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Solana Builders - Kyzzen Spotlight
Recorded: June 3, 2025 Duration: 1:04:21Space Recording
Short Summary
The Solana ecosystem is witnessing significant growth with new project launches, strategic partnerships, and a focus on consumer-facing applications. Initiatives like SoulFlare's MasterCard and Build with Monkey DAO's grants program are set to enhance user engagement and support innovation in the blockchain space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I hope you guys are all having a great Tuesday. We're about to get started
into this space. As we're getting started, I'm about to pin our spaces link to the top of our
space event. So if you guys can, you know, show some love on that, on that spaces link, like it,
share it, repost it. And also if you're in the audience and there's someone specific here that
you have a question for, if it's, you know, any of our guests, any of the co-hosts, please drop a,
drop a question underneath the space link, the post, and we'll be monitoring that to make sure all your guys' questions are getting answered.
So if you have one, please put it underneath the spaces post.
It's pinned to the top.
And also, I invite any of our guests that if you have a post that you would specifically like to showcase with something that you're talking about or something you're going to maybe shill today,
to showcase with something that you're talking about or something you're going to maybe shill
today, please feel free, pin something to the top of our space so the audience can quickly
access it and know maybe what you're talking about and dive in deeper if there's any resources
you have for posts.
So it's not just for our Spaces link guests.
We invite you guys go pin something up at the top there so you can utilize it too.
But we're about to get started in here. We're going to get into some guest intros of who's all up here and who's building on Solana. We're going
to talk about Solana Builders. So if we can kick it off, we're going to do that first where we're
going to intro each guest because I think we have them all here. Yeah, we do. So we'll dive into
that right now. Soul Flare, could you kick us off and kind of
sharing who you are and what you do for Salon and maybe even something you solve? What is something
you solve in the Salon space? But if you can make it like a quick intro and then later on in the
space, we're going to dive into a complete shill where each project can show what they're building
in alpha that they may have. But Soulflare, can you kick us off? Jam, Jam, Kaizen.
Good to see you, Solana Builders.
Happy Tuesday.
Always bullish.
This is SolQuicks over here for the marketing BD team at SoulFlare.
Definitely Solana Builders.
First Solana wallet.
Self-custody.
Solving a lot of issues, obviously, with onboarding,
user responsibility of owning and operating
a self-custody wallet, and helping to push the Solana ecosystem forward.
We have a lot of exciting features and late drops that we've been excited to talk about
with our waitlist right now for our MasterCard.
But yeah, man, we'll dive into more.
A lot of Accelerate and events and definitely trying to help support and move
this Solana ecosystem forward.
So really excited for this space.
I love it.
Thank you so much for the intro.
I'm so stoked to have you up here and talk about it.
I am looking forward to hearing about that MasterCard.
I am very much interested in that.
Did you join the waitlist?
Yes, I did.
I'm going to shoot my shot right now.
I did.
It's in your banner and your SoulFl your wallet or on our website on the drop down
Thank you so much so player
Metaplex, can you guys give us an intro who you are and what you do and maybe what's what's a problem you solve?
Um, we I don't know if anyone knows about Solana you you probably have heard about Metaplex. We are a
infrastructure knows about Solana, you probably have heard about Metaplex. We are a infrastructure protocol,
so to speak, which enables you to launch tokens and NFTs on Solana and the SVM. And basically, we help others solve their problems. We are here for builders, building tools and infrastructure
for others to actually, you know, build their dreams and uh other things that they want to build on
solana that's it i love it you're the builders for the builders i love that uh chris can you
uh interest in on who's dialect who you guys are and what do you do and maybe what's a problem you
solve hey yeah what's up everyone good to be here and thanks for the invite. Yeah, so I'm Chris. I'm the founder at Dialect.
And for those of you who haven't heard of us, we build developer tools and what we call like the UX stack for crypto and specifically Solana.
There's two products in there that we like to sort of jokingly say, like help you reach your users at the right time and the right place.
say like help you reach your users at the right time and the right place.
Right time is our alert stack, which is suite developer tools for sending notifications and
timely alerts, company announcements, product announcements, all that to your users, like
huge reduction in total engineering time, all the boilerplate code out of the way so that you can
spend all your time building like great alerts. Probably not a surprise to this audience that
like alerts can go off the rails pretty quickly,
become spammy, and actually actively hurt your users, which is very few product features that are like that. So we built this from the ground up for crypto and have some cool alpha we can
share about something big coming next week on that front. Second product is blockchain links
or blinks for anyone who hasn't heard of those. It's not about Twitter. They are APIs for
transactions and the fastest way to integrate
on-chain experiences into your product,
including hopefully coming soon
into alerts themselves.
So imagine like getting an alert
you're about to get liquidated,
smash the top up collateral button
right from the notification
and you don't even have to leave
or go to another site to do it.
So we call it the UX stack
and just happy to be here.
Thanks for having us.
I love that.
Thank you so much, Chris, for entering yourselves.
Moonwalk, I would love to hear from you.
Who you guys are, what do you do, and maybe what's a problem you solve?
Good morning.
Thank you for having me.
This is Caitlin.
I'm the head of growth for Moonwalk Fitness.
Moonwalk is a fitness accountability app built on Solana that uses financial incentives
and daily step goals to help people form healthy habits that
last. The main issue that we're solving for is one of the biggest that we see in health and
wellness. We see it every year with New Year's resolutions, which is accountability. We often
want to live healthier, but go about it in the wrong ways or choose overly challenging goals
that aren't realistic in your day-to-day lifestyle, hard to integrate, hard to maintain.
Moonwalk takes the opposite approach, asking users to put money online to join games with daily step goals. And if you
do what you say you're going to do, or in other words, hit the daily step goal and remain consistent
in hitting movement goals each day, you get all of your money back at the end of the game. You
get to split a prize pool that's made up of partial deposits from others in the game that
do not hit the daily step goal. I like to call it gamified
accountability, but really helping people build momentum, confidence, and community and make
fitness into a lifestyle that lasts rather than a fad diet or difficult workout regimen that doesn't
end up becoming part of their day to day. So just helping people move more to live better.
I love that. Thank you so much, Moonwalk, for entering that and creating your cool app that rewards us for staying active.
Last but not least. Oh, wait, no, we got two more. Sorry, that was wrong.
