
This week's goal was to start creating mini dApps on Solana. There are 2 parts to this - interacting with Solana using @solana/web3.js library and creating on-chain programs.
# Thoughts on web2 vs web3 development
Preethi Kasireddy discussed how web3 development differs from the classical client-server programming model. On the one hand, web3 makes it extremely simple to have a global computer with persistent storage, but on the other hand, doing iterative development is significantly more difficult. Another significant difference is the security model and how much auditing needs to be done before deployment. Because iterative upgrades are complex, auditing and security reviews must be done before deployment.
My experience so far with Solana and Ethereum aligns with that: a lot of the basic concepts are the same - you are still writing rust/solidity/js, storing/retrieving data, using a database as a source of truth - but things change a lot when you start building, deploying, combining these components. Be sure to have an open mind if you want to go deep.
# Solana web3.js library
This week, we did two quests - creating an airdrop program and creating a roulette game. Both of them were about how to use @solana/web3.js to interact with Solana and on-chain programs. The quests are relatively easy if you know JavaScript.
My quick review of the library - very easy to use, powerful (you can move real money in a couple of lines of code), and even better with Typescript with all the autocompletion goodness.
# On-chain programs
We had to build a voting program with support for delegation (same thing implemented in Solidity). I wanted to do this exercise without using the Anchor framework. Even though it makes program development much simpler and more secure, it abstracts away quite a few things. I wanted to learn how the Solana program SDK handles those things without the Anchor abstractions.
It turned out to be more challenging than I expected. I couldn't find a good starting point, so I went into a rabbit hole and explored the Solana program library. I found the name-service program most helpful. Its features were relatively straightforward, and the implementation was simple to understand. I created a template for myself at templates/program.
I completed the program after browsing and going through open-source Solana and Rust programs. I could not test it through a UI, so I learned how to write integration tests for Solana. It was satisfying to see the green check marks after some challenging work.
That said, I'll be using the Anchor framework from now on. Not using it showed me how useful it is.
# Week 3: More dApps
This week's goal was to continue creating dApps on Solana - not as simple as last week's.
# Anchor framework
This week, I had a personal goal - to learn and use the Anchor framework. Anchor provides an eDSL for writing Solana programs and IDL that anyone can use to generate a client. It also comes with a CLI and workspace management for developing applications.
I faced a lot of issues last week getting started with Solana programs. There is too little documentation and quite a bit of boilerplate. Looking at open-source programs helped me immensely, especially solana-program-library.
I had heard great things about Anchor, so I used it for this week's work. And it was great. It was easy to follow the tutorials, go through The Anchor Book, start a new project and get the program to a working state. It makes Solana development feel as simple as Solidity development. The only problem I faced was the limited documentation, which was expected given that it's a young project and is under active development.
# On-chain programs
This week, we did three quests - building a crowdfunding platform, setting up campaign accounts and sending money and creating an on-chain calculator. These were easy to follow after last week's exercise. The calculator program was also a good introduction to using the Anchor framework.
This week's exercise was to build a bi-directional payment channel (same thing implemented in Solidity). It was a challenging exercise, just like the last one, but for different reasons.
The programming models of Ethereum and Solana are very different. So, directly copying over the logic is not possible. Where you can store data, where you hold the treasury, how you manage the treasury - all of these things have to be handled differently on Solana.
There were many instances when I thought I was done with the program logic, just to be hit with another error and learn something new about the Solana programming model. I completed it after a day of work. What was helpful was that I wrote some basic tests beforehand. So, the build and test cycle was tight.
Some final thoughts: Anchor is awesome; be ready to go into rabbit holes, as the documentation and example programs are limited, test continuously, and error messages are sometimes unclear. Join the Anchor and Solana Discords to get help.
# Week 4: NFTs
This week was about NFTs—what they are, when they can be used, and how to create some on Solana.
# Creator ecosystem
We had a session by Jenil from Coinvise at the start of the week. He talked about communities, NFTs, tokens, DAOs, and web3. It was an insightful session, with some interesting anecdotes from his journey. Jenil also discussed how to evaluate and build ideas, specifically in web3. The way early projects and communities originate and operate is very different from web2 companies. I needed to think about it in the coming weeks as the project deadline comes closer.
