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The Colosseum is like a hackathon organizer mixed with the Y combinator of Solana startup. I tend to view hackathon entries as proxy for what Solana builders are interested in. The winner of the hackathon is considered a potential agent that Solanaventure investors think is worth it.
This week on the Lightspeed Podcast, we asked Colosseum co-founder Matty Taylor about her excitement from the organization’s latest hackathon. His answer surprised me.
“One of the things we’re most excited about is a return to Crypto Cypherpunk’s roots,” Taylor said. He cited the new take on DAO with an application that provides privacy as examples.
Taylor said he has shown a lot of interest in private trading technology after seeing “the founder of High Performance (Solana)” and cited former Colosseum winner Dark Lake (building a zero-recognitive DEX) as one example. He has also seen builders promote private payments for existing stablecoins.
The developers of Solana seem to be more interested in Onchain’s privacy. RPC provider Helius has announced Confidential Balances, a more private version of Solana’s existing token extension. The testnet phase encryption infrastructure network Arcium has also been booming recently.
Privacy is cypherpunk, but it is also necessary for some institutions to be on-chain as large capital allocators tend to prefer to keep their financial activities opaque.
Taylor also mentioned Daos, a cryptographic and native governance structure that has proven difficult to implement so far. The Colosseum was an early supporter of Metadao, a market-based governance platform, and Taylor spoke about the future-ready token launchpad, which is subject to the market, where funds are escrowed and how they should be spent.
This type of service has been tested against things like NFT roadmap of the past. So it is unclear whether this attempt will catch more broadly, but it is rarely amelioration of the “one token, one vote” situation.