Build a Monkey Doubt. Can you share with us who you are and what you do and what's a problem you
solve? GM, GM, everyone. I'm in behind the speaker here on the Build with Monkey Doubt program. So thanks for having us.
Build with Monkey Doubt is a program outside of the Monkey Doubt, well, a part of the Monkey Doubt community.
Essentially, what we are is a grants program or a builder program within the Monkey Doubt community helping support early stage builders on Solana.
Our goal is essentially to identify and attract extraordinary builders on Solana,
building something unique and exciting within the consumer vertical, helping
integrate both MonkeyDao and the wider ecosystem, but really bring exposure and
support to those early stage builders.
We help builders with firstly grants.
So we do some grant funding to help them build, continue on their journey of what they're building out.
We support with distribution, tapping into the Monkey Down network and our different
channels to help those products get exposure and distribution.
We also have a mentorship and advisory program where our members are involved in helping
support those builders, creating a network and connecting individuals to different strategic
individuals to different, different strategic partners in the ecosystem. So a big part of what
partners in the ecosystem.
we do is essentially taking early builders, helping support them along their journey, and
hopefully turning those into some success stories that really help help on board and expand both
monkeyed out and the Solana ecosystem to a broad audience through consumer products.
I love that. I love that you guys are doing this. And
thank you so much for supporting people who are trying to expand and grow Solana. Dave,
I'd love to hear from you. Who you are? What do you do? Maybe what's a problem you solve for Solana?
Jim, guys, man, I'm just dealing with some crazy allergies. I don't know if any of you guys have
been hit with really bad allergies this year. For me, it's just wild this year. It's like totally different than
every other year. I'm getting some hundreds and thumbs up. So it's glad I'm not the only one.
My head feels like it's going to explode. But anyways, yeah, I'm the founder of Wise Whales
and Fast Car Slow Car. So my main focus right now is um on doing some uh back running
arbitrages and other on-chain uh high frequency strategies um so how do i help the ecosystem i
mean i do a little bit by um improving liquidity and making tighter spreads in the in the pools
um if uh so so that is that is one way we kind of help the
ecosystem a little bit. We don't do any front running or sandwiching or anything like that.
I love it. Thank you so much, Dave, for the intro and for what you do for the space.
And again, everyone who's in the audience, give these guys a follow. They're building,
they're doing amazing things for the salon ecosystem and you're going to want to stay in the know last but not least omi can you give
us an intro who is kaizen who are we and what are we doing what what maybe do we solve absolutely i
i apologize if there's a lot of noise behind me because i'm actually in vietnam getting ready for
the sauna summit and i just got out of a dinner event so i'm hiding in some corner here but uh
yeah for those of you who don't know,
Kaizen is like the ultimate onboarding and discovery platform of Solana.
So effectively, we try and find all the best opportunities across the ecosystem,
whether it's staking, lending, tokens, NF3, squares,
airdrops, bounties, all of those stuff,
to help you learn about them, to help you explore them,
and to help you make it much easier for you to keep track of them.
So check us out, Kaizen.io.
Yeah, it's better for this space.
I love it.
Thank you, Omey.
And you sound crystal clear.
Don't worry about the audio.
It sounds great.
But yeah, again, give us a follow.
Shoot Kaizen a follow.
We help you find amazing yield opportunities.
All right, let's get into
the Solana Builder conversation because I'm really excited to
get into this.
I'm really excited to hear from our guests.
And one of my first questions I want to kick off is how do you guys balance, you know,
shipping fast with crypto and with or building with long term infrastructure or utility that
lasts?
Like, how do you guys balance that?
Let's ship fast because people
like it fast, right? And in crypto. And also how do you balance, you know, the long-term
sustainability of your infrastructure? And maybe if you're not someone building, right? Like
Metaplex or Build a Monkey Dile where you're supporting builders, where do you see builders
who are doing this, doing it well? And maybe how do you, what would you give maybe someone a tip
who's in the audience to do this well too, if you're not someone, you know, maybe directly
trying to build a product quickly. But I'd love to hear from you guys on, you know, this, this,
you know, intro to the conversation. You guys can either unmute or just raise your hand. Soul
Flare, I see your hand raised. Love to hear from you. Yeah, I'll go ahead and throw the paw first. I think the age-old Web3 proverb of under-promise over-deliver is generally a good foundation to start with.
And that was something with our most recent update was that we kind of built up to the idea that something big was coming,
but they didn't understand that it was a complete rebrand of our company project.
And also the app, which is now 13 times
faster included new updates like portfolio display so you can customize your experience
and even just like long time solana users that tried out the new update or downloaded it since
have noticed the improved difference and that wasn't really anything that we had announced
prior to um we kind of built up some hype,
but that's kind of like a perfect example
of under-promising, over-delivering,
and it worked out really well for us,
and I think that would be a great, like, good foundation to start with,
but love to hear from other projects as well.
Dave, I'd love to hear from you.
Thank you so far for that.
Yeah, I got disconnected,
but I guess the question is, what advice do you have for builders getting started in the space, right? Something like that?
Yeah, like, how do you balance the fast shipping of building something and in the long term, like infrastructure, essentially?
Yeah, I mean, I think this is actually a really critical point.
I mean, I talked to a lot of builders, a lot of fresh teams in this space.
And if you need to deal with data in any significant way, I think this is something you have to really, really carefully think through.
I see a lot of teams that have kind of an idea and try to build up some MVP, especially with like AI
agent related projects.
And they just don't realize how difficult it is to get the data that they want to make
their product, like to really hit like product market fit and get like a good product.
It's one thing to kind of build some simple agents that are just kind of looking at the
top coins or whatever,
you know, something simple where you're hitting third-party APIs.
But to deal with Solana data properly and to try to get signals from on-chains, stuff
like that, it takes a lot of work.
And anything, even something as simple as like getting good pricing data is really tough,
especially in the long tail of assets.
And so, you know, if you're building and you need blockchain data for anything you're doing,
I kind of highly recommend just like pausing, talking to someone who really knows what they're
doing and really thinking through how to build that out before you even start building your MVP or anything like that.
Because I've literally seen 50-plus teams assume that they can do this
and get to the point where they really need to get their blockchain data
and deal with it properly and scale up and just all of them,
like just fail, fail, fail, because it's that difficult.
