Written by Sergio Flores

Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash

Among other things, I’m a proficient Solana blockchain developer. And to be honest, I love the technology, and I love the whole concept of blockchain tech, but I love even more the specific implementation that the Solana team has done.

One thing that has been on my mind lately though, is my feeling that blockchain technology, as a whole, is underutilized, with much buzz going to speculative or financial applications, and not near enough into practical, real world applications that could take advantage of the very solid technology underneath. Since Solana is my area of expertise, the rest of this article will focus on it, though some of the concepts are likely to be applicable to other blockchains as well.

In my opinion, the main benefit of Solana as a tool, would be its “distributed database” nature. What I mean by that, is that the blockchain is essentially a programmable database, and this database lives in many independent servers, hence, distributed. Now, like any tool, it’s more suitable for certain kinds of problems than others, but its whole purpose is to solve problems or help us do certain tasks. Nothing more, nothing less. It follows that not all tools are suitable to tackle all problems: a hammer won’t cut wood, a guitar won’t pour concrete, and I’d like to see you try and make music with a car.

Therefore, trying to force a tool to do something that it was not designed to do, will end in failure, more likely than not.

So in today’s article, I wanted to talk about what problems I believe are suitable to solve with a tool like the Solana blockchain and look a bit into how one may go about solving them.

First of all, briefly, the main use case for a blockchain is to have two or more parties write information and read information sent by their counterpart, into a “neutral” system, that is, a database that cannot be tampered by any of the participants, and “sign” that information with their private key, to prove the origin of the information, in such a way, that this cannot be replicated by 3rd parties.

This is really the whole point of having a public blockchain system set up. If you and I are doing some transactions, and we trust each other, one of us can roll up a traditional database at a server, and then we can store in it the relevant info on our work, and we’re done. Since we trust each other, there’s really no further problem to solve.

A public blockchain, like Solana, comes into play in the scenario where we don’t trust the other party, and in fact, we may not even know who they are. So neither of the participants can take the responsibility for storing the operation’s data, because the other party might be suspicious. Furthermore, Solana is not managed by any one single entity and all participants can be reasonably reassured that it is sound; that is, the stored data has not been tampered with.

The main use case for a blockchain like Solana is to have two or more parties write information and read information sent by their counterpart, into a “neutral” system.

Now that we know the main “feature” of Solana, what could some potential real world applications of the above concept be? Let’s look at three use cases:

1. Royalties payment

There are many creative industries out there that rely on the association of one or more parties to produce and sell a creative work: Writers and Publishing Houses, Musicians and Promoters, and Actors and Agents/Studios, to name a few. What all of these have in common, is that one party has the responsibility of sales and handling of payouts to the other party according to some previously agreed rules. Note that just the previous statement sounds really close to what we term a “smart contract”, a program that can be used to transfer tokens or other virtual representations of value among participants, based on some internal logic.

Let’s consider how this problem has traditionally been solved. Let’s say I’m an actor, and I filmed a commercial, to be released in North America, for 1 year. So I got paid for that. Now the year has passed, the tv spot had good results for the client, and they want to not only extend it for another year, but also air it in LatinAmerica. Now, I have the right to get paid for that as well, and normally the client would get in touch with the producers or my agent to figure it out, but things can get complicated, employees come and go, companies go out of business, transaction records get lost, and in fact, for a large production company, keeping track of these payments and re-negotiations is a major effort and expense. Wouldn’t it be great if all of this would have been codified into a computer program from the beginning, so that we could just have this program connect automatically to real world resources to get information and take action, without human intervention?

So, how could a Solana implementation go about solving this? Well, we could have a smart contract with a codification of the negotiated rules, for example:

• Actor gets X payout for every TV spot airing in a region.
• Smart contract gets funding from client every 6 months.
• Smart contract gets notification from TV Station, on spot airing, at which point, it deducts from its funding the actor’s due payouts.
• If the smart contract does not get funding, it notifies the TV station to stop airings of the commercial.

The above is just an example; mind you, I’m not an expert in best practices for talent negotiation!

The point I’m trying to make is that whatever agreement has been reached, it can generally be codified into Solana to operate in a fairly autonomous manner. The tools that we need to achieve the above are readily available: We need the public blockchain, Solana; participants need a private key or wallet, with tokens to enable the transactions, and we need an external system, validated, normally called an “Oracle” whose job is to provide or certify the information that the smart contract needs to fulfill its logic. In this case, the “Oracle” would be tasked with verifying the TV spots airings.

And you know? It sounds simple. And conceptually, it really is. It’s a lot simpler than the manual, labor intensive, administrative expense that is the process in place right now around the world.

2. Supply chain traceability

There are many industries that need to prove the origin and transformation that some item has gone through in the various stages before reaching the final user. Agriculture products come to mind, for example, where the various final buyers might need to know where the products were grown and under what conditions, where and how were they stored or transported, etc.

Or vehicles might require their parts to go through certification on safety or structural integrity, luxury items might require to attest to the quality of their materials, and so on.

Again, this is an old problem, and solutions have been proposed over time. For the sake of argument, let’s say we have a fictitious coffee company that wants to prove to their consumers that their supply chain is fully organic. So this company might establish a Solana solution as follows:

• Every participant has a private key to “sign” or “certify” their information.
• Coffee growers send info to the smart contract on their agricultural practices; and “sign” it. The info itself will be publicly stored elsewhere, but the contract uses a mathematical proof to show the information was not changed after the fact.
• Transport companies “certify” on the state of the coffee beans they received for delivery.
• Wholesaler randomly tests batches of coffee beans received from the transport company and certifies the “organic” characteristics of them.
• And finally, the actual coffee shop certifies their purchase from the wholesaler.

In this manner, the whole supply chain process is public and transparent, and the final consumer can verify the information and make an informed purchase decision.

3. Certifications and 3rd party data verification

As a CTO, sometimes I need to hire developers for a project. Now, when you’re hiring Senior developers, the task is easier, because this is people who have a body of work, previous employers references, and other materials that you can evaluate. But, let’s focus on the case where we have a project that, due to its nature, is suitable to be tackled by junior developers with little or no experience.

So, how can I evaluate a given candidate’s skills? One thing many companies are doing now is requesting “coding challenges” or “coding tests” from candidates, so they can showcase their skills. But there’s a problem with this approach, and it’s a huge time sink for both parties: Candidates need to complete N tests, one per company they’re interested in working for, and hiring managers need to review M tests, one per applicant to the position.

Suffice to say, that neither of the participants will have the time or patience to do this process properly for any sustained amount of time, resulting in inappropriate decisions.

Enter the Solana solution, where a set of standardized tests are available for candidates, which they can complete in their own time, according to their preferences, and then the smart contract on-chain “certifies” their results. So hiring managers can confidently look at a candidate’s results and decide if they want to engage further, without having everybody repeat over and over the same process for each new position.

So, those were the 3 use cases I have for you now. What do you think? I’m sure that with those examples in mind, you can think of similar ideas closer to your area of expertise.

To conclude, the gist of when a Solana blockchain solution is appropriate, would be:

• Participants are independent of one another, and may not even know each other.
• There’s a need to “certify” or “prove” something.
• The related information can or should be public.
• The process is standardized enough that can be reduced to an algorithm that can be programmed.
• There are external systems that can provide information to the program.

I hope we see more and more of these types of solutions developed, so that everybody has more options to choose from when considering the right approach to tackle any given problem!

Are you interested in learning more about this technology or explore how could it be applied to your particular needs? Please send me a message using the form below, for a no-commitment, exploratory talk about your problem.