Solana aims to grow 100x through small business, infrastructure partnerships

Solana co-founder Roj Gokal said in a May 29 interview with TechCrunch that his company aims to grow 10 to 100 times, primarily through small business and infrastructure partnerships.

Solana has a small business focus

Gokal said in the interview:

“[Solana wants partners] that can move, push releases and experiments and measure every week rather than someone really big that has an established view of what they’re looking for.”

He criticized larger companies for their willingness to move on to new things if the results of the partnership were not successful.

He highlighted one partnership with the San Francisco-based cafe chain Boba Guys, which began to explore a loyalty program built on Solana in April. Gokal said that the cafe chain could use non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and other tokens to drive sales.

Gokal also said that Solana seeks out independent developers. He said that the company invests in hackathons, the most recent of which attracted 800 submissions, and creates “hacker houses,” which have attracted over 17,000 devs.

Solana also focuses on infrastructure

Gokal said that Solana is pursuing infrastructure partnerships as well. The project also partnered with Google Cloud in November, allowing users to deploy Solana nodes and allowing Google Cloud to serve as a Solana validator.

He also suggested that Solana was interested in a partnership with Stripe. He noted that Stripe introduced a fiat-to-cryptocurrency onramp in December 2022 and said that the majority of Stripe’s supported apps were based on Solana.

Gokal also emphasized during the interview that Solana aims to become the “Apple” of crypto. In addition to focusing on UX and performance in a manner similar to the tech giant, Solana is producing a smartphone called Saga — which will once again provide greater infrastructure for third-party projects.

In a separate discussion on May 23, Solana Labs co-founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko said that Solana is working on ChatGPT and AI features.

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