# NFTs
This week, we did two quests - creating and burning NFTs using @solana/web3.js and creating your own NFT minting machine. I particularly enjoyed the second one. It allowed me to deploy an NFT minting machine quickly, and then I could peek inside the code and see what was happening.
I had previous experience creating NFTs on Ethereum. The mental model of Solidity was much more straightforward. There were a couple of interfaces - ERC-721 and ERC-1155 - implement those, go as crazy as you want with the implementation, and you are done.
Metaplex is the de facto NFT standard on Solana. It is significantly more complex than the Ethereum standards. Some of it is because of Solana's programming model, and some of it is to be fast. The good thing is that Metaplex has excellent tooling, documentation, and UI code to get you started. I leaned on that to understand Solana's NFTs and do the exercise.
# Dynamic NFTs
This week's exercise was to create an NFT marketplace supporting dynamic NFTs. I decided to build dynamic Pokemon NFTs. You start with Charmander Pokemon and can evolve it into Charmeleon, Charizard, etc.
I bootstrapped with Metaplex Storefront and added UI components to create and evolve Pokemon NFTs. The creator could go to the Pokemon NFT page and click a button to evolve it. Learning about the Metaplex APIs and the Metaplex Storefront UI cache management was the most challenging part.
It was not the best solution, though. Right now, the dynamic nature requires the creator to manually update the metadata by clicking a button. Ideally, there should be an on-chain program as the NFT's update authority. That program would be responsible for checking the conditions for evolution and automatically evolving the NFT based on conditions like time passed, etc. But I didn't have enough time to implement that, unfortunately! It's a nice addon that I may implement at some point.
# Week 5: DeFi
We focused on DeFi this week - basics of tokens, staking, and tokenomics.
# DAO treasuries and getting into web3
This week we had a session by Shreyas, who's the co-founder of Llama. He talked about economic infrastructure for DAO treasuries, how to create a community, his journey in web3 and how important it is to have a good name for your product!
I connected a lot with his journey into web3 - he left his job wanting to get into a new industry and took part in hackathons to force himself to do something - something I am trying to do. Another interesting thing he talked about was how to decide what problems to work on - he helped people with their DAOs, and that's where he came across the problem people face managing treasuries. Since then, he has built a product, created a community around it and built up conviction in the problem statement.
# Creating my own wallet and cryptocurrency
To see how Defi is implemented on Solana, we did 3 quests - creating a wallet, creating your own crypto using solana programs and creating your own crypto using javascript. All of these were focused on how to move money, SOL or any other SPL token.
The first 2 interacted with Solana through its JSON RPC API, but the last one was interesting - we had to create a Solana contract that proxies calls to the main SPL token program. This ability to call other programs quickly makes the ecosystem more composable and rich.
# Staking and Tokenomics
The exercise for this week was to add support for staking to the cryptocurrency created in one of the quests. This is what I ended up making.
I had to consider where to escrow the funds, how to create different escrow accounts for tokens, and how to connect it all in the UI to provide a good user experience. It was a fun exercise, and I ended up learning a lot.
This exercise also made me think about token economics (tokenomics for short). Different projects have different ways of token distribution, inflation, rewards, etc. I wanted to know why different projects choose different mechanics and how they implement those.
I read the documentation of Solana economics. It is a well-written set of articles. I would suggest everyone go through them to know why people stake and why it's beneficial for the blockchain that people distribute their stake to different validators—a problem some projects are trying to solve.
# Week 6: More Complex dApps
This week, there was no particular theme; we just practised, built more complicated programs, and started on the fellowship project.
# dApps, dApps everywhere...
There were 4 guided quests - all very different.
Staking on Solana: This talked about staking and how you can stake on Solana. I have been staking on Solana for the past year, and this was an excellent deep dive into how it works under the hood.
Building a messaging app on Solana: This was quest to create a simple messaging contract and write tests for it.
Building a decentralized identity verification system on Solana: Decentralized identity verification is an interesting problem, and blockchains are an excellent implementation tool. You should try this quest if you've used ENS (.eth domains) or Bonfida (.sol domains). It will give you an idea of how to implement services like that.
