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TAPEDRIVE won the grand prize in the latest Colosseum hackathon, a popular hackathon-cum-venture accelerator started by original Solana Labs hackathon organizers.
The contest, which I tend to view as a partial litmus test for what Solana builders are interested in at the moment, had a large number of stablecoin entries, one organizer told me. But the grand prize winner took at a stab at a problem internal to Solana: the cost of storing data onchain.
Solana is the busiest blockchain in existence as things stand. With all of this onchain activity paired with fast block times, it can get expensive to store data on Solana. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and others have talked about this problem of reducing data storage overhead on the network.
TAPEDRIVE claims to have the ability to read or write data (that is, access or add it to the chain) 1,400x cheaper than Solana’s status quo.
The program basically bundles Solana data and adds less expensive cryptographic proofs to the blockchain. A network of miners is incentivized to store this data using the TAPE token. To earn these token rewards, TAPEDRIVE miners solve data storage challenges in parallel every minute to prove that they hold their assigned portion of the data archive. This all still relies on Solana’s proof-of-stake mechanism for security.
This sounds reminiscent of the first Colosseum hackathon winner in ORE, which was a viral proof-of-work game built on Solana that had miners solve puzzles every minute.
