Solrazr — Telegram AMA — September 10
On Friday, September 10, we had the pleasure to welcome to our Telegram chat:
Vijay Kalangi, Co-founder
We asked him questions about the development of Solrazr.
Some sentences have been slightly edited for readability but the meaning has been conserved.
Summary
SolRazr is reimagining token sale whitelists and allocations by leveraging the power of NFTs on Solana. The community will participate in interactive and engaging workflows on the platform to mint NFTs which are codified with whitelist and allocation amounts. Token sale programs will check for the ownership of NFTs instead of Solana addresses, which means the community members can transfer ownership of their whitelist and allocations to their friends and family.
Helping project developers build fast and launch faster by automating token infrastructure deployment on Solana. Developers new to blockchain and Solana find it difficult to write web3 and smart contracts (programs). Solrazr provides them with the ability to deploy token utility and infrastructure without writing the code. Their no-code/low-code platform helps the developers learn and build fast on Solana, thereby helping the ecosystem grow faster.
Solrazr is excited about working together with exceptional teams pushing the boundaries with Solana and driving the DeFi ecosystem forward. Under the Accelerator program — Solrazr incubates projects, helps with go-to-market strategy and provides tools to build fast on Solana. Participants get a variety of benefits, including mentorship, funding opportunities, and market exposure. The mentors of Solrazr work in business and strategy, product/UX, front-end development, and community/marketing.
SolRazr takes advantage of the Solana wormhole to provide cross-chain pools that allow communities from other chains to invest directly into Solana projects. Solana Wormhole is a bidirectional, decentralized ERC-20 ⇄ SPL token bridge between Ethereum and Solana. It will enable existing projects, platforms, and communities to move tokenized assets seamlessly across blockchains to benefit from Solana’s high speed and low cost.
Introduction
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: Tell us about yourself. What did you do before crypto and did you have any other previous venture in crypto?
A — Vijay Kalangi from Solrazr: Sure… My name is Vijay Kalangi. Prior to SolRazr, I was the Co-founder & CTO of an education technology firm called KNOLSKAPE with multi-million dollar revenue. I have 14+ years of experience building products in learning and edu-tech, serving millions of users. My background is in Mathematics and Computer Science.
Q — Telegram user dayana: Can you explain how strong the SolRazr team is?
A — Vijay Kalangi from Solrazr: Again, both the founders, we have been entrepreneurs managing highly scalable tech products, large teams, and managed PnL. One of the companies got an exit to Walmart labs. We are trying to build for the long term. More details on the team here
About
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: Can you tell us how you got into Solrazr and what the project is about in a few sentences?
A — Vijay Kalangi from Solrazr: Sure. Both Sreekanth (the other co-founder) and I have been passive observers and active retail investors in this space for the last 4 years.
Last summer, when Defi started exploding, we started believing in real use cases being built, unlike back in 2017. So Sreekanth and I thought this was the right time to jump into this space. Our project started with a simple idea — provide an opportunity for millions of retail investors to be part of the early phase of the disruptive projects.
And about SolRazr … SolRazr’s mission is to help projects building on Solana Raise Capital and Build fast. Expanding on it.
We want to do only three things and do those very well!
- Providing retail investors access to investing in projects through fair and decentralized allocations.
2. For the projects & developers, SolRazr provides the ability to raise capital at lightning speeds in a truly decentralized manner.
3. Developer tools: SolRazr also provides access to a host of developer tools to help them build fast on Solana and go to market early.
Q — Twitter user @Cripi_Angel: What background information can you give us about the new developer tools?
A — Vijay Kalangi from Solrazr: “SolRazr Build” is a set of developer tools to manage your entire dApp development lifecycle on Solana. It will help you build, test, monitor, debug, document, and publish your Solana dApps. More details on this here.
Q — Telegram user Price834: How many users (developer) do you think you will have?
A — Vijay Kalangi from Solrazr: I think the number of projects being built on Solana is only growing by the day. We are looking at an exponential increase in terms of web2 talent flocking to web3 space. We are super bullish on dev tools and how many devs will be in our ecosystem!
Q — Telegram user Nico: Many developers building DeFi and NFT have started switching to Solana, leading to massive network effects. Could Solana become the closest competitor to Ethereum in the next few years and be Solrazr one of the first builders in this space?
A — Vijay Kalangi from Solrazr: I strongly believe we are moving towards a multichain world. I see ETH and Solana playing a major role with significant market share in the coming years. We are still too early and are very bullish on the growth from now on.
Q — Telegram user Zann: Why you decided to Build on Solana Blockchain just because of the hype that Solana has for the moment or another reason?
