Solana Summer Camp Hackathon

Ideas

While we encourage hackathon participants to build novel projects that can become a fully-featured product, we have compiled a list of project ideas and themes for builders to freely explore that span a variety of use cases spanning DAOs, Payments, Mobile, and beyond. The following is a list of ideas sourced from the Solana community and ecosystem projects. Take a look if you're in need of some inspiration!

DAOs

  • Chat platform for DAOs

    • Web3 chat platform that allows DAOs to take governance actions while also maintaining their community

  • Web3 social network focused around communities

    • Building the equivalent of a Web3 FB Groups / Reddit for communities / DAOs

  • Legal wrappers for DAOs

    • Helping DAOs utilize the correct legal framework for their needs

  • Institutional multisig built on SPL Governance

    • Enterprise-grade multisig to support institutional capital

  • Creator platform

    • For example, Web3 Patreon — content-gating, subscriptions, micropayments, tipping, etc.)

  • DAO mobile platform

    • Allow users to take governance actions in their Realms DAOs via mobile

  • Web2 auth / wallet creation for normies onboarding to a DAO

    • Users can sign up using a mobile phone or email, and have a wallet created for them within Realms

  • Job board for DAOs

    • Place for DAOs to post open roles, and easily see reputation / profile of those applying

  • Bounty board for DAOs

    • Make it easy for DAOs to post bounties for their communities and pay out those who complete these bounties

  • Reputation for DAO members

    • Understand each Realms DAO members role and achievements in the community

  • DAO debit card / credit card provider

    • Allow Realms DAOs to spend their treasury in the real world

  • DAO frontend focused on gaming DAOs

    • DAO frontend built on SPL Governance addressing DAO needs of games

  • DAO owned validator as a business

    • Starting a business around running a validator within a DAO, and providing the playbook for others to do the same

Payments

  • A streamlined KYC and on-ramping features, and an off-ramp that even your 80-year-old grandmother can understand.

  • While using Solana as a payment rail provides strong cost incentives for merchants, the consumer value proposition has been less compelling. Can you think of ways to reinvent offers and loyalty using Solana Pay?

  • Merchant enablement is still a barrier - easy onboarding for merchants that want to accept Solana Pay including custodial / non-custodial wallets, integration into existing POS solutions, integration into inventory and accounting systems, etc.

  • Creative agency for unforgettable experiences: we’ve received a lot of inbound from brands who want to use Solana Pay but don’t know how to best use it. We would like to see a consulting agency project that can take on the technical and design challenges to create both one-off and recurring experiences for customers. A good submission should include at least one client submission.

  • NFT ecosystem collaboration projects: as the Solana NFT ecosystem becomes more robust, new features such as stealth NFTs, composable NFTs, and compressed NFTs can be utilized to create unique interactions.

    • We want you to imagine those experiences by working with other ecosystem projects!

  • With the Saga phone launch, we would like to see submissions that integrate Solana Pay on mobile apps, especially leveraging transaction requests. We would like to see integrations with the Mobile Wallet Adapter and a roadmap for supporting the Seed Vault SDK after the Saga phone launch. It could be an existing project that doesn’t have a native mobile app yet, or an entirely new project.

  • No-code point-of-sale system targeting SMBs: our team has received thousands of inbound interest, many of whom are from small mom-and-pop stores looking to accept SPL tokens, especially SOL and USDC/USDT. They have no developer resources and are technically limited.

    • How can we create the simplest, fastest onboarding process for those merchants?
    • The end product can be a simple transfer request, or it can be a point-of-sale with an integrated on-ramp feature.

  • Hybrid solutions: to fix the cold start problem of onboarding merchants and users, how can we find opportunities by leveraging the existing payments system?

    • Think about what systems have high costs and low speeds in your region. Does check cashing take forever? Is there a long lag between card acceptance and settlement because the networks are not native to your region?
    • Think about what customer journeys can be created by combining a traditional crypto debit card with NFT loyalty, for example – how can we design the loyalty programs?

  • International projects: half of the world’s payments revenue is generated from regions outside of Europe and North America, where Western card and banking networks often charge additional fees.

    • So far, most of the projects we’ve seen target English-speaking audiences in developed countries. We would like to see more projects built with multi-lingual support targeting non-English speakers with a local market focus.
    • Keep in mind that mobile users in these regions is much higher than PC users

  • Remittances: remittances account for >10% of many countries’ GDP, with a significant amount of capital inflow going through informal channels. For example, it is estimated that ~50% of remittances in Nigeria are done through channels such as P2P, FinTech platforms, and cryptocurrency.