Building a blog on Solana: This one was similar to the messaging app. But the good thing was that the author provided a UI that I could use to play with the app.
The exercise for this week was to create a shared wallet between friends to spend from. The program I built allowed a group of people to create a shared wallet that they could use to manage any SPL token. I used the proxying technique from the previous week to create a proxy spl token. For now, the shared wallet only allows the transfer of SPL tokens. It can be extended to any transaction type in the future, similar to multi-sig wallets like Goki.
# Fellowship project
For my fellowship project, I decided to work on streaming payments for Solana.
# The problem
The original idea that I came into the fellowship with:
Having worked at private remote companies, I have seen people having issues with ESOPs (transparency and illiquidity), global payroll and expense management.
This is something I feel blockchain technology can solve, especially for newer-generation companies which are global, distributed, and they want new structures for incentivization and a seamless employee experience.
At the same time, startups are coming up in India and overseas that are trying to solve for earned wage access. Earned wage access means employees can access their earned wage anytime. For example, a person with a salary of 30k per month can withdraw ~15k on the 15th of that month rather than waiting for the start of the following month.
Low-income employees want this because they sometimes face cash crushes at the end of the month if there is any sudden financial expense. They have to resort to predatory loans in these circumstances.
# The Solution
I used Superfluid when I was trying to build something on Ethereum. Thinking about these problems made me think of it and how easy it would be to build solutions on top of it that can solve the issues mentioned above.
The idea was to have a contract that allows a sender to send streaming payments to a recipient. Some features that I need for this contract:
- Support for cliffs: ESOPs generally involve cliffs, so we need some way to codify cliffs to support that use case.
- Prepaid and Unbounded streams: Some stream types, like ESOPs, would need to be prepaid because employees would need assurance that part of their tokens are locked up in an escrow that will be given to them on the vesting schedule. Other streams like payroll and subscriptions will be unbounded, so senders can top up the escrow to keep them running.
- Solvency detection: Unbounded streams may become insolvent if not topped up in time. There needs to be a way to identify them as quickly as possible and penalize the sender of that stream somehow. Superfluid uses deposits and sentinels to incentivize this behaviour. Something similar would be needed here.
There are solutions in the Solana ecosystem that are trying to bring streaming payments to Solana. However, these lack some features needed to solve the use cases. Some of these are closed-source, so it isn't easy to gauge if they can add these features in an update.
# Week 7: Starting on my project
This week, I designed and started implementing the project idea. I made significant progress, finalized the scope, and implemented major parts of the smart contract.
# Components
There would be 4 main components:
- Streaming contract
- Service that checks for insolvent streams
- Javascript client for usage in browser/node applications
- Web UI for users to manage their streams
One of the main aims I have for the project is that any other project should be able to hook into these components to incorporate payment streaming.
Another exciting aspect of the project is insolvency—how to detect, decentralize, and incentivize people to prevent it. I have some ideas on this subject but am still finalizing the approach.
# Naming the project
Probably the most difficult decision of this week. I didn't spend a decent amount of time thinking about it. I finalized on Superstream, inspired by Superteam.
# Future considerations
Many more exciting things can be done. One example is transitive streams. If Alice is streaming to Bob and Bob is streaming to Charles - Charles can be assured that his stream will not go insolvent till Alice is topping up the stream. The contract can ensure that Bob only takes out the net balance from both streams.
However, implementing these ideas is pretty complex and out of scope for the project. I might come back to these ideas later.
# Tech stack
- Smart contract implemented in the excellent Anchor framework
- Insolvency checker and javascript client using Typescript
- Web UI using Next.js and Typescript
# Superstream
It took me a month, but the project is finally ready. It's live at superstream.finance. Try it out, and let me know what you think!
# Closing thoughts
It was a fun and productive 8 weeks. I learned a lot, built a lot of things and got to know a lot of people. I'm excited to continue building on Solana. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn how to delevop Solana apps.
I'm especially pleased about this project. I plan to dedicate some time to market it and build a community around it.