So you really need
to have a coherent strategy there um so that that would be my advice yeah i second that um
yeah i think like uh to answer your question i think shipping fast is how you build long-term
infrastructure it's not a guarantee but it's like for sure the thing you should do and the reason i
say that is like shipping fast means you can fast, and that means you can get customers and talk to users fast.
And if you're not talking to users, you're probably building the wrong thing.
So just getting to market, shipping iteratively is really the most important thing.
There's nothing more motivating to building long-term infrastructure than having an MVP that a customer is using
and you're building for them and they've like made the ask.
And then like assuming that number two is like hire an incredible engineering team
because like it is really, really hard to build long-term infrastructure.
Guaranteed you're going to do it wrong if you don't have a customer, but like you're
going to end up with like spaghetti code and all that other stuff.
But like best way you hire amazing talent is to like actually have customers and
growth.
And so I think like shipping fast is the name of the game.
You got to do it.
Yeah.
Real quick,
Chris.
Sorry.
Sorry,
Caitlin.
I have a real quick question for Chris.
Yeah.
You,
you mentioned hiring a dev team or an engineer team.
You know,
is there any tips,
like say if there's a startup project that maybe doesn't have a lot of capital um you know is there any tips like say if there's a startup uh project that maybe
uh doesn't have a lot of capital you know is there is there a tip you have maybe for someone
who doesn't have a lot of capital to deal with in regards to hiring an engineer team yeah i think
like if you're technical that's great if you're not it's not impossible and i i think really the
answer is still the same thing which is like get your first customers as soon as possible and like um uh i went through yc a few years ago and y
combinator and they're among the most like craziest and best advice in the world on like how to
challenge your assumptions of what it means to actually launch a product and get a customer
there's a famous example i'm forgetting the name of the company, but they are like in the United States and they're like a subscription service for medications, like medical
medications. And so instead of going to like a pharmacy to get your prescriptions, they get
delivered to you. And the two founders, they basically were like, cool, interesting problem
space. And I think the same day they had a customer already, someone who wanted stuff delivered to their door.
Like, hey, I don't have time to go and pick up my prescriptions from the pharmacy.
They literally just like went and got them.
They found a way to actually legally get them for that person.
And they just got in their car and drove and did it.
And they had their first paying customer like within four hours of basically like committing to working on the project.
So I think like the answer to like either of these is you find those customers, you show that growth, you show that engagement,
then you can like either convince engineers or fundraise or both at the same time.
Like that's really, I think, just like challenger assumptions on what it means to ship an MVP.
I love it. Thank you, Chris. Caitlin, go for it. Sorry, I cut you off.
No, you're good. You're good. I mean, totally agreeing with Chris. I think moving fast,
but not aimlessly and operating on short feedback loops is so, so important. Just shipping and
measuring what you're learning from the users, the feedback that they have, what works, what
doesn't and using that on the decisions as you move forward is super important.
But I think on the opposite end of that, and not optimizing for
dopamine metrics, something in this space that I feel like I see a lot are short-term games for
long-term sacrifices and not remembering long-term mission. I mean, if you're in a lot of the
projects, obviously on this panel, not included there, but you see it in this space so often of
kind of the people playing short-term extractive games. Or alternatively, with the metas that shift over time,
you see a lot of teams that try to sort of chase ghosts, if you will,
and ship features that drive movement today
that don't necessarily pan into the long-term vision of the project.
So I think that having a balance of urgency and patience
to be able to test, adapt, and make sure that you're staying on track
with what you're doing and remembering why you're there is very important and it's really easy to get swept up
in this space so i would just add that as well 100 it's so true um i would oh sorry i might be
getting feedback from my computer uh build with monkey dow uh i would love to hear from you then
dave awesome yeah um definitely echo echo what some of the other folks
here have said I think one of the biggest things we we see is through the applications we receive
through the loop monkey now is a lot of people try to build like or are pitching ideas for
problems that don't exist I think I think a big part of building these products is a lot of times
people spend so much time trying to figure out the perfect
architecture, trying to figure out all these integrations. And then when you ask them,
hey, like, what problem are you actually solving? Have you even talked to people
about trying to like, see if there's even a need for this product in the market?
He'd be surprised how many times people don't even do that, that level of work. So I think a big
part of that is like, just validate the idea with real people.
One of the big things that we've actually done in the Build with Monkey.dat program is actually
structure this so that we engage our community members. We know that we have over 3,000 members
in the community, power users, obviously. We want to be able to create an active feedback loop with
the builders that we bring on into the program to help validate those ideas, right? To test out different concepts,
to actually get real users trying it in the early stages
before you commit a ton of time and a ton of effort
to try to build something so robust out
and then figuring out that nobody cares to use it.
So to the points that some of the other folks here said
is really validate your idea early and often,
engage a community, either your own community,
work with a community, for example, like with MonkeyDow to tap into those members to get access to early users that can give you robust idea.
You may not always agree with it as a builder, and that's fine.
But, yeah, make sure that you're getting it in front of people early and often so that you're not spending a ton of time building something that ultimately nobody cares about down the road. So we'll definitely add that.
No, I love that because I think I remember one time I heard Elon Musk in an interview
talk about before they ship a product, they send out a survey to see how many people are willing
to not only do the survey, but then put a hundred dollar deposit down to hold for the product. And they, and they literally see what, like, who's willing to do that.
And depending on their numbers of who's interested, like that's when, if they will or will not ship
that product. And I think that's a huge, a really good tip. I love that build a monkey. Dave,
I'd love to hear from you. Yeah. And that's, that's tricky. it's not it's not obvious how to kind of validate your
product but i think what everyone has said kind of speaks to two kind of additional things one
you need someone on your founding team that is like deep deep deep in the in the world of of
solana or wherever you're building and that that really understands, that has, you know,
knows 100 people, knows their pain points really well.
They have, you have the pain points yourself.
It's not just kind of guessing.
You need to be like right in the trenches
and you need to have been there for like six plus months
because you're not just, you're just not going to compete
with the teams that do have that.
And the other thing is, you is, we talk about building early
and then iterating based on your customer's feedback.
You can't do that without really good technical developers.
And so either you have to be extremely technical,
like very technical,
like a solid engineer yourself,
or someone on your team has to be,
like one of the founding members.
