At Unique, we are all about innovation and creativity. Read the article to find out more about how ideas are created in our team.
The Solana Hacker House
The Solana Foundation visited Prague in March 2022 as part of their World Tour. This six-day event provided a co-working space for collaboration and networking. The program included informative educational lectures about DeFi, NFTs and offered time for discussion with Solana Labs engineers. At the end of the event, there was an opportunity to compete for local grants through a Demo Day.
Unique development team had the opportunity to attend this event and meet many fellow builders as well as to get to know many Twitter and Discord usernames in person. An important connection for the team was meeting with Sebastian Bor, an engineer at Solana Labs and the main responsible for the SPL Governance — a crucial library in the Solana ecosystem.
What is SPL Governance?
SPL Governance is a program which provides core building blocks and primitives to create Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and represents de facto a standard for Governance on Solana blockchain. An important trait of the SPL-Gov library is its modularity which allows customization through external plugins, that way supporting one of the most important crypto values — composability.
We identified this in the early phase of Unique Venture Clubs platform architecture design and decided to build on top of it.
We were curious to find ways of implementing our own features in it, such as the possibility to vote on proposals in the club allowed by a possession of an NFT. The state of the NFT collections space supported our thinking that NFT voting is one of the top requested features in the governance domain. — Uroš, Unique.vc CTO
Since the architecture of the SPL library offers customized democratic governance, and would allow the implementation of the ideas, the team decided to further discuss the concept with Sebastian Bor. Through spontaneous chats, Unique dev team and Sebastian agreed to work together on developing the feature in the next two days and present the progress on the Demo Day.
Demo Day
The decision was to use the existing Mango locker plugin as a basis and implement the instructions specific for the NFT voting use case while supporting the new Metaplex Metadata standard v1.1. For the testing purposes, we have first generated an NFT collection on Devnet following the standard. In parallel with our work in Prague, Adrian from Mango was remotely preparing the UI for showcasing the solution.
With joint efforts, the team managed to finish the initial version before the Demo Day and present it to the crowd. We casted the first ever vote over SPL-Gov library based on the NFT ownership!
Collaboration
The great work did not end at the Hacker House event.
Unique’s team continued the collaboration after returning from Prague, resulting in the Sebastian’s PR #37, which adds support for multiple collections with their own voter weight multiplier, as well as casting votes with multiple NFTs and many more changes.
The NFT voting plugin is yet to see its updates and include new options such as supporting NFT collections which do not follow the latest Metaplex Metadata standard v1.1.
Being able to join forces with top notch Solana engineers in building such an important feature is a big honor for us at Unique Venture Clubs. Our goal is to continue contributing to the Solana ecosystem and especially to the SPL-Gov library in order to bring more features and extensions which will support different organizations, groups and clubs. — Uroš, Unique.vc CTO
Attending the Prague Hacker House event was a valuable experience that allowed us to get inspired and put our ideas into action. The NFT voting plugin feature is already being implemented and will soon be ready to use in the Public Beta version of the Unique.vc platform.
