Looking at Solana and relevant token projects as we build out our own token and digital wallet
We are entering a new world where anything can be tokenized, even healthy and sustainable food
Intro:
As constantly repeated buzzwords- terms such as NFT’s, DAO’s, web3, and crypto tokens can be overwhelming and quite a number of people have likely learned to tune out or even physically mute the words when they encounter them online and on social media.
It does not help either that the most prominent early adopters of crypto and NFT’s are largely white, male, and wealthy with at times seemingly limited taste along with social skills that can appear like they are only reserved for discord servers.
However, when you move beyond jpeg’s of monkeys plus the apparent early lack of diversity (more projects like this please) and dive into the details of how crypto can help amazing artists, musicians and businesses to reward their top fans and larger community the potential is so exciting. To me “accessible, shared, & appreciating ownership” is a much better and more empowering way to describe the power of crypto and decentralization.
Specifically, at the Three3 we are trying to put this ethos into action as we build out a rewards token and a “food-focused” digital wallet on top of the eco-friendly Solana blockchain.
The high level idea is that we can directly reward consumers for purchasing healthy and sustainable food from our carefully selected partners. Rewards will be automated in numerous ways including integrations with the API’s of ordering sites & platforms and eventually our own payment portal app. Although “early access community members” are able to receive rewards and feedback through direct receipt submissions on our website. Overall, our rewards ecosystem will also give people all types of special deals, meal plan ideas, nutrition coaching nudges, and more.
In case you missed it, I previously gave a very general overview on the crypto tokenization and “food fintech” spaces, while highlighting some of the related opportunities for innovation.
Since writing that piece and originally publishing here, inflation of food prices has only soared and in May 2022 according to the federal reserve food costs climbed another 1.2% month over month bringing the year-over-year gain to 10.1%. It should be noted that the federal reserve uses a very narrow sets of generic goods to calculate food inflation and actual inflation is likely much higher. (any aisle walk through the grocery store will show this) It is not relevant to a plant based diet (although it could cause more people to try eating plant based), but the cost of meat, poultry, fish and eggs is up around 20 percent on annual basis just for the lowest quality, generic products. It goes without saying that a solution to help people manage spending while optimizing for health and sustainability (and encouraging a cost effective plant based diet) is badly needed right now.
For broader context on crypto tokens, recently many have built tokens on top of Ethereum- commonly in the format of what is referred to as ERC-20 and which requires conformity to a variety of technical standards for smart contracts. Solana has also emerged an alternate network for anyone to build “SPL” tokens on top of and is ideal for transaction heavy applications along with for minimizing gas fees and carbon emissions.
I originally had this piece include in-depth write ups for various token projects including top Solana projects, but considering I was writing updates on constantly evolving projects. things were getting too long and tough to track in the single article so have just included some links along with editor reflections from a recent lunch with Solana leadership.
Revisiting in Winter 2025:
Two and a half years ago Solana (SOL) was weathering a brutal crypto darkness, trading as low as $10 and facing persistent questions about network stability. Three years later, with SOL hovering around $200-225, the technical promises of Solana's high-speed, low-cost blockchain remain as compelling as ever. However, the core tension I identified - between Solana's potential for revolutionizing payments infrastructure and its actual implementation - has only become more pronounced even as AI could theoretically make such a new approach to payment processing even more seamless and protected from fraud. For now, traditional payment systems are still proceeding as they always have and it is worth noting their conglomerate sizes make it a very difficult industry to disrupt even just around food purchases to start.
About Solana
A great, somewhat older overview on Solana:
The efficiency:
“Whereas it costs ~$3 today to do a transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain, and ~$8-40 on Ethereum, it costs $0.0001 to do a transaction on Solana.”
“We’ll get into the nitty gritty, but for now, what you need to know is that Solana uses a Proof of Stake consensus mechanism plus Proof of History, a decentralized source of time that Solana Labs CEO and founder Anatoly Yakovenko told me is “the implementation of the arrow of time in math.” Sounds mind-bending, and it is, but what it means is that transactions on Solana are verifiably ordered without all nodes needing to agree simultaneously. That’s what makes it so fast.
It also means that Solana can be single-shard. While Eth2 is expected to reach 100k TPS, it, and other new blockchains, will do so by sharding, creating side chains that tie back into the main Ethereum blockchain. Solana does everything on one single chain, in a single state.”
Growth & the need for network effects:
“Solana might have the best tech of any blockchain on the market, but the best tech is wasted without a strong community of developers and users. Tokens are just a way to scale network effects. Once the network effects start spinning, a blockchain takes on a life of its own, with big names and superior tech attracting investors and developers who attract users and more developers, and so on.”