I think you're asking,
like, how do you get going
if you, you know, with a low budget
trying to like hire an engineering team?
I'd say like, you don't.
You abandon all hope.
I mean, you can,
you work to find an engineer
that is capable, that can be your co-founder, right?
Don't get going without that, right?
Don't hire cheap engineering teams to build your MVP.
Don't do it.
Because you're going to be, first of all, you're going to be probably hiring some, I don't know, North Korean or something like that, who kind of is tricking you into thinking they're a decent developer. And like, it's funny, but like, honestly, I know I've talked to a bunch
of North Koreans trying to get jobs. I know of them like working in the Solana ecosystem. Like,
there's no joke. It's really hard to vet good engineers if you're not a very technical person
yourself. So that's one thing. They'll kind of, they'll, they'll trick you into thinking that they're better than they are.
You have no way of really validating them.
You have no way of knowing how good the initial code base is for your MVP.
And you won't be able to kind of iterate fast and, you know, with precision when you, when
you want, when you need to.
Right.
So like, I would say like, if you don't, you know, and because we're all trying to build
fairly technical stuff in Solana, right?
Unless it's something that's very simple
and it's mostly kind of UI that you're focused on,
maybe that's the exception,
but otherwise you absolutely need
like a rockstar engineer as your co-founder
or you better be one yourself
or honestly, just don't do it
because it's going to be a waste of time and money and just like a giant headache for a year.
Uh, Dave, I have a quick question on vet, like you're mentioning vetting the engineer, you know,
for someone who's maybe down there, who's kind of like me, I'm no engineer. I I'm not going to be
good at that. I'm not going to be able to spot whether it's good or bad. How would you recommend someone vetting an engineer or maybe even someone else on the panel? If you have an expertise in this, you know, how do you vet an engineer? How do you vet their work? And how do you know if you can trust someone or you can't?
Unless you're a very technical person yourself, you have no good ways of doing that, right?
You go off other people in the space that are good technical engineers, right?
And you ask for their opinion.
But man, I've been tricked by that as well, right?
I've been recommended people by people I trust, other developers, and they haven't been as great as I'd hoped.
And if I wasn't fairly technical myself,
I wouldn't have even known that. And so that's why I think really be very careful in forming
your founder team and make sure you have someone very technical there.
Got it. Okay. So making sure someone maybe who you're partnered with can
help you vet that. Okay. I love that. Thank you so much, Dave, for sharing.
We're seeing growth and expansion in regards to adoption.
What's something they need to understand about building here versus anywhere else?
What separates Solana from other blockchains?
What's something that maybe if there's a builder in the audience,
what do they really need to understand about building on Solana?
Metaplex, I see your hand up.
I mean, there's one big difference between building on solana and for instance
the evm ecosystem it's the way we use smart contracts on the evm side you have to write
and deploy your smart contract here you use the programs and that's like a basic and and probably one of the most important things to know when you're
approaching solana um the other thing is um well you do it is good to understand rust of course
but uh thanks to uh some of the stuff that also metaplex has made available you can build on
solana with pretty much everything now um we have a bunch of SDKs that you can use, and even if you're not really good
into Rust, you can still start and, you know, start
validating some of your ideas, start testing out, even
if you are still learning Rust. So this is maybe something for the beginner level
developers out there. I would also add
I love that. Thank you. Chris, I see you unmuted.
Yeah, yeah. I would say
whether or not you intend
to be developing yourself
and whether or not you're technical, I do think
getting a picture in your mind
for how Solana works,
like how you store data
and how you interact with the blockchain,
how programs like the SPL token program
work.
I do have a technical background. I hired amazing engineers and they like instantly fired me from
engineering. They're just like, we've got it from here. Don't worry about it. But a huge part of how
I think from a product perspective and how we think about development is understanding that
Solana is not another EVM chain. And if you're coming from the EVM world
or not, like getting a, like a, sort of like a semi-technical high-level view of just like how
data is stored on the blockchain, how you interact with it. So like, you know, the concept of program
derived addresses, like it's, it's a radically different model than EVM. And it's just been
really powerful for me when I think about like we're developer tools
we don't do anything on chain but even just knowing that makes me informed when we're like
talking with other teams um like maybe we're working with a multi-sig team and like figuring
out how we can get blockchain links to work with multi-sigs like understanding that at least like
a semi-technical conceptual level i think is really valuable.
Thank you so much, Chris, for sharing that. Before we move on to the next one,
does anyone else want to tap on this subject right here? Dave, I'd love to hear from you.
Yeah. I mean, it's just kind of reiterating what's already been said, what I already said before, but like just a lot, a lot of the things that you kind of can dream up is kind of an order of magnitude or more difficult to do in some cases, especially when it comes to accessing data.
And so I think you really need to kind of map out like how to actually you have to be very you have to carefully map out how you want to how you're going can actually build this to realize your dream.
There's a lot of things that you can dream up that just aren't practical to build
or are just much more difficult to build.
And so just kind of vetting those ideas through someone with a lot of experience is kind of necessary.
I love that. Thank you, Dave, for sharing that. One thing I kind of have
too on the question for our guests up here is, you know, a lot of the conversation when it comes
to Solana is like, how do we balance, you know, catering to the Web3 audience, but also bridging
the gap to Web2? And as builders, how are you guys kind of bridging that gap between,
you know, a Web3 on it and a Web2?
You know, I know so far, like you're doing a MasterCard,
which is something very familiar with a lot of Web2, right?
Everyone knows, or maybe even a lot of people have a MasterCard, right?
So I would love to hear, how are you, Beas,
maybe trying to help facilitate or even bridge that,
you know, with builders you're supporting or what you're creating?
Yeah, absolutely. And that's a great question. And being self-custody wallet of Solana, it's a responsibility. You know, an interesting statistic is that over 50%
of our users have never interacted with a DAP. They will just send, receive, maybe swap,
substance limit orders. And so that's also like our responsibility to reduce that friction for education.
And that's where we help try to really promote
the dApps and projects that have been building on Solana,
which show like the opportunities
that they can generate revenue,
create these streams of revenue
through DeFi opportunities,
because not only is it a huge responsibility
owning a self-cussy wallet,
but there's like a lot of rewards that come with that,
you know, with the different staking protocols in both Solana
and now it's Stablecoin,
which is something that we're really excited to release in an upcoming update.
