Solana Will

Inspiration

At the beginning of 2021, prices for some cryptocurrencies had skyrocketed, making a number of lucky people wealthy. But at the same time, because of the coronavirus situation, the amount of uncertainty about the future was extremely high.

So we've conducted a quick survey between people in the crypto community, asking if they had a plan, how to pass their savings to relatives in case if something happens to them. Most of them hadn't ever thought about that, which is not surprising, because before they never considered crypto as a source of income, and in some cases even the opposite, it was a source of losses and fun.

What it does

SolanaWill service allows you to address this problem easily. You can create a wallet, to which you have easy and transparent access, and which should become the main storage for your funds. Your inheritors will get access to this wallet after 1 year of inactivity.

The workflow is: 1) create a will account and deposit most of your funds into it. Your main wallet should become just an operational one, where you store some assets for the short period. 2) specify the public keys of inheritors and the desired proportion. 3) send the WillId back to inheritors. 4) at the moment when a person decides to receive their inheritance, they are entering the website, paste the WillID, and receive the inheritance.

How we built it

As soon as the Ignition was announced, Kostya had an idea what to do. He called our designer, with whom he actually was dreaming to work together, but never had a chance. He accepted my invitation immediately. After that, we managed to connect with a copywriter and audio/video editors. It was the first time we were all participating in the final product development, and it was really lots of interesting discussions and sleepless nights spent on it. But on the other hand, this made us believe that we are doing the right thing, and no way we can give up.

This service was created as a minimal viable product for the Solana hackathon. Because we didn't have any experience with Solana blockchain and Rust before, we've spent lots of time digging into the documentation, trying and testing.

Design

Our designer never had a chance to work with a real crypto-related project. He was full of questions but luckily others were able to explain the main concepts to him and in two days the excellent design drafts were delivered.

Backend

Because the original example of helloworld has to cover lots of the details in a single application, it wasn't the easiest thing for Kostya to learn from. He published some of his findings on the blog. But this was not the only issue. He was even more disappointed by the lack of some common API for working with wallets, and by some obvious bugs in Borsh serialization protocol. Another challenging task was to be prepared for the extraordinary load, hosting the site as a set of static pages on Google Cloud Storage, and setting up our mail server, so you can reach us with fancy @solana-will.com emails! BTW, why no one is storing email messages in Solana? It may be the next project!

Video production

Alexandra is a radio host in Saint-Petersburg, so she and her partner know everything about sound! We didn't have a chance to work together, but they were giving some fun hints about the voice recording. "Switch off your washing machine!", - "But I cannot, it is in the middle of a cycle!", "Switch. It. Off! It creates a background noise", - "But maybe you can clear it...", "-@!@$$$!!!", - "Got you :)" (pulling the plug off). So, at night, in the absolute silence, between mountains of pillows, we were recording audio, and after that, they have produced something all of us were fascinated. Our first video, for our first-ever project. This was a moment when the magic happened.

Future

But now we are satisfied with the results and have proof that the direction was right, the tech stack was great (Rust, Typescript, React). Time to move forward! These are our plans for the future.

Support tokens (Q4/21)

The first thing - is to add support for tokens and NFTs so that they could be inherited as well. When the service will have tokens supported, your will can start storing LP tokens, staking accounts etc, and you can enjoy the protection against inflation.

More flexible rules (Q1/22)

The next iteration should bring more flexible rules, comparing to current, pretty oversimplified //"1 year of inactivity"//. For example, you can allow withdrawing by equal portions during the next 10 years, or withdraw only to some pre-defined accounts, like university or property agency.

Wrapped Wills (Q1/22)

And finally, I can see potential in making a share in a will a part of another will.

GoTo Market Strategy

I am a pretty well-recognized person in the Russian community. For the first iteration, I think it will be enough for me to ask in my Telegram channel (1k participants) and friendly channels (~20k in total) to test the service. I think the audience is right - people who came to crypto a while ago, so they do have something in their pockets. Hopefully, if I get a slot on the Solana-ecosystem page, this will help me to reach more international investors. Nest iteration could be a partnership with the biggest staking services. If people agree to stake to them, but not directly from their wallets, but from my smart-contract, which will allow to stake funds indirectly. I have some experience with ambassador programs, so we can organize some incentified ambassador programs and testing events, to spread the word of mouth any further.

These marketing strategies + a good product I hope will bring more people onboard.