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Colosseum is one thing like a hackathon organizer combined with Y Combinator for Solana startups. I are inclined to view its hackathon entries as a proxy for what Solana builders are fascinated with, and I see its hackathon winners as a possible proxy for what Solana enterprise buyers discover helpful.
So this week on the Lightspeed podcast, I requested Colosseum co-founder Matty Taylor what he’s enthusiastic about from the group’s latest hackathon, and his reply shocked me.
“One of many issues that we’re most enthusiastic about is form of a return to crypto cypherpunk roots,” Taylor mentioned. He cited privacy-preserving functions and new takes on DAOs as examples.
Taylor mentioned he’s seeing “excessive performing [Solana] founders” exhibiting loads of curiosity in personal buying and selling know-how, citing former Colosseum winner Darklake — which is constructing a zero-knowledge enabled DEX — as one instance. He’s additionally seen builders facilitating personal funds on present stablecoins.
Solana builders do appear to be rising extra fascinated with onchain privateness. The RPC supplier Helius simply unveiled confidential balances, a extra personal model of Solana’s present token extensions. The testnet-phase encryption infrastructure community Arcium has additionally been buzzy of late.
Privateness is cypherpunk, however it’s additionally a necessity for some establishments to come back onchain, as giant capital allocators have a tendency to love protecting their monetary actions opaque.
Taylor additionally talked about DAOs, the crypto-native governance construction that has up to now proved tough to execute. Colosseum was an early supporter of markets-based governance platform MetaDAO, and Taylor talked a couple of futarchy-enabled token launchpad the place funds are escrowed and topic to choice markets for a way they need to be spent.
That form of service has been tried for issues like NFT roadmaps up to now — so it’s unclear whether or not this try will catch on extra broadly — however just about something could be an enchancment on the “one token, one vote” established order.