It's going to tie perfectly into the MasterCard,
but definitely that is a huge feature that we kind of wanted to front run
and really push out first and get everything tested,
get the data and metrics so that we can release it to all markets
because it makes things tangible. When you're able to turn this magic internet money into goods and
services, it really becomes a reality. And it's helping so much in areas of hyperinflation where
we see the Solana apex and some of the events really targeted towards. So we're really trying
to branch into those markets. And we feel know, we feel not only should we have like that card available,
but that's why we're also trying to promote the Solana ecosystem and projects
and showing up to spaces like Kaizen's, you know, and supporting you guys.
Cause this is, these conversations are important because the more users that show up,
they need to be educated and learn what better place with some of these absolute legends up here.
Metaplex, Moonwalk, you Yo, shout out Moonwalk on Caitlin.
Also, I saw you grinding with the push-up thing at Accelerate.
I definitely had the Moonwalk going on.
Second day, I got the alpha.
They were like, yo, you need to turn on your steps, right?
Look how much walking you're doing all around this conference.
You know, you're not like even taking part in this.
So that was the alpha.
And I'm going to remember that for future events.
I love that.
Thank you so much, Soul Flare, for sharing for sharing and yeah moonwalk is an awesome they
they kill it on the irl events um build a monkey now i see you guys just hands up i'd love to hear
from you yeah sure so uh with us like uh i mentioned specifically we're looking for builders
building consumer products this is obviously a a tough vertical to sometimes identify and pick out
which products are going to actually gain real traction in the consumer space beyond
maybe our echo bubble of the world we live in here in Web3 and the space that we're in.
But essentially what we look for in ways that we want to reach that audience is essentially
looking for products and builders that are
building something that one is main, like mainstream attractable, something that we
feel our own friends and family that may not be in the ecosystem may use as a product.
We obviously want to obfuscate the complexity of integrating and connecting with wallets,
building all the different security precautions, how we sign up to different apps.
So definitely looking for teams doing the work to try to create that experience
that makes the onboarding experience as simple as it would be
for any of your Web2 apps.
So really trying to go after those builders that are going towards that space.
For example, one of the things that we feel is very relatable and something that we feel can bring on that mainstream audience is one of
the teams that we just announced uh as part of the program is this luko team which is essentially
like a pokemon like everybody knows what pokemon go is essentially it's a pokemon go with loot boxes
of on-chain items so um stuff like that, we want to experiment, support, and back. So ultimately,
trying to find different ways to utilize blockchain and the benefits that you get with
distribution, with access, with everything that comes with the benefits of blockchain,
but building consumer products that regular users would connect to then further integrate them into the blockchain or the Web3
economy and ecosystem. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for sharing that. And Moonwalk,
can you please, I saw your hand up. Sorry, I'm having technical difficulties over here.
All good. Yeah, I think the way that we're thinking about it, and I say this a lot,
is that Moonwalk is a fitness app built on Solana, not a crypto app focused on fitness.
And we use that to inform every decision that we make as we continue to build the product.
The way that we're sort of, I guess, approaching more of the long-term mission,
which is a mainstream consumer app
that looks and feels as high quality and easy to use as what you'd see with regular Web2 apps,
is definitely evolving as the product does. So right now, our audience is primarily
either within the crypto industry or crypto adjacent, so familiar with wallets and able to
transfer funds and all of those fun things. But ultimately, what we think about with decisions of how we want to
move the product forward are sort of counterintuitive to how you see a lot of teams in the crypto space
building, which is, as someone mentioned before, just building for problems that don't exist.
It's thinking of what does the average person outside of the space actually care about? What
are the bottlenecks in the process of the app that we're building right now? And where can
we go with it to make it way simpler? A lot of it goes back to just talking to regular people,
to be honest, which I don't think enough people in this industry do. We tend to have a bit of an
echo chamber where we all hype each other up. The energy is great. Lots of really smart people
building interesting things. But I think a lot tends to get lost in that when we don't, you know,
look outwards
of who we're actually trying to build for
and get in front of
rather than just the audience that we already have.
But for Moonwalk, a lot of that,
first of all, just going into the onboarding.
And I love that Chris is on this spaces as well.
When I saw him in Turkey,
he was incredibly helpful
with just going through the current onboarding flow.
It's something we're thinking about
doing a bit of an overhaul of to make it super simple, lowering the number of steps from sign up to get a person into a game.
Every step that you add in the onboarding process results in massive amounts of drop off.
So just making it a bit more intuitive and a bit more slick.
But then also going into like embedded wallet features and fiat on ramp off ramps.
At the end of the day, the average consumer is self-serving.
We're self-serving people.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but when you know that and you're informed about that,
you can build and account for it.
Users want to use something that can help them live healthier.
They want the ability to make money.
They don't want to be told they need a specific type of wallet.
They don't need to be told that they need crypto for it. All of these things are just deterrence from using the product and getting
to experience the benefits of blockchain rather than I was telling them like what they need and
how they need it. So working through we have an embedded wallet future right now. We're working
on Fiat Rails, which I think is a super important component of just onboarding people to the product
where they can actually use it. We have a free-to-play mode right now as well that gets people in the door,
obviously sort of missing the loss aversion component of the product with that perspective.
And then just adding in things that regular users are used to and like to see.
So when you're adding any sort of social features into the app,
making it easy to connect with their friends,
being able to share content from the app,
which helps with distribution and visibility,
all of those fun things, that's sort of how we're thinking about it. It's, you know, ultimately just
boils down to letting users experience the benefits of the parts of the product that are
on-chain without shoving it down their throats. And I think that's how we win, at least from a
consumer perspective. I love it. Thank you so much for sharing that, Caitlin. And Dave, I see your
hand up and then
we'll probably get to towards the end of the space where we get and allow every project up
here to shill and give it some exciting news for the next six to 12 months coming up.
Yeah, this isn't really it, but like I'm not in the consumer app kind of space, but I wanted to
just give this other take, which is having talked to, you know, I got a lot of VC friends and the people are like, we're looking for consumer apps, right?
Like, just don't take the bait and try to build.
And I know PumpFun has made a lot of money and it's like, you know, it's kind of easy to think to, you know, I should build another launchpad.
I should try to build an AI agent, blah, blah, blah.