    • We are excited to see extremely user-friendly solutions that target specific geographies through language, cultural, and educational offerings.
    • P2P exchanges have been wildly successful in those markets. Can we create a decentralized, on-chain version of it?
    • The biggest pain points are off-ramping and customer awareness
    • Projects that propose to partner with local companies (such as FinTech) are welcome.
    • We advise that projects be aware of the local regulatory environment

  • Cross-border B2B payments:

    • We would like to see projects address the traditionally slow and expensive cross-border B2B payments market, especially between smaller currency pairs with low liquidity.

  • Gig economy: Estimated to be a ~$450 billion market by Mastercard, the gig economy can particularly benefit from faster payouts and trustless escrows through blockchain technology.

Mobile

  • Mint photos taken from Saga as NFTs. The NFTs are then owned by you and can be shared or even re-minted for friends.
  • Peer-to-peer tap-to-pay. Any two Saga friends could pass currency or NFTs between each other’s on-device wallets.
  • An in-app crypto payments SDK. Simplify things like in-app transactions, subscription services, and allowlisted for developers.
  • A complete replacement of Google Photos/iCloud photo backup. All photos and files stored securely on-chain.
  • Crowdsourced crypto donations. Letting the community fund a project or an event while on the go.
  • NFT content creation apps. Think greeting cards, written content, 4d stuff. What can you create with your phone that extends beyond just a jpeg.
  • Data-to-earn. In what ways can consumers use data for a greater purpose, and how can we reward users for doing so?
  • NFT in-app Ad network. For dApps distributed in the dApp store, how can builders be rewarded for building a network and users be rewarded for engaging with ads.
  • A "knowledge bounty" app. Got a question and want an expert to give an answer? Post a "bounty" with your question and put up some crypto to incentivize someone to answer!
  • Crypto education. Guiding new-to-crytpo users through the web3 world, and getting them familiar with all of the concepts that they’ll need to know.
  • Voluntary multisig to enable family members access to your funds. Providing additional safety in case of missing or unusable Saga.

Climate

Helium for air quality: Helium is a people-powered wireless network, where anyone in the world can buy a hotspot and support the growth and resilience of the network, and get rewarded accordingly.

We’re interested in seeing new applications of people-powered hardware networks, including a similar application but for collecting climate-related data–such as air quality. These applications would create new economies for environmental data, which would be reward collection of valuable data and as a result accelerate the growth of collection networks overall.

Automatically offset transactions: A plug-in that makes it easy for any developer to add a “purchase offset” button to transactions on the Solana blockchain. For example, someone buying an NFT on MagicEden would automatically have the option to purchase a carbon offset at the point of sale, to make their transaction carbon neutral.

  • This plug in can be built using Change’s Climate APIs – to both calculate and purchase the offset
  • With Change, someone can build an interface where a user connect their wallet and all activity for the wallet is automatically offset with Change’s climate APIs. There would need to be some delegate authority for a pool of funds.
  • Allow creators to drop in their collection address into a form to offset their NFT collection. This can be done via Change’s APIs (example)

Thanks to the team at Change for this idea! If you have questions, DM Sonia or Amar.

Climate wallet: A wallet that auto-donates carbon credits for every transaction that the wallet signs. Carbon credits can be donated in SOL via Change. Nonprofits such as One Tree Planted plant trees based on donation amount.

Thanks to the team at Change for this idea! If you have questions, DM Sonia or Amar.

Evolving NFT: As a NFT holder purchases more carbon offset credits, they have an NFT that evolves as they buy more carbon offset credits. For example, the initial version of the NFT can have a tree, then as they obtain more offsets, the tree turns into a forest.

Carbon removal credits: Typically carbon removal credits are ~20x more expensive than traditional carbon offsets. This idea is to offer users the ability to offset their transactions with removal carbon removal credits. This might happen by allowing a user to purchase a set of carbon removal credits via a DAO and allow users to offset their carbon consumption and “burn” the tokens when they offset.

Build an on-chain carbon market: This is obviously a huge undertaking, but something the Solana Foundation would love to see built on the Solana network. Ideas for implementation range from building an on-chain carbon market from scratch or building a bridge with an existing on-chain carbon protocol (such as Toucan).

Marketplace for farming data: Some projects focus on tokenzing carbon credits, but this idea is focused on generating new offsets by incentivizing farmers to adopt regenerative farming practices.

This idea is inspired by Loam. Your project might be building a similar product to Loam on Solana, or building a bridge or integration to Loam.

