Solana Fellowship Week 7: Starting on my project

March 27, 2022 • 3 min read

This week was spent designing and implementing the project idea. I made significant progress, finalized the scope and implemented major parts of the smart contract.

Project idea

As I described in my last post, for my fellowship project, I've decided to work on streaming payments for Solana.

To recap, the idea is to have a contract that allows a sender to send streaming payments to a recipient. Major product requirements that I decided on:

  • Support for cliffs
  • Prepaid and unbounded streams
  • Solvency detection and punishment for senders whose streams become insolvent
  • Cancellation should be configurable - whether sender and recipient can cancel the stream and when they can cancel should be configurable

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 interesting aspect of the project is insolvency - how to detect it, how to decentralize it and how to incentivize people to not let it happen. I have some ideas on this subject, but still finalizing the approach.

Naming the project

Probably the most difficult decision of this week. I spent a decent amount of time thinking about it. I finalized on Fura. I was searching what flow is called in different languages. In Japanese, it's Furō. It sounded nice, short and memorable. So that's what the project will be called.

Future considerations

There are many more interesting things that 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 make sure that, Bob only takes out the net balance from both the streams.

But implementation of these ideas is pretty complex and out of scope for the project. I'll come back to these ideas once the basic things are in place.

Tech stack

  • I implemented major part of the smart contract. It's made using the awesome Anchor framework.
  • I'll be building the insolvency checker and javascript client in Typescript.
  • For the web UI, I'll use Remix and Typescript. Using Remix is very pleasant, and I recently built my website (garvitpahal.com) using it, so I am comfortable with it.

I'll be spending the next couple of weeks completing the project, presenting it and completing the fellowship. There is a lot of work left to be done. Fingers crossed!