There's some low-hanging fruit there
in terms of like where the product market fit is.
But let me tell you, like everyone is dying
for more consumer apps.
The VCs are kind of starved for them.
You go to any builder house
and most people are not building consumer apps,
which is disappointing.
Moon on, not Moonwalk, but Moon on the Build with Monkey DAO account, he's bored. He needs to see more consumer-facing apps. So just get out there and
do it. I highly recommend that you will find VC money. But before you do that, go, you know, make sure that it's, it's something kind of an interesting idea that people
kind of, um, would want to kind of, if not, you know, make sure people want to use it and make
people, make sure people would invest in it. Right. Cause, cause when you have a space that's
kind of starved for consumer apps and VCs are dying to invest in consumer apps, if a VC hears
your idea and doesn't want to, isn't intrigued, then maybe, maybe try something else.
Right.
But, but we need to make like way more shots on goal here because we just like, we don't have nearly enough consumer apps.
Shout out to, to Moonwalk for, for making one of the only, you know, for, for like really nailing the product market fit with a consumer app.
the product market fit with a consumer app.
Like it's, it's not, it's not easy.
Like it's not easy and there are like,
like it's horrible how few real good consumer apps
there are in Solana, right?
Let's be honest.
I do think though the incentives are just like lacking
in a lot of ways where I'm not surprised
that people are short-term oriented
and building for like short-term extractive games
because there's really no accountability.
And continuously you see time and time again of people building the exact same product or the exact same scam.
And people are always lining up at the door willing to give their money to it.
And it's just this really negative feedback loop.
If people leave their morals at the door and know that they can make a quick cash grab and they're not going to be held accountable for it in a meaningful, real-world way, they're going to keep doing it.
So I think that does separate the very few consumer teams and teams that are building
for the long term.
This space is incredibly short-term oriented in a lot of ways.
So if there is a team building in the consumer track or building something that's more of
a longer-term infrastructure play, whatever the case may be, to move the space forward,
you know they're really in it because there are infinite ways in which someone could make a quicker dollar than doing all of those
things it's pretty crazy yeah yeah for real but but the incentives are aligned with vcs
so just want to like reiterate that like vcs do want to invest in consumer facing us
so yeah maybe one like small clarification there is like,
it is amazing if you can convince a VC because really like coming back to the earlier parts of
the conversation, like that funding, as long as you're a good steward of it can really be like
transformative for your early stage. But like, just going to throw the idea out there that like,
we love our investors. And I think generally generally speaking like the community of investors and web three but they have no better clue
than you do on like what consumers actually want and
Sometimes you get someone who can really get it and like they'll make an early bet on you
but like number one thing is go find users and then like
Really liked what what Kate was saying earlier that like you really there's no
I really liked what Kate was saying earlier that there's no solution other than your own
internal discipline of not getting sucked into the whole points and airdrop and short-term
gains stuff.
The upside is infinite if you can find a really authentic real consumer use case.
There is an absolute appetite amongst these VCs, but it's really up to you and finding
users is how you get that traction.
As we're coming close to the end,
you know, I hear that there's a hunger for consumer apps.
Do you guys have any maybe ideas
that maybe you could shoot to the audience of,
if someone's like, man, I've been thinking
of what I could create.
Is there any ideas that maybe you guys have
of what's a consumer app that would fill a big hole that you think would be killer for a VC?
Go for it, Dave.
Go ahead, Moon.
Yeah, one quick idea.
This is just like not from the program, but like personal ideas, like, I think there's like a really cool idea to do on like on chain, one commerce solutions.
I think on chain commerce solutions could have a really cool, a really cool avenue and really cool new innovative ways that you can explore building that out.
are building that out. Also integrating AR experiences with on-chain items, on-chain
physical goods, like physical goods, I guess you can say. I know that in the previous cycle,
there was some things happening in the digital space. I think that kind of fell off. Not
necessarily because there wasn't really a demand for it. I think there just wasn't the right
solution or the right space for it. I think bringing back like some sort of consumer digital apps that integrate commerce, on-chain payments, all that
sort of stuff, there could be a huge opportunity within that space, a new way to reimagine shopping
experiences in the digital world, I think is really cool. These are just like personal top
of mind consumer solutions that I think I haven't really seen many people explore and try, but would be one,
huge margins, a lot of opportunity, very relatable in the consumer space. There's one idea.
Yeah, I've seen a couple attempts just in the last month on integrating like
marketplaces, like, you know, Amazon of Web3, that kind of thing.
And also trying to reimagine kind of that experience in different ways.
That's something.
I think we need to see a lot more attempts in social fire.
I know it's been such a disaster so far.
Like, everything that's been tried has failed.
So I know there's been such a disaster so far, like everything that's been tried has failed. So I know there's a hesitancy there, but like there's no doubt in my mind that that's like there's going to be something there that really kind of hits the nail on the head.
It's not just like, you know, having marketplaces that, you know, just like token gating some users content or something like that.
All the things that have been tried are not good enough, but try something, try something
new, like sit down and think on it and try something new because like, I have no doubt
in my mind that in 10 years, there's going to be some gigantic social fi app that, that
we're all using.
Right.
And so kind of get there early.
There's really been like very few shots on goal there, right?
Yes, they've all failed, but like we've given a lot of them a decent try as well, right?
And that should say something, right?
Like the initial, you know, if you're getting users that are interested and kind of trying
things, that shows that, okay, we just need to kind of hit the next filter and really kind of find market fit there.
And there's additional tooling that's being developed.
I mean, Dialect for one, but also there's a team that's building out social graphs from the previous attempts.
So just trying to lift social graphs
to help with the cold start problem.
You go onto your app and no one's there.
You have no connections.
But you can kind of lift that data from blockchain.
And I think that's a great kind of way to bootstrap that.
And the other thing that I think needs to be explored more
is kind of geolocation
and just kind ofrap that. And the other thing that I think needs to be explored more is kind of geolocation and just kind of utilizing that. Like, Luco, you know, you can imagine Luco transforming into
something where you're killing monsters with your friends, like Pokemon style, and, you know,
tokens are dropping and you're going and doing quests and stuff like that. There are things that
you need to do, like people are paying you to do things in the real world.
So like making more use of geolocation, geotagging,
I think there's like a lot,
there's like a huge landscape of opportunity there.
