⏭️ First Zohran, now TAPEDRIVE

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It’s the 4th of July, which means I’m obviously out of office celebrating a very US holiday…in Canada. 

Don’t miss me too much, I’ll be back next Monday.

Until then, Lightspeed’s Jack Kubinec is holding down the fort.

🏆 Solana data storage project wins Colosseum hackathon

TAPEDRIVE won the grand prize in the latest Colosseum hackathon, a popular hackathon-cum-venture accelerator started by original Solana Labs hackathon organizers. 

The contest, which I tend to view as a partial litmus test for what Solana builders are interested in at the moment, had a large number of stablecoin entries, one organizer told me. But the grand prize winner took at a stab at a problem internal to Solana: the cost of storing data onchain.

Solana is the busiest blockchain in existence as things stand. With all of this onchain activity paired with fast block times, it can get expensive to store data on Solana. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and others have talked about this problem of reducing data storage overhead on the network. 

TAPEDRIVE claims to have the ability to read or write data (that is, access or add it to the chain) 1,400x cheaper than Solana’s status quo. 

The program basically bundles Solana data and adds less expensive cryptographic proofs to the blockchain. A network of miners is incentivized to store this data using the TAPE token. To earn these token rewards, TAPEDRIVE miners solve data storage challenges in parallel every minute to prove that they hold their assigned portion of the data archive. This all still relies on Solana’s proof-of-stake mechanism for security.

This sounds reminiscent of the first Colosseum hackathon winner in ORE, which was a viral proof-of-work game built on Solana that had miners solve puzzles every minute. 

The project’s founder, known as Z, told me they’re still “shell shocked” after winning. “I’m really grateful to have the opportunity to work on this full time now. Job’s not done. I’m fairly optimistic it could help a lot of teams once it’s dialed in,” they added.

Interestingly, TAPEDRIVE intentionally doesn’t use zero-knowledge technology for reasons laid out in the white paper of data storage platform Arweave, Z said. 

The rest of the hackathon’s winners ran the gamut from prediction markets to gaming, but Colosseum co-founder Matty Taylor said he thinks the strongest entries came from the stablecoins track. Builders in that area were pushing to “grow crypto payment adoption within specific regions and industries,” Taylor said.

— Jack Kubinec

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