Crypto

Solana’s co-founder sees potential for its blockchain to be the ‘Apple of crypto’

Comment

A picture of Raj Gokal, co-founder of Solana, talking at an event.
Image Credits: JEENAH MOON – Bloomberg / Getty Images

As some crypto companies gain mainstream adoption through partnerships, alliances or deals with big brand names, others are operating by the beat of their own drum and not worrying about whether a big label is with them.

Solana, a layer-1 blockchain that launched in 2020, is one of the biggest chains that developers are building on. Excluding stablecoins, Solana is the eighth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization at around $7.6 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.

“Solana has the potential to be the Apple of crypto,” co-founder Raj Gokal told TechCrunch+. For many years, Apple focused on two things: user experience and performance, he said. “I think about Apple, having worked for close to a decade on latency for touchscreens to allow for the iPhone to come out and it just felt like magic.”

“There were a lot of things to be built on top of that platform to get the iPhone and App Store and app ecosystem to where it is today,” Gokal added. “But it all started with one relentless focus on a simple interaction that had to work perfectly.”

And that’s a focus that Solana’s core engineering and ecosystem has, he said. It’s important to create a network “that feels like the regular internet, when it’s an entirely new financial internet.”

It’s also worth mentioning that Solana may be trying to compete with Apple through its own web3-focused Android smartphone, Saga, which was rolled out to the public in April (I got to test one out). Solana says Saga was launched to make crypto products and services more accessible for users by offering them through a phone instead of the traditional way of accessing crypto platforms and applications: using computers.

There’s lots that the network is doing to keep itself fresh and competitive. “The core thesis is going to be [focused on] new businesses, new projects, independent developers,” Gokal said. “We are still in an ecosystem and a community that is optimistic about what two developers in a garage can do.”

For example, Tensor, which is one of the largest Solana-focused NFT marketplaces, gained significant traction within the first year of launching. For what it’s worth, the platform is only being run by three people.

“So there isn’t as much emphasis on securing big logos and trusting that large enterprises that drive adoption,” Gokal said. “Some of them are forward leaning, but they’re waiting for new use cases to get validated before turning on their entire user bases.”

Solana launches ChatGPT plug-in to help users interact with its network

So in the meantime, Solana’s potential to grow 10x to 100x is through small “independent businesses” and developers building on its platform, Gokal said. “That’s why we invest in a lot of things like hackathons; even through the bull and bear cycle, we’re seeing hackathon numbers go up and up and up.”

Its most recent hackathon had over 800 submissions, and its hacker houses have had over 17,000 developers come in. “Venture money keeps pouring in, and that’s where our focus is.”

Instead of partnering with big established consumer-facing brands like Nike, Starbucks or Disney — which the layer-2 blockchain Polygon has — Solana would consider joining forces with companies that build infrastructure or payments like Stripe.

In December, Stripe announced its fiat-to-crypto payments on-ramp, and 11 of the 16 projects in the program were based on Solana’s network. Separately, in November, Google Cloud also partnered with Solana to bring its Blockchain Node Engine to the chain, so it could make it easier for people to launch Solana-dedicated nodes on the cloud. That announcement was one of a few that Google Cloud made in relation to Solana.

Then there’s more “highly experimental teams” like cafe chain Boba Guys, which has franchises across 30 cities and is “willing to rapidly experiment with loyalty programs” on Solana, Gokal noted.

“We think we’re at a very early stage of figuring out how NFTs and tokens could drive bigger basket sales and more stickiness with a beverage chain,” Gokal said.

In general, there’s only a handful of “big companies” that make sense to partner with, Gokal said. The blockchain wants to work with teams “that can move, push releases and experiments and measure every week rather than someone really big that has an established view of what they’re looking for and if it doesn’t work they just de-staff it and move on to shinier things like AI, which is the hot new thing.”

More TechCrunch

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during its I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Here’s everything Google just announced

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google gets serious about AI-generated video at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google TalkBack will use Gemini to describe images for blind people

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

Circle to Search is now a better homework helper

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

Google experiments with using video to search, thanks to Gemini AI

A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers.

Google will soon start using GenAI to organize some search results pages

Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.

Google is adding more AI to its search results

At its Google I/O developer conference, Google on Tuesday announced the next generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips.

Google’s next-gen TPUs promise a 4.7x performance boost

Google is upgrading Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, with features aimed at making the experience more ambient and contextually useful.

Google reveals plans for upgrading AI in the real world through Gemini Live at Google I/O 2024

Veo can generate few-seconds-long 1080p video clips given a text prompt.

Google’s image-generating AI gets an upgrade

At Google I/O, Google announced upgrades to Gemini 1.5 Pro, including a bigger context window. .

Google’s generative AI can now analyze hours of video

The AI upgrade will make finding the right content more intuitive and less of a manual search process.

Google Photos introduces an AI search feature, Ask Photos

Apple released new data about anti-fraud measures related to its operation of the iOS App Store on Tuesday morning, trumpeting a claim that it stopped over $7 billion in “potentially…

Apple touts stopping $1.8B in App Store fraud last year in latest pitch to developers

Online travel agency Expedia is testing an AI assistant that bolsters features like search, itinerary building, trip planning, and real-time travel updates.

Expedia starts testing AI-powered features for search and travel planning

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we look at the drama around TabaPay deciding to not buy Synapse’s assets, as well as stocks dropping for a couple of fintechs, Monzo raising…

Inside TabaPay’s drama-filled decision to abandon its plans to buy Synapse’s assets

The person who claimed to have stolen the physical addresses of 49 million Dell customers appears to have taken more data from a different Dell portal, TechCrunch has learned. The…

Threat actor scraped Dell support tickets, including customer phone numbers

If you write the words “cis” or “cisgender” on X, you might be served this full-screen message: “This post contains language that may be considered a slur by X and…

On Elon’s whim, X now treats ‘cisgender’ as a slur

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch the AI reveals live

Facebook once had big ambitions to be a major player in enterprise communication and productivity, but today the social network’s parent company Meta will be closing a very significant chapter…

Meta is shutting down Workplace, its enterprise communications business