So yeah, those are those two things.
I love it.
Thank you guys for sharing those ideas.
And if you're in the audience looking to build something,
I mean, there you go. You just got a bunch of ideas, you know, for a potential major product you could create.
As we're getting to the top of the hour, I want to be respectful of everyone's time.
And I'd love to give them a time for each project to shill.
You know, what's something that's coming up the next six to 12 months that we can get excited about?
Maybe invest alongside you guys.
You know, that reason to, you reason to get that follow from someone else in
this audience here. Solflare, could you guys kick us off on what is something that's coming up in
the next six to 12 months that we can get really stoked about with you guys?
I can't release that kind of alpha. I'm just the fox, and I don't want to get in trouble,
especially because I'm about to be a super team balkan startup village uh we have
headlining breakpoint at the end of the year we're going to be supporting so many events throughout
now and then honestly i always say like for my personal stuff say here if you believe in solana
if you use solana like use soulflare man because like we're truly here supporting the ecosystem
trying to push onboard educating we're doing grassroots onboarding and marketing.
Support Soul Flare, support Solana.
It's been a great space.
Thank you, Kaizen, all the builders up here.
And yo, shout out the Metaplex team really quick.
Tommy's an amazing photographer.
So not only do you most likely use your tools, but you'll most likely see his photography
out there at some like social fight event in the future.
Bullish. Bullish on everyone here man appreciate it thank you so much soulflare for being here we're super excited
i'm on the wait list for that card so i'm really excited to see what you guys are building and
and how you guys ship that all out thank you guys for what you could do for solana
metaplex can we hear from you guys what is coming up in the next 6 to 12 months we can get really stoked about with you?
Sure.
Yeah.
So we just shipped an upgrade
to the compressed NFT program called Bubblegum.
It's now called Bubblegum V2,
which enables a lot of different things
that you can do with compressed NFTs
that you never could do before.
So that's one thing that we just shipped.
But I think the most important thing that we're working on currently and that could probably be a big benefit
to the space is that our plan currently is to be there for everyone who wants to do a proper tg
and launch any kind of token uh the proper. So we're building a full suite tooling
for every company developer or whatever you are.
And you want to do it the proper way
and you want to have all of the available tools there.
We are here for you.
So if you are planning to do a TG,
feel free to contact me over Twitter or over Telegram.
And yeah, we can get you started.
So that's the one big thing that we're working on.
And towards the end of the year, we have something really sweet coming up that I can't mention yet.
But I'm really stoked about it.
But yeah, that's what we're doing so far.
I love that.
Thank you so much, Metaplex, for being here and for what you guys do for the space
so if you're planning on launching something launching a token go hit them up make sure you
do it the right way uh chris and dialect can you share with us you know what's coming up in the
next six to twelve months with dialect that we can get really excited about yeah maybe um first
i'll just say like uh i'm gonna like shill metlex too. I'm such a huge fan of the compressed NFT technology and that whole thing.
Just thrilled to hear.
We've been actually meeting with the Metaplex team on some unrelated stuff and I've been
hearing about that.
Really, if you're doing anything with NFTs, you should seriously consider using compression
technology.
It's amazing.
Yeah, just a really big fan of their roadmap right now.
I can share something at Dialect that we're doing in the next couple of weeks.
And we've already talked about this on stage at Accelerate last week at Crossroads in Istanbul.
I was in New York, Crossroads in Istanbul a couple weeks before that.
Our alert stack, we've teamed up with Jupyter Mobile to do something really first of its kind in crypto.
And this is coming out in the next couple of weeks.
I don't wanna like share a ton of information about this,
but insanely excited about it.
You can really think of it as like a brand new,
really, really, really high fidelity way
to reach your users about just about anything you'd want.
So if you're a project building, get in touch with us
and we'd love to chat with you on what's coming there. And then generally speaking on blockchain links,
like reaching your users at the right time with alerts and the right place with blockchain links.
Like I didn't say this earlier, but right place means literally wherever they are. Like crypto
has this superpower to allow users to take action on anything from anywhere as a part of like self-custody, self-sovereignty.
And we've got some amazing things coming there.
And really, it's like the blockchain links being the fastest way to get your experiences in front of users where they are already spending their time.
So right place, literally meaning like wherever your users already are.
And we think the Web3 Internet is going to look totally different from a UX and consumer perspective.
So if you're building some creative new stuff, just get in touch and we'd love to
build with you. I love that. Thank you, Chris, for sharing. And if you're building something,
go reach out. Don't be scared. Put yourself out there and you never know what could happen from
it. Moonwalk, we'd love to hear from you. What is coming up in the next 6 to 12 months we can get excited about with you? Oh, man. I mean, between the next 6 and
12 months, it's going to be a completely different looking experience. Just improving the UX in every
part of the product to make it way easier for non-crypto users to onboard seamlessly. So really
focused on that, focused on thinking through notifications and easier ways to access the user as well.
With a product like ours, you know, the nudges and kind of the benefits of being that, you know, fly in the air of reminding people to perform the action that they're wanting to perform as they're trying to form the habit is super, super valuable.
So working through that, in the next couple of weeks, we're going to have two pretty large pushes to the product,
won't give away too much there. One of those things is more on the social side of allowing
users to connect more and improving the stickiness of the product with more of the social incentive
side and letting communities form, the support systems form, et cetera. And then the other side
of that is the next evolution of our Experience Point system. I know everyone here's Points
program and rolls their eyes. Ours is very much focused on incentivizing users to perform the actions that we want them to and that they want to, which is moving more daily and, you know, structuring the entire program around that.
So the next evolution of that system and kind of further gamifying the process and the product is coming up probably in the next week or so. So follow along in the Moonwalk account if you're not already following.
And I guess I'll leave it at that.
But thank you for having me.
The spaces was great.
Thank you so much, Caitlin, for being here.
We love having you on all these spaces and you guys are killing it.
So thank you so much for sharing with us.
Build with Monkey Dow and then Dave.
So build with Monkey Dow.
Can you tell us what is coming up
in the next six to 12 months?
Awesome, yeah. Next six to 12 months? Awesome.
Yeah.
Next 6 to 12 months is probably going to be even busier than it already is.
We have a ton coming up.
So over the short little while here, some things that we do have coming up is we'll
obviously be announcing a couple more teams.
