Solana founders ‘returning to cypherpunk roots’: Colosseum’s Taylor

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Colosseum is something like a hackathon organizer mixed with Y Combinator for Solana startups. I tend to view its hackathon entries as a proxy for what Solana builders are interested in, and I see its hackathon winners as a potential proxy for what Solana venture investors find valuable.

So this week on the Lightspeed podcast, I asked Colosseum co-founder Matty Taylor what he’s excited about from the organization’s newest hackathon, and his answer surprised me. 

“One of the things that we’re most excited about is sort of a return to crypto cypherpunk roots,” Taylor said. He cited privacy-preserving applications and new takes on DAOs as examples. 

Taylor said he’s seeing “high performing [Solana] founders” showing a lot of interest in private trading technology, citing former Colosseum winner Darklake — which is building a zero-knowledge enabled DEX — as one example. He’s also seen builders facilitating private payments on existing stablecoins. 

Solana developers do seem to be growing more interested in onchain privacy. The RPC provider Helius just unveiled confidential balances, a more private version of Solana’s existing token extensions. The testnet-phase encryption infrastructure network Arcium has also been buzzy of late. 

Privacy is cypherpunk, but it’s also a necessity for some institutions to come onchain, as large capital allocators tend to like keeping their financial activities opaque. 

Taylor also mentioned DAOs, the crypto-native governance structure that has so far proved tricky to execute. Colosseum was an early supporter of markets-based governance platform MetaDAO, and Taylor talked about a futarchy-enabled token launchpad where funds are escrowed and subject to decision markets for how they should be spent. 

That kind of service has been tried for things like NFT roadmaps in the past — so it’s unclear whether this attempt will catch on more broadly — but pretty much anything would be an improvement on the “one token, one vote” status quo.

“DAOs are really interesting again,” Taylor said.

Solana has been labeled a VC chain and has been criticized for centralization vis a vis 95% of the network’s stake currently running on the same validator client. It also — perhaps for the better — lacks some of the ideological bias toward more cypherpunk outcomes that its predecessor in Ethereum has.

So it would certainly be a noteworthy development if the pragmatic chain dominated by memecoin activity took a turn for the cypherpunk. It remains to be seen whether Colosseum and other investors will put their money where their mouth is.

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