🍬 Riptide Results Reviewed (Really)

GM and welcome to Sol Sweet, the email that keeps you up to date with the Pepsi of blockchains. This week:

• A Closer Look At the Riptide Winners

• The Hackathon No One Talked About

• Chamath Pumps Solana Pay (Of Course)

• Hedge Has a Plan

• Explain Solana Like I'm 5

A Closer Look At the Riptide Winners

Riptide, Solana's latest global hackathon finished mid-March. The winners were announced last week.

We dug through the list to see what was interesting, so you don't have to 😉

But first, why should you care about the hackathon winners?

Great question, clever reader. The answer:

Because builders be building!

And, projects like StepN, Aver, and Hedge (more on them below) came out of the last hackathon.

So it's well worth keeping tabs on the latest batch of winners to see if we can spot the next big thing in Solana.

The Main Winners

• Grand Champion ($65k) - Cronos, an on-chain task scheduler that allows users to schedule instructions.

• Payments Track ($50k) - mtnPay, a suite of payment solutions that include an iOS point-of-sale app.

• DeFi Track ($50k) - Otter Cash, a privacy layer for Solana.

• Web3 Track ($50k) - Wordcel, a decentralized publishing stack that enables creators to publish, distribute and monetize their work on-chain.

• Gaming Track ($50k) - Strangemood, a decentralized gaming platform and marketplace that allows users to build their own storefronts.

• DAOs Track ($50k) - Strata Launchpad, a protocol that allows users to easily launch their own tokens.

As you can see there was quite a bit of cash handed out.

Solana said this hackathon saw nearly 7000 participants submit 550 final projects to the judges, with a global prize pool of up to $5 million in prizes and seed funding.

Ok, that's great man, but what companies should we be watching?

Keep Your Eye On

1. The grand champion, Cronos - duh!

In all seriousness, I'm not the most technical person out there. But I can imagine the ability to schedule tasks can only be good in the dev world.

And the easier, the better, when it comes to building. And more building = Solana grows more.

Again, I'm not very technical, but you get the idea.

2. mtnPay

Another obvious one - we actually touched on them last week with their NFT photo booth at Solana Miami.

It's obvious payments will be a big part of decentralization. But to overturn a massive system like Fiat, you need to get people to adopt the alternative.

One way to do that is to create a bridge.

And that's what mtnPay is focusing on with their iOS point-of-sale app allowing existing Square merchants to make the switch to accept crypto with ease.

Apple and Square, two huge companies with huge user bases. Smart move mtnPay!

3. NiftyPay - fourth place in the Payments Track

NiftyPay is a tool that allows creators to add NFT-linked access to real life events.

This isn't a new concept in Web3 (see Gary Vee's VeeFriends NFT which gives access to VeeCon), but it is an area that will need robust tools to allow IRL companies to adopt the blockchain for event access/tickets.

4. SolRace - third place in the Gaming Track

SolRace is a drive-to-earn racing game inspired by good old Mario Kart.

We're seeing play-to-earn (Ethereum's Axie Infinaty) and work-to-earn (StepN) show proof that the tokenized "to-earn" concept can work.

Building something inspired by a classic game is a smart move and may help SolRace gain traction, if they can do it right.

The baller move would be to license Mario Kart and use the classic characters to build out the game!

The Hackathon No One Talked About

Did you know there was a month-long Solana hackathon in Utah back in February?

Me either.

Turns out a DAO was set up - appropriately named mtnDAO - for the event hosted by  @cypher_protocol and @marginfi.

And out of it came mtnPay, who as we just saw above won $50k in Riptide.

Pretty cool considering it was built in 48 hours, in the middle of Salt Lake City!

Utah Business reported approx. 175 people attended, with 30 staying the entire month. Some even signed leases to stay in Utah permanently.

mtnDAO plans to hold the event again next year with the aim of growing it to become "bigger and better."

We'll be adding it to the calendar as something to watch.

Chamath Pumps Solana Pay (Of Course)

Interesting to see Chamath mention Solana pay on the last episode of the All In Pod (skip to the 21:20 mark).

When talking about potential disruptors to the traditional payments industry, the billionaire SPAC-man says he recently got to "look under the hood" of Solana Pay.

And he likes what he sees 👀

There's a lot of optimism for Solana Pay thanks to the speed of the Solana blockchain.

Plus exposure on a platform like the besties pod is always good.

But redditors were quick to point out that Chamath holds a big SOL position and maybe he was just pumping his bag.

The Sweet take? We're bullish (obviously) and think any exposure like this is a positive for Solana.

Hedge Has a Plan

DeFi platform Hedge (yep, the one we mentioned earlier) has raised $3.7 million to help build out their loan protocol.

Hedge will provide 0% interest loans in their USH stablecoin.

CEO Sebastian Grubb said they plan to "upgrade the whole Solana ecosystem" by lifting the current 20% level of SOL locked in DeFi.

We like the sound of that, Seb.

Although, initial thoughts are that this is very similar to the Hubble protocol which offers the same loans in their own stablecoin, USDH.

Hat tip to @SolCoyote for the insight.

BTW - if you want to learn more about Hubble and their protocol, check out Coyote's latest YouTube video here for a full guide.

Explain Solana Like I'm 5

Aaand to round off your morning pumpkin spice latte, have a look at this thread to help explain what makes Solana so fast and cheap:

Ok that's all from me. Hit reply and tell me what you're keeping your eye on. Or if it sucked, tell me why.

And follow me on Twitter @TenderKiwi

Same time next week!

Toby