The Solana Wormhole Hackathon kicked off on the 28th October 2020! It will finish up on the 14th November 2020 with a total of $200k USD prizes up for grabs. Let’s explain what wormhole is about and why it will help many projects scale up thanks to Solana’s very quick transaction speeds and super low cost transaction fees.
What is the Solana Wormhole?
The Solana Wormhole is an Ethereum bridge that helps transfer wealth from the Ethereum blockchain to the Solana blockchain. It also helps transfer liquidity between the Ethereum ERC-20 token standard to the Solana SPL token standard.
Wormhole allows existing projects, platforms, and communities to move tokenized assets seamlessly across blockchains to benefit from Solana’s high speed and low cost… Bridging across to Solana negates that friction and still allows for the value to settle back to the Ethereum network if so chosen… It uses decentralized cross-chain oracles — called guardians — operated by a set of node operators that include top Solana validators and other ecosystem stakeholders whose incentives are strongly aligned with Solana and Serum… Those guardians certify token lockups and burns on one chain in order to mint new tokens or release tokens on the other, and vice versa.
Official Solana Medium Blog
How Does Solana Wormhole Actually Work?
What Problem Does Solana Wormhole Solve?
Many of the problems that Solana’s Workhole Ethereum Gateway solves is poor performance due to congestion and high gas fees. These issues are elaborated in previous posts like Reasons why De-Fi Projects will Choose Solana and make a lot of sense for new projects that due to want the risk of expensive or slow transaction execution and haven’t invested a lot of time in Ethereum.
The beauty of Wormhole is that it also fixes another issue that a project would have encountered when making the move to Solana. That is the need of the project to move all their Ethereum solidity code over to Solana (Rust). Instead, projects can now utilise Solana’s low cost high speed transactions even if their base code is still on Ethereum. For projects that need to scale however cant wait several minutes or pay $5 for a gas fee, using the Solana Wormhole makes sense.
Solana Wormhole Hackathon Events
There are a load of events to attend during this hackathon period including:
- 23rd October 2020 – Fireside Chat with FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried & Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko
- 26th October 2020 – Panel Discussion with Tarun Chitra & Sam Bankman-Fried
- Anatoly Yakovenko – Co-founder/CEO of Solana
- Sam Bankman Fried – CEO of Alameda Research and FTX
- Michael Egorov – CEO of Curve
- Stani Kulechov – Founder/CEO of Aave
- Tarun Chitra – Founder/CEO Gauntlet
- Jeremy Musighi – Head of Growth Balancer
- 27th October 2020 – Fireside Chat with Aave’s Stani Kulechov & Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko
- 28th October 2020 – Fireside Chat with Compound’s Robert Leshner & Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko
- 28th October 2020 – Panel Discussion with The Future of DeFi (Panel Above)
- 29th October 2020 – Panel Discussion with NFT’s
- 29th October 2020 – Fireside Chat with Gauntlet CEO Tarun Chitra and Anatoly.
- 29th October 2020 – Panel Discussion about Interoperability with James Prestwich, SBF and Anatoly.
- 30th October 2020 – Panel Discussion on Liquidity Pools
- 30th October 2020 – Fireside Chat about USDC with Jeremy Allaire
- 3rd November 2020 – Fireside Chat with Multicoin’s Kyle Samani
Hackathon Ideas that will be Worked On!
A bunch of ideas have been provided Solana for the people participating in the Hackathon to address. A lot of these projects would help Solana have comparable tools, features and services as other blockchains
Solana Explorers/Visualisers
- Blockchain explorers and visualisers such as https://txstreet.com, or gossip protocol messaging visualisers
- GraphQL Support: Integrating directly into the Solana rust code to add a parallel GraphQL API that can be used in https://explorer.solana.com
Solana Tooling / Developer Experience
- Name Service
- A program that can accept any asset transfers to a name service. Including a table where the mint of a token can submit a name for their token. Also create a table where a token controls governance of the naming.
- SPL Token Minter: A simple interface for developers to launch their own SPL token
- Debuggers: A tool that renders the core dump from the Solana module using the debug symbols from the library
- Solana/Metamask Plugin via https://github.com/MetaMask/metamask-snaps-beta/wiki
- Ethereum ORU’s on Solana for Ethereum
- Wallet UI/Visualisers: Portfolio charts for https://sollet.io
Solana DeFi
- A Serum-related list can be found here: https://projectserum.com/blog/project-ideas
- Money market lending protocol native to Solana (akin to Compound or Aave)
- Cross-Chain Lending: A lending protocol that immediately provides liquidity for assets transferred cross-chain – such that users don’t need to wait for the cross-chain assets to be fully confirmed on both chains – in return for a fee
- Fixed Rate Loans: Where users can take out a fixed rate loan on an Ethereum Lending/Borrowing protocol that is enabled by an on-chain interest rate swap order book on Serum
- DeFi asset manager: A single interface consolidating all DeFi assets and liabilities across different platforms (and different chains) into one.
- DEX Aggregator: A cross-chain DEX aggregator that allows users to choose the best price for execution across multiple DeFi platforms, including cross-chain platforms.
- Build-your-own Liquidity Mining platform
- Build out support for tokenized synthetic assets using Chainlink oracles and listing the SPL Synthetics on Serum
- Oracles: An on-chain oracle that takes prices from Serum markets, does sophisticated risk and sanity checks on them, and creates a clean price feed that other projects working on Serum can use. Furthermore, once there are on-chain cross-chain bridges, those can be combined with this to create a fully on-chain cross-chain pricing oracle.
- Fee Compare: A simple interface that tracks and compares cost to execute something given certain parameters across various DeFi platforms. Parameters include desired spread, transaction fees, trading pair setc. Can also track total value saved in transaction fees/spread
- Creating Custom Markets on Serum: An interface to create custom markets on Serum from Ethereum. Including the set-up of decentralised market makers.
- Slashing Insurance: A simple insurance protocol where the community can provide insurance for validators against the risk of being slashed
- Payments: A payments application for cross-chain conversion and transfers between Ethereum and Solana
Solana Gaming & NFT’s
- Cross-chain games: Multiplayer cross-chain games i.e. Snake/Pacman
- On-chain text based games
- NFT (Games): Text-based games to generate unique NFT’s (i.e. http://monsterbreeder.com)
- NFT (Licensing): Build your own NFT, and a governance token for the NFT to control how the royalties are spent and who is licensed to play the song.
- A port of Roguelike Open Source project: https://awesomeopensource.com/projects/roguelike transforming it into an on-chain multiplayer application
- NFT generator: Allows creators to easily issue it to their community, tracking awards to specified wallets and logging history
- On-chain advertisements: e.g. http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
Solana Governance
- Governance Platform: A governance oriented interface that can be used by any Solana application which can help communities submit, manage and discuss proposals, track on-chain votes and execute proposals etc.
- Build-Your-Own-DAO
Learn more over on Github
Check out the Solana Labs Wormhole Hackathon Github Repo
Solana is the fastest, low-fee, censorship-resistant blockchain designed to enable developers to permissionlessly build and scale applications to billions of users globally. Wormhole is the first bidirectional bridge that connects Ethereum with Solana. Wormhole allows new and existing crypto projects, businesses, and communities to move tokenized assets seamlessly across blockchains to benefit from Solana’s high speed (50,000 transactions per second) and low cost (less than $0.00001 per transaction).
Solana Labs Github
Want to learn even more?
Check out the detailed technical blog post on the Wormhole Bridge over at Certus One’s blog.
