Network States on Solana TLDR: We have a new track devoted to DAOs and Network States at the upcoming Solana Hackathon. If you’re building a new or existing crypto community, or building tools for one, we invite you to enter at solana.com/hyperdrive @balajis & I wrote a longer note below about what the opportunity is and and how you can leverage it. ————————— For twenty years, we’ve been liking, poking, and tweeting at each other on social media. But man does not live by threads alone. There’s an entire dimension of human existence that has been missing from social media — the economic plane. Yes, yes, of course you are pestered with ads. But that’s a one way thing. The platforms are getting the economics out of you. Your economics are missing. Your property rights [1] are too. You aren’t really able to create wealth directly on social media, aside from maybe getting a small share of ad revenue. You can create information, though. You can send anything from the tiniest text file to the largest dataset to anyone online. Or many anyones. And you can collaboratively edit with them, anywhere, at any time, in no time. Indeed, we now take for granted that any person on the internet can create and send information across borders in many ways — from writing simple emails to running sophisticated peer-to-peer programs. But you still can’t easily create value. It takes days to open bank accounts, send international wires, or start companies. You can’t gather a group of friends from around the world into a group chat, hit a button to start an organization, hit another button to accept international wires, and start selling software within seconds.

Yet. Cryptocurrency is changing that. Anyone with a Solana address can now send and receive funds to anyone else with a Solana address, within seconds, anywhere in the world, without any previous setup. So at least the transaction part is there. More than there, in fact, because very complicated financial transactions are now routinely facilitated on chain by smart contracts. The next step is to move from individual transactions and smart contracts to fully on-chain organizations, which are in a sense collections of many contracts. And that brings us to DAOs and network states.