Some may know.
A couple more teams coming up here that we'll be introducing to the Build a Monkey Dog program
and further integrating them into the program there.
So be on the lookout for that. Super excited.
We are obviously continuing to review applications.
So if you are a builder in the space, please do apply to the program.
You can see the pinned link, the pinned tweet on our profile if you want to find the link to apply to the program.
to apply to the program. We'll continue reviewing all those applications,
continuously looking for builders in the ecosystem that have amazing ideas, innovative ideas that we
want to help back from the consumers, specifically focused on consumers. So super excited about that.
Also, if you are a team or a builder within the ecosystem or a larger organization within the
ecosystem, and you do want to be involved as a partner within the Build or a larger organization within the ecosystem, and you
do want to be involved as a partner within the Build With Monkey.org program, we are
obviously continuing to look for partners to help bolster that.
So if you are interested in supporting grants and supporting consumer products, but may
not have the resources of the team internally to do that, please reach out.
Let's talk.
We are happy to help support in some ways and build some partnerships around that.
So going to give that plug there as well um in addition to that a couple things uh that i do also
want to shout out be on the lookout for build with monkey doubt and specifically obviously monkeyed
out at more events we will be reaching out and trying to further identify builders in the
ecosystem either irl at real events different different hackathons, different builder houses, things like that. For example, this week, we obviously, we have a portion of our team and a
ton of members in our community at Solana Summit in Vietnam. So I have definitely massive FOMO
there, but definitely be on the lookout there, obviously looking for different builders.
We have end of June, June 25th to 27th in New York City, the cultural
heartbeat of Solana MonkeyDAO putting on the Solana Solstice event. So that will be alongside
NFT NYC. So if you are in Toronto, come check us out. We will be there with the Build with MonkeyDAO
team. We will have obviously the MonkeyDAO conference there. If you are a builder and
want to talk in person, that's a great opportunity to do so um so yeah uh definitely look out for us more irl events we have
a lot more updates coming for the program here soon um if you are a builder do apply if you are
a partner if you are someone that is looking for specific partnership opportunities to be involved
with different early stage builders please do reach out but yeah overall a ton of stuff coming up um that we're super excited about and definitely expect to hear
a lot more from us um on the building monkey doubt side a lot more amplification from
uh monkey doubt as a community as a whole and also um from our builders that we will be supporting
so super excited about that and thanks for i love me here today. I love that. Thank you guys so much for, you know, supporting builders and, you know, giving opportunity to those who are trying to make something amazing, you know, happen.
Dave, can you share with us what's happening in the next 6 to 12 months for you that we can get excited about?
Oh, nothing.
Nothing consumer-facing.
The likes of a little while uh but if you do know anyone that has very good
kind of uh rest skills and knows the client the the client's uh code very well or is used to you
know has experience with the high frequency uh strategies um intro me that's the only ask but
but thanks for having me on it's great chatting with everyone a bunch of like you know a bunch
of the best uh bunch of the best uh
bunch of the best here in this uh in this panel so yeah had a good time thank you so much day for
being here and we do really appreciate every single guest coming and showing up omi can you please
you know tell tell the audience what's happening in the next six to 12 months for kaizen that they
can get excited for absolutely yeah so um we So we just released Solana Jobs last week.
So if anyone in the audience is looking for a freelance position or a job,
we are currently scraping from Super Team Earn as well as Solana Ecosystem.
So you guys can check out all the jobs there.
We have four major tools coming out this week alone.
One is security pools pooling from radium meter and orca uh to
help you easily like track all the different you know aty's across those security pools uh we're
also launching our token data database so you'll be able to track like trending tokens on solana
uh we are also wrapping up on our new landing page which should basically become the ultimate
front page for solana where you can see everything, right? You know, Solana performance, Solana token performance,
ongoing bounties, airdrops, quests,
you know, trending tokens, trending NFTs,
best use on LPs, on staking, on lending,
like one single page to keep you guys updated on that.
We are also working on a huge multi-language feature
to, you know, basically make Kaizen available in 26 different languages.
Not just the platform itself, but Kaizen Academy as well,
all additional courses, 50 over of them.
To be honest, expecting to break across our UI,
I'm factoring just how the translation is going to react.
So we're going to rely on the community to come to us
and tell us, you know, like, hey, you need to fix us it, right?
So those are the four major things to wrap up this week
where V1 is done.
And then we're going to focus a lot,
for V2, we're going to focus a lot
on the other opportunities
where you'll see things like Deepin
and maybe gaming.
We're still fleshing out that version.
But we're going to take a two-week break actually
across the next two weeks
to try and clear
some of the technical depth
since it's been sprinting
very hard
as well as
upgrade a lot of
the existing tools
that we have
based on user feedback.
So please,
do let us know
if you have any feedback
on the current Kaizen
that you have
if you have noticed.
One last thing
I wanted to mention
is that we have just mentioned yesterday that we are,
you know, we are so foreign to our build for data aggregation.
We are now working on expanding on our content and alpha as well.
So if anyone in the audience is, you know,
looking to get more involved in solar content,
whether it's like Twitter, Twitter interns,
or Twitter space hosting, or, you know, whether it's like Twitter, Twitter interns, or Twitter space hosting,
or, you know,
maybe looking at alpha hunting,
please do DM me.
We are looking to expand
in this area as well.
So that's it from us.
Thank you so much
to all the guests,
you know, audience.
Thank you so much for being here.
You know, please follow our guests.
Please support them.
These are all, you know,
very, very big builders on Solana.
You know, we really love them.
Thank you
Thank you guys so much for being here Thank you, you know to the audience for coming and hanging out and listening and I and really thank you to each and every guest who showed up
Came out and you know and and share their expertise of what they're building, what they're growing, and some tips and tricks for any builders down in the audience. So you guys make this space
amazing. And also, you make Solana amazing. So to each and every one of you, thank you for what
you do on Solana. Thank you for what you're building. And thank you for helping onboard
and just making this a better place to interact. Because I'm a DJ in this place, and I love every
single project
up here and what you guys have done so thank you guys so much and i'm going to end the space here
and that's all we got for you guys so we'll see you next thursday or this coming up thursday on
our next space so give us a follow shoot us some love and we'll see you in the next one
have a great rest of your day everyone