A — Vijay Kalangi from Solrazr: We started building a launchpad on Ethereum first back in February. We quickly realized that it wouldn’t scale to our needs, and transaction costs are extremely high to support millions of retail investors. Before any of the hype that you see right now on Solana, we quickly pivoted to building on Solana, and that’s how we became SolRazr.
Token
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: What role does the token play in the Solrazr ecosystem?
A — Vijay Kalangi from Solrazr: Here are some of the things that you can do with the SOLR token that we have made public so far …
1. Allocations to private and curated pools is exclusive to SOLR token holders
2. SOLR tokens can be staked for longer periods to earn rare allocations
3. Voting rights and project governance when DAO is formed
4. Access to various developer tools
Security
Q — Telegram user Anitax: Security audits are extremely important for any project, especially DeFi protocols that deal with user funds. So, can you explain if Solrazr has been audited to convey confidence and security to the crypto community that is interested in investing in your project?
A — Vijay Kalangi from Solrazr: Great question. We are audited by Kudelski, one of the best audit firms out there. Please check out our website. It is the same audit firm that audited Solana and most of the prominent projects. Also, our code and the audit report are public for everyone to see.
Funding
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: Did you raise funds so far? If so, how did you handle them? And are you planning to do any future raises?
A — Vijay Kalangi from Solrazr: Yes, We had a private round raise of $1.5M from some of the most reputed VCs and angels in this space. Early investors of Solana and FTX are also investors in SolRazr
A part of the $1.5 million seed fund will go towards SolRazr hiring more developers, bringing in community managers, and onboarding business development experts. Focus is on #buidl!
Competitive Advantage
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: What sets Solrazr apart from other crypto projects with a similar concept?
A — Vijay Kalangi from Solrazr: As I see it, we differentiate ourselves from the competition with two major offerings … ones which no other launchpads, even in other blockchains don’t have.
1. Tradable allocations: By leveraging NFTs, we make our allocations transferrable and tradable. Once you win a whitelist slot, it is not just you that can participate, but you can trade/share that with others. We are essentially creating a secondary market for allocations which is quite powerful.
2. We are more than a Launchpad. We are building a comprehensive platform around developers by working closely with them from day 0 (incubation) to helping them build fast on Solana (developer tools) and go to market. We will be a one-stop platform for any Solana project — ideation to launch.
Q — Twitter user @DTryasari: I saw SolRazr is trying to do something that hasn’t yet been done by others. Could you expand on what you are doing & how it is different from what has been done before? What makes you think that SolRazr platform is very important & could be a solution for project developers?
A — Vijay Kalangi from Solrazr: We offer Solana projects that will work with us not just the ability to raise capital but a holistic one-stop platform to take care of all their needs to start, launch and go to market quickly.
Here are the features that will stand out for everyone:
Tradable Allocations: Reimagining token sale whitelists and allocations by leveraging the power of NFTs on Solana.
Accelerator: Under the Accelerator program — we incubate projects, help with the go-to market strategy and provide tools to build fast on Solana.
Developer Tools: Helping project developers build fast and launch faster by automating token infrastructure deployment on Solana.
Cross-chain Pools: Built on Solana wormhole, cross-chain pools allow communities from other chains to invest directly into Solana projects.
Business Development
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: With respect to your roadmap, what should we expect in the next weeks and months?
A — Vijay Kalangi from Solrazr: In the near future, our IDO is going live on Oct 4th. Less than two weeks from now.
We have built the entire platform from scratch on our own unlike some of the other launchpads in the Solana ecosystem (the code is publicly available for everyone to see)
We have been working on some exciting items under the developer tools platform. Please follow our updates over the next few weeks. We have a lot to showcase to the community.
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: Do you have plans to move to other chains in the future if your followers demand it?
A — Vijay Kalangi from Solrazr: The current focus is on Solana. We want to be the best platform out there for anyone building on Solana. We might in the future consider moving to other chains. But for now, we have cross-chain pools that will let users from other chains participate in the projects we list. We are not missing out too much :)
Q — Telegram user Bryant Javier: Could you tell us more about the Cross-Chain Pools that you plan to launch in Q1 next year? really what will be the networks that will be compatible with your dApps development products?
A — Vijay Kalangi from Solrazr: We plan to build this on the wormhole, which recently went live on Solana. It is a bridge that can bring in liquidity from different blockchains.
Vijay, thanks for coming into our community, and taking the time to answer our questions. Anything else you’d like to say? Where can we follow you to stay updated? — Ayeley from GAINS
Yes, thanks for the lovely chat, folks. The first IDO on our platform will be SolRazr’s. For the latest updates on the IDO announcement, follow us on Telegram and Twitter. — Vijay Kalangi from Solrazr
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