Request for Startups
Inspiration and ideas for new companies and projects that are only possible on Solana, from the Solana Foundation.
Last updated August 2024
The goal of this list is to inspire prospective builders on Solana with crypto startup ideas that we think would be valuable. This is by no means an exhaustive list of value businesses that could be built on Solana, but merely a starting point for those looking for that first spark of an idea.
DePIN
Energy DePIN
The world’s energy infrastructure is going to change dramatically in the coming years and decades. July 2024 saw two of the hottest days for Earth on record. The heat is on (pun intended) for nations to shift their energy consumption towards sustainable / green sources and governments are now providing 100s of billions in funding to accelerate the shift to green energy.
There’s an opportunity to build a truly optimized energy business via token incentives and the DePIN playbook
- Users earn token rewards for installing valuable energy hardware (e.g., solar panels, batteries)
- Users also earn token rewards for adjusting their energy consumption behavior - users get notifications each day advising them on when to run energy-heavy appliances (get people to reduce usage when prices are expected to spike, and incentivize them to consume when prices are low/negative).
- “Earn 3x token rewards for running your dishwasher between 12pm - 4pm”
- Turn each homeowner into a mini “energy trader”
Stablecoins / Payments / Commerce / PayFi
Buy Now, Pay Never?
Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) has become an increasingly popular payment method with the rise of firms like Affirm. But what if we could finance purchases without ever “paying”?
Imagine paying for a Messari Pro subscription by staking a yielding asset (e.g., SOL, ETH etc.) to an onchain account that retains your custody on the principle asset, but programmatically deducts some of the yield each month to pay for the subscription service. The arbitrage / opportunity here is one of psychology - Messari Pro still costs you the same amount of money, but because the way the payment is happening is via deduction of yield for an asset you want to own anyways, it feels “free”. If you ever want to unsubscribe, just unstake your asset.
P2P Marketplace, Powered by Stablecoins
P2P markets like Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist have become massive centers of mostly-offline commerce. These platforms aggregate P2P demand and supply, don’t usually facilitate commercial transactions, and generate revenue through ads, etc. They’ve amassed huge audiences: in a normal month, 1.2B shoppers buy something on Facebook Marketplace, while 250MM worldwide sellers use the platform.
But scams & fraud, ugly disputes, “ghosting,” and spam can often disrupt the user experience. Many of these problems could be solved with blockchain. Help sellers find qualified buyers and filter out the noise by requiring proof of funds via transparent crypto wallet balances, or locking up deposits in escrow programs. Increase buyer and seller protection with smart contracts, allowing for easy escrow and dispute management. With programmable money at the backbone of a new marketplace, the design possibilities are endless.
End-to-End Payments Solution
Consumers are feeling the cost of point-of-sale transaction fees now more than ever. This is a prime opportunity for crypto payment rails to capture market share. The blocker is that most consumers don’t want to or don’t know how to use crypto. Furthermore, merchants need fiat dollars and also don’t want to deal with crypto complexity. There exists an opportunity to create an end-to-end payments solution on Solana using stablecoins, Solana Pay, gasless transactions, and integrated fiat on/off ramps to enable a payments rail that does not charge 3%+ at every sale.
Creator Economy
Creator Token-Based Models with Long-Term Alignment
A notable challenge with creator token based apps (e.g., Friend.tech, Fantasy Top) is that the incentives are fundamentally misaligned between creators and token owners. Creators want lots of people to buy their token but after the primary sale of their tokens, creators only monetize when there’s churn in their user base and they earn fees on the trading of their creator token / key. This means a creator’s incentive to stay engaged goes down as soon as their token price starts to fall and token holders have no incentive to stay involved once the initial novelty of owning the token wears off.
Web2 platforms solve this via recurring payment models (e.g., Twitch Subscriptions). It’s important for future creator-token based apps to design with some analogous long-term financial alignment between creator and user.
Social Apps that Leverage Solana Itself as the Social Graph
Many in crypto are building open social graph infrastructure. While there’s an opportunity to do that, there’s an even bigger opportunity to build consumer apps that leverage an untapped rich existing open social graph - Solana itself. Think about the the kind of “social” history / information carried by your wallets:
- Are you a diamond hand or paper hand? (look at how many now successful tokens you sold too early, how many tokens you held through 90%+ drawdowns)
- Which communities are you really an OG for? (look at when you first owned a given NFT / token)
This tweet from 0xDesigner is just one example of the kind of applications / experiences that could be built leveraging the history of user behavior captured on Solana. The opportunity lies in creating a product / UX around the ‘social graph’ of Solana that already houses a large user base and rich user behavior history.
IP Infrastructure
More and more content is being generated (and increasingly generated by machines). There’s a huge question around how do we handle the veracity of, and economic rights around, the IP associated with this content explosion. Solana has seen a plethora of rich content coming on-chain in the past year. NFTs and social tokens are a v0 of this.
