DoraHacks is thrilled to announce their latest Public Good Grant to TinyDancer, an open-source light client implementation for the Solana blockchain. This client is used to make the Solana network more trust-minimized, which is crucial to further decentralizing Solana, and providing greater network accessibility for a wider range of machines.
The average day-to-day Solana user is required to trust that RPC nodes are not colluding, are posting accurate data on-chain, and are not engaging in other malicious behavior, because running a full node at home is infeasible or too expensive for most users. Meanwhile, the average user could run a light client at home, either on a laptop or mobile phone, and verify the accuracy of blockchain transactions directly.
TinyDancer’s goal of providing open-source infrastructure also enables the development of new trust-minimized projects that require light client implementations, such as wallets or interoperability protocols.
For the latter, the creation of Solana light clients will actually enable for the first time the adoption of the Inter-blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol for the entire Solana ecosystem. IBC is the most widely used interoperability standard and decentralized bridge in Web3, doing nearly $100M of daily volume as of December 2023. IBC integration will usher in a rush of liquidity for the Solana ecosystem, and as the SVM continues to proliferate across appchains, L1/L2, and rollup implementations, it will ensure a stable state and composability across this new modular environment.
The DoraHacks team has committed to providing a $10,000 public good grant to TinyDancer to support the light client pioneers in continuing to create more open-source public goods and infrastructure for the SVM developer community. This grant is provided specifically by the Dora GrantDAO Foundation, which is an entity that oversees Dora GrantDAO , a community-driven program that sustainably funds the hacker movement.
As public goods-aficionados, TinyDancer and DoraHacks share similar values. DoraHacks is a global hackathon organizer and one of the world's most active multi-chain Web3 developer platforms. It creates a global hacker movement and provides crypto native toolkits to help developers around the world team up and fund their ideas and BUIDLs via hackathons, bounties, grants, grantDAOs, and public good staking. To date, more than 7,000 projects from the DoraHacks community have received over $60 million in grants and other forms of contributions from supporters worldwide. A large number of open source communities, DAOs, and more than 100 major blockchain ecosystems are actively using Dora's infrastructure (DoraHacks.io) for open source funding and community governance.
“We are thrilled to provide TinyDancer with mission critical public goods funding. TinyDancer team is dedicated to providing crucial open-source infrastructure to the Solana community, and their light clients will enable the ultimate underlying interoperability stack, IBC, to finally come to Solana, one of the world’s most active blockchains.” - Steve Ngok, Partner at DoraHacks
TinyDancer is the first light client on Solana, providing secure and trust minimized access to the network. TinyDancer light clients are collusion-proof, and offer a safe and cheap alternative to trusting centralized RPCs.
“We're excited to be getting this grant from Dorahacks to support our development of the solana light client, this will enable us to develop a light client bridge using IBC between solana and cosmos based chains. We think this will have huge impact in terms of cross chain DeFi and other activities powered by IBC while getting the security guarantees of solana's consensus.” - Anoushk Kharangate, CoFounder at TinyDancer
Additional details on TinyDancer’s public good grant can be found here: https://dorahacks.io/dora/public-good
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