Climate-related Dynamic Elements to NFT contracts: This idea is to add an element to smart contract NFTs that make those NFTs dynamic in response to real-world climate events. For example, the NFT might evolve in response to a wildfire or flood somewhere in the world, so that people have an ever-present reminder of how quickly climate change is impacting the globe.

Thank you to Lydia and the team at Steward for contributing this idea!

A couple of ideas from ecoToken:

NFT marketplace for carbon assets. A specific NFT marketplace for environmentally focused NFTs and NFT projects. This could also be a place where users could offset their annual emissions through carbon offsets and mint a carbon neutrality NFT for a set number of on-chain carbon credits.

Thanks to the team at ecoToken for this idea!

**Carbon credit app with list of credits available on Solana. **This could be a simple directory project that is a mobile based marketplace that hosts all credits available on the Solana blockchain in one place with descriptions of the types of credits they are.

Thanks to the team at ecoToken for this idea!

Carbon neutrality protocol. Ability to input employees, cars, energy used and link to a protocol to offset emissions, provide a carbon neutrality NFT. This could be used for businesses and corporations to easily offset their emissions.

Thanks to the team at ecoToken for this idea!

MRV (Monitor, Report, Verify) data tools on Solana. Real time satellite data that can verify carbon emissions are still taking place in a given region that can be used to verify credits on an annual basis. Underwater surveys and other real world data brought on-chain would be very valuable.

Thanks to the team at ecoToken for this idea!

Reward people via tokens for different types of civic climate engagement.

  • Register to vote
  • Vote
  • Write your legislator
  • Participate in a rally
  • Sign a petition
  • Donating to a nonprofit advancing sustainability or fighting climate change

Thanks to the team at Outside Inc for contributing this idea!

Climate extension: A browser extension that watches for browser activity and asks if you want to donate a carbon credit for certain events. E.g. shipping something, or purchasing a flight.

KlimaDAO integrations and climate positive NFTs: KLIMA is a digital currency backed by real carbon assets. It’s built first on Polygon, but the team at KlimaDAO wants to see the potential of KlimaDAO broaden substantially and across chains. One idea is to introduce climate positive NFTs to Solana. This involves embedding a Polygon retirement hash into each NFT in a Solana collection to create climate positive NFTs (the NFT is on Solana, but the retirement happens on Klima on Polygon).

Thanks to the team at KlimaDAO for contributing this idea!

Zero / low carbon commodity tracking: Hard-to-decarbonize sectors (steel, cement, chemicals, etc) will evolve more quickly if there is a way to prove that units of each commodity are actually zero / lower carbon. This will unlock the market for commodities by allowing buyers to more easily find, verify, and purchase climate compatible supply. An on-chain method to record the GHG intensity of production, transport, and distribution (a value chain that can involve many parties) would make this possible.

Community benefit distribution: A massive build-out of wind and solar power generation capacity is going to be critical to meeting our broader climate goals. But as with other industrial projects with major footprints, communities are pushing back against these developments with greater frequency. One way to improve this situation could be to enable distribution of some fraction of project revenues to local communities, to allow them to share in the benefit and encourage more enthusiastic scaling of renewable energy. This would mean finding a way to distribute these funds to communities in a decentralised, verifiable manner that is generally resilient to bad actors.

Facility emissions impact tracking: Monitoring data for emissions from industrial facilities is often not publicly available, and in the cases where it is, rarely recorded in an accessible and tamper-proof way. The same is true for data collected by regulatory agencies in many locations. Gathering a permanent record of facility emissions may supply long-term planning, community/legal action, and policymaking.

Low-carbon Solana validator rewards: Building on the existing emissions analysis of the Solana network, create tools or interfaces that more clearly highlight the emissions intensity of the power each validator is using. This could extend to gathering data on any data center-specific Renewable Energy Certificates (and similar) that mean the functional carbon intensity of that data center is lower than the grid around them.

DeFi

  • Fixed-rate loans: Build a lending protocol that allows users to lock in a fixed rate of interest over a specified period of time.
  • Weekend equity prediction market: Build a prediction market protocol that is feed data from Pyth oracles that enables users to bet on the price of equities while the markets are closed, weekends or off hours during the week.
  • Volatility index product: Compute implied vol. or black scholes from Serum market data to build volatility products
  • Slashing Insurance: A simple insurance protocol where the community can provide insurance for validators against the risk of being slashed
  • Generalized Insurance Protocol: Build out a protocol that allows for smart contract insurance, DeFi risk insurance, etc.
  • Serum analytics tools: E.g. Skew but for Serum.
  • Institutional Trading API for trading directly on Serum
  • Interest rate swaps