Solana’s Innovation Strategy: Why You Should Build on Solana in 2023
How Solana is quickly turning into the hub for Web3 innovation.
Key Insights
Blue Oceans on Solana: Unlocking New Markets
Open Innovation on Solana: Rapid R&D
Opportunities For the Taking
SolanaFM’s Mission
If you’re thinking of building cool products in Web3, some of the best opportunities at the moment lie within the Solana ecosystem. With more than 800 submissions in the recent Solana Grizzlython, we’re seeing more developers looking to launch the next killer app on SOL.
How is Solana quickly turning into the hub for Web3 innovation?
The ecosystem has continuously adopted these 2 modern innovation strategies used by industry giants like Philips, Apple and even Marvel to reconstruct the blockchain market:
Blue Ocean Strategy
Open Innovation
Let’s break them down.
Blue Oceans on Solana: Unlocking New Markets
Solana launched the Solana Mobile Stack (SMS) last year, creating a Blue Ocean for mobile-native apps on the network.
Blue Oceans are most commonly referred to as a new, uncontested market where companies can create, and thus capture, new value without having to compete with the big guns.
This strategy is prevalent in some of the most successful business ventures we know today — Steve Jobs took the App Store and created a new market for third-party developers to publish high-quality applications. Peter Cuneo created Marvel characters that were ‘humans first, superheroes second’ and successfully captured an entirely new target market: college students.
Solana launched the SMS and the SAGA smartphone in similar fashion, opening up a mobile market for hundreds of mobile-native dApps like Floop, dReader & SolGuard to attract new mobile users into the network.
SMS is only one of several other Blue Ocean innovations; engineers at Metaplex and Solana Labs also recently developed Compressed NFTs, a technology that reduces the cost of storing NFTs on Solana by a whopping 26,000 times. This opens up a new market for mass-minting NFTs on Solana, benefitting companies like Dialect and Helium who can now mint millions of NFTs for just within hundreds of dollars.
Read about more recent innovations in this article written by Austin Federa: https://solana.com/news/solana-ecosystem-innovation-xnft
Open Innovation on Solana: Rapid R&D
The recent Grizzlython was the biggest hackathon in Solana’s history — over 10,000 registrants took part, and over 800 solutions were submitted to solve the biggest problems across seven tracks including Gaming, Mobile and Payments. This is one of the most notable examples of Open Innovation we can see today.
Open Innovation takes the traditional model of Research & Development and turns it on its head — instead of hiring a closed group of developers to conduct research, companies like Philips, Samsung & Netflix organize events like Hackathons, Ideathons or Case Competitions in succession. Each event features different problem statements for the participants to dive into, with massive rewards in exchange for the brightest solutions.
This strategy basically taps into the collective intelligence of developers on Solana to solve the major pain points echoed by users across the ecosystem.
Solana has hosted a total of seven hackathons since its inception in 2020. With almost every hackathon recording more submissions than the last, these events have proven to consistently produce top projects like Mango Markets, Squads and Dialect which continue to iterate and deliver useful products to the market post-hackathon.
Majority of protocols on Solana are also open source — open source code lets developers identify issues, build on top of one another, and foster a network of composability.
OpenBook was truly one of the most notable examples of the power of open-source — key members of the Solana community stepped forward to fork Project Serum, one of the integral parts of Solana DeFi, in order to take over ownership from FTX following the events that occurred late last year.
A close-knitted, vibrant community of developers looking to solve problems. This is exactly what is needed to drive innovation forward.
Opportunities For the Taking
At the current stage, Solana still has plenty of areas across the seven tracks that require effective solutions. With the fierce adoption of Open Innovation and a Blue Ocean Strategy, the ecosystem is going to see new untapped markets and even more opportunities for the taking in the next 2-3 years to come.
Solana will likely continue at its current trajectory — hosting more hackathons and connecting with new builders in pursuit of the next problem to solve, and the next unicorn to launch.
SolanaFM’s Mission
If you’re looking to build on Solana, we can help you supercharge your development process. SolanaFM is supporting the next generation of builders with the FM Builders’ Foundry.
The FM Builders’ Foundry brings together a community of developers and founders to collaborate, test each other's products, and establish effective feedback loops to accelerate product development and market entry.
If you’re building/looking to build on Solana, we’d love to chat — drop us a message on Twitter or create a partnership ticket on the SolanaFM Discord Server.
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