Solana Launches ChatGPT Plugin

Solana, a Layer 1 blockchain known for its fast and cheap transactions, is embracing the nascent world of artificial intelligence in a bid to reverse its long-standing downtrend and bolster adoption.

On Tuesday, Solana launched a ChatGPT plugin that lets users purchase NFTs, transfer tokens, and analyze on-chain data. The plugin can be downloaded from Github.

“Every developer building consumer-oriented apps should be thinking about how their app is going to be interacted with through an AI model because this is a new paradigm for telling computers what to do,” Anatoly Yakovenko, the CEO of Solana Labs, said in an interview. “AI will make Solana more usable and understandable.”

Yakovenko said he expects that future versions of the plugin will be able to write smart contracts and deploy them on-chain.

Solana’s AI offering follows an extended downtrend for the project and its broader ecosystem. The network’s SOL token is up 80% this year but remains 92% below its 2021 highs.

The move comes as the rapidly growing sophistication of ChatGPT and rival large language models dominate headlines. The technology promises to significantly disrupt the labor market, unlocking new productive capabilities while leaving widespread creative destruction in its wake.

Battered Ecosystem

Solana was an early winner in the Layer 1 boom of 2021 that was kicked off by rising transaction fees on Ethereum.

Total value locked (TVL) on the network grew 20 times from $500M to $10B between July and November 2021, accompanied by a 600% rally in SOL. However, TVL has steadily cratered to just $266M since then, with SOL also plunging more than 92%.

Solana lost sizable market share to competing low-cost Layer 1s at the end of the previous bull cycle, with critics taking shots at the network’s persistent outages and poor decentralization.

Already among the web3 ecosystems hardest hit by the 2022 bear trend, Solana suffered yet another massive blow last November when FTX and Alameda Research collapsed, throwing the firms’ founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, into disrepute.

Bankman-Fried, a long-time proponent of Solana, made large investments in many ecosystem projects through his now-insolvent trading and investment firms. Several projects have since failed due to the firms holding outsized exposure to their tokens.

Grants Funding

Solana also announced a ten-fold increase in funding allocated to its AI accelerator grants program to $10M on May 23.

The program aims to foster the development of machine learning models interacting with Solana-based protocols. More than 50 projects have applied for grants since the program was initially announced one month ago. The grants are valued between $5,000 and $25,000.

“I think what would be cool is an AI plugin that you tell, ‘Hey, I want to do an NFT set with 10,000 images in this style with these traits’, and then stable diffusion generates the whole thing, mints them on-chain, sets up a Discord group, starts answering questions, and starts building out lore and stories. I think there’s a lot of interesting, weird things that could happen.”

Anatoly Yakovenko

The Solana ecosystem is already home to several projects utilizing AI specializing in web3.

Hivemapper, a decentralized mapping application that distributes tokens to users that contribute to its map using a dashcam, launched an AI tool in April that helps to convert dashcam recordings into a visual map.

Also in April, MarginFi, a decentralized trading protocol, launched Omni, a chatbot specializing in providing information on Solana and its ecosystem projects. Context also launched a Solana-focused chatbot last month.