The product here is an on-chain framework for creating IP and then monetizing it (via licensing / sale) to streamline the process relative to the world today (where it’s mostly onerous processes with a lot of lawyers negotiating licensing deals). Specific implementations might be, content remixing app, co-creation hub, AI-generated assets marketplace, or a brand licensing market.
AI
Token-Incentivized Data Collection
Access to high quality, unique data increasingly seems like it’s going to be the bottleneck for the improvement of AI models like LLMs. There are large existing web2 businesses (e.g., Scale AI) serving this need of helping model builders acquire differentiated data. Targeted token incentives are potentially powerful (and capital efficient) way to drive explosive data gathering for niche and hard-to-collect/generate pieces of data.
- Get users to install software or hardware that collects and transmits their data (e.g., Grass, Uprock on software side, Ambient, Dimo on hardware side)
- Incentivize users to label data / give human feedback for RLHF (e.g., Synesis One, Hivemapper)
A few examples:
- Grass uses token incentives to get people to install a browser extension that crawls the web when the user is inactive. This data has many uses, including serving as data collection for non-English LLMs (because Grass has access to non-English IP addresses via their 1m+ install base)
- AI calorie tracking apps like Eato have users take photos of food and then use AI models to provide a calorie breakdown for the food. If the model mislabels a photo, users can submit notes with corrections that serve as human feedback to improve the model. What if the app also rewarded users with a token to help them build a habit of taking photos and submitting corrections? While normal app “points” can incentivize similar behaviors, web3 tokens have the potential to drive more explosive growth (see StepN, Hamster Kombat).
Games
“Fully” Onchain Games
It seems increasingly likely that the breakthrough web3 game will not look or play like many of the games we play today and that asset ownership isn’t the only, or even primary, use for blockchains in gaming. And instead, the breakthrough will come from “Fully Onchain Games” (FOCG) that use blockchains as a decentralized compute layer that fully expose a game’s state and logic (learn more here).
Much more experimentation is needed in the design of FOCG. In particular, there needs to be:
- More focus on:
- Unique fun game loops that lean into the potential of game state/logic being exposed
- Sustainable economics - token incentives are crypto’s superpower, and successful games will almost certainly lean into this power.
- Less focus on:
- High production value (good graphics etc.) - at this early stage of onchain games, it’s hard to justify spending resources on “polish”. Figure out an engaging and unique core loop and then polish later
- Having every piece of game state or logic onchain
- Think about which pieces of game state and logic are highest leverage to expose to the community and focus on having those onchain . Rest can stay offchain initially if that enables faster iteration
Geo-Based Gamified Apps
Apps like Pokemon Go show the power of gamified experience to get people to take action in the physical world and StepN demonstrates how token incentives can also motivate outdoor activity. We think these geo-based app experiences can be taken a level further specifically by tying an IRL advertising component to them.
E.g., a StepN-esque experience where users earn tokens for walking around, but only when they enter specific locations
- Stores / restaurants can advertise by purchasing and offering token rewards for users who enter their store
- Want to gift a friend a meal at a new local restaurant? Buy tokens and “place” them at the restaurant so that your friend can claim them when they arrive at the restaurant
- Stake tokens to your favorite stores/restaurants to earn
- Stores/restaurants with a lot of staked tokens are ranked higher within the app (more easily discovered by users)
Asset Tokenization
RWA Aggregated Investment Portal
Many assets have been tokenized over the last few years, yet it is quite hard for the average investor to know where and how to get access to these investments. An aggregated investment portal where buyers are matched with asset supply could be significantly beneficial for both sides of RWA markets
For example, it could be a heavily abstracted user interface where it lists investment opportunities in plain english. Kind of like a Kickstarter-type landing page. It explains the asset, yield opportunities or projected appreciation rates, and any other information they might need in order to make an educated decision without all the blockchain mumbo-jumbo and jargon. The ideal state of a product like this is that its integrated into a brokerage like Fidelity or Schwab where people can easily see RWA investment opportunities and seamlessly invest into them.
Infrastructure
Onchain Identity
Tokenized on-chain identities that allow identification while preserving privacy (only revealing info required for using specific app or even not reveal using zk tech). Examples on other chains going into that direction are:
Light RPC
Today the hardware requirements for an RPC are significant. As the ecosystem is developing additional validators those validators include upgraded components like higher throughput and better memory / disk tradeoff.
The goal for this project would be to develop an RPC that is faster and requires less hardware. The RPC should be separated from the voting validator. It should only serve read / write requests and use the new components from the next evolution of validators for increased throughput. It can have a read only mode to only serve reads from network. It can also implement optional indexes based on the work that existing devOps team have done (like Triton and Helius).
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