“The past two years saw rapid growth on the Solana network, with over 500 decentralized applications deployed on Solana, and prices of SOL rocketing from under $2 to a peak of nearly $260 in October.”
The Future of Solana Pay:
“The protocol provides a specification that allows the consumer to send digital dollar currencies, such as USDC, from their wallet directly into the merchant’s account, settling immediately with costs measured in fractions of a penny. This embeds loyalty, offers and rewards in the same messaging scheme and become true building blocks for the future of commerce.”
“"The next phase of development of the protocol will enable merchants to send digital assets back to the consumers which will open up new capabilities in commerce not possible before."
Editor reflection from lunch with Solana leadership:
At a recent May 2022 lunch with Raj Gokal- one of the founders of Solana and a few other senior Solana team members, a small group of around 10 of us had a chance to ask questions for a good hour plus on almost anything and a few things became clear to me:
The Solana team views payments as the holy grail and feel they will eventually be able to integrate with most fin-tech apps, point of sale systems and banking software. Solana’s fast transaction speed and low transaction cost (and low environmental footprint) is simply unmatched by current technology. NFT related projects are simply where crypto culture is now and in Raj’s words,
“you shouldn’t ignore where people are going right today everyday and figuring out how to use crypto. The internet was a playground to start with and the reasons people first signed up for email and the internet was pretty random too. AOL used to have its own keywords too to access different sites. NFT’s give people the ability to organize around culture and vibes but obviously the long term potential is much much larger.
I jokingly mentioned about creating a music video from Solana from the Beverly Hills mansion we were at high above LA, but the reality is Solana does need to make a targeted effort to bring cultural relevance and laymen's understanding to both itself and the projects that are getting built on it through dynamic content and more. This will only get more important as Solana projects have higher and higher stakes and scale. Rather than just having a largely technical and open-sourced team, Solana should have systems for rewarding cultural and brand builders who support some of its top tier projects. “Vibes” do matter after all.
Perhaps, Solana too could recruit a team of core influencers and brands to support existing projects while empowering them on some of their own Solana related efforts within community tokenization and ecommerce.
It's unclear to me why the full time Solana team is so small when the potential of what they are working on for payments and back end infrastructure is so huge. The timing of their token sale to venture capitalists has mostly rewarded the VC's with near record returns while not helping Solana raise significant dollars compared to the resources of other companies in the payments space beyond just the blockchain. It would seem that when dealing with outages and high stakes projects it would help to have as deep of a team as you feasibly can.
Yes Solana has had some outages, including in the prior weekend due to bots around a NFT launch, but the fixes to these over the long term can be quite simple and are not end times. I was curious why Raj the COO and founder told us but not the world more about what was done to fix the outage the previous weekend from bots flooding the NFT drop. In his own words at lunch:
"There have been 3 block production halts on Solana. The first one was no one remembers, the second one happened in September at 17 hours, and it was really the same this time as that time. It's just the protocol changes to fix this once and for all are taking a while to develop.
The changes have been soaking in testnet and unfortunately another outage happened at 10 times the volume of the last one. The last one was at 400,000 transactions per second of mostly bot activity- people making bots to programmatically spam the network to get access to hot NFT's and immediately sell them on secondary.
There are just obvious properties of bots that are pretty easy to block at network layer, but we have to make sure do it right to make sure doing the right change.
I told them there needs to be regularly (and mainstream) written pieces that give updates on the Solana ecosystem similar to Packy Mccormick's original Solana Summer piece. Heck they could get Packy to even routinely write such quarterly updates himself (kind of similar to how typical startup investor updates are written but hopefully more in depth). There could even be video or podcast style versions too with popular creators’ paraphrasing core concepts.
Such continued education systems would make things clearer in laymen’s terms and give builders on Solana a clear sense of their own roadmap especially for Solana Pay. I feel strongly that mainstream finance media does crypto a huge disservice in largely just reporting new price highs or record sales of NFT’s during our recent bull times rather than the mechanisms behind projects. Such a reporting environment has also allowed too often for scams and fraudsters to thrive rather than actual innovation and art.
Additional things to keep an eye on in Solana and beyond:
Crypto reward possibilities for community businesses:
Royal & Music NFT’s (read our article):
Stepn & move to earn platforms (read our article):
Super local & hyperlocal tokens:
FWB & token based social clubs (updating our own article-will update link)
Integration of consumer packaged goods & crypto into “community packaged goods”:
A whole new job ecosystem including for token designers:
The power of token airdrops for community acquisition:
The potential of web 3 for customer acquisition:
Thread on the potential of web 3 & nft’s for new community building and content creation:
The potential of public tokens issued by otherwise normal marketplaces:
“Braintrust is a clear distillation of an incredibly important point: good tokenomics can enhance a strong value proposition, but can’t replace a strong value proposition.”