Cakes On Solana: The Baking Paper
Welcome to Cakes On Solana. We’re a simple cake based project. On the Solana blockchain.
But what does that mean?
Let’s start with what we love:
- Memecoins
- Decentralised Finance (DeFi)
- Decentralised Social Media (SocialFi)
- NFT art
- Onboarding newbies to crypto
- Cakes
As a team we’ve had a wide range of experiences across many different crypto projects, protocols and technologies, seen the great and the terrible, and we all have come to the same conclusions
- Solana is THE ecosystem in term of user friendly tools and retail friendly apps
- There’s more than enough tools on Solana for a non-developer to start building BUT there’s not the resources available to guide you how to get started (it’s a STEEP learning curve)
- SocialFi is severely under-appreciated by crypto projects as compared to the tools that have been built by socialfi platforms
- If you’re a non-dev all the token minting tools kinda suck right now. Don’t worry, we got something for this coming…
- The only way to truly learn something is to build it and then teach someone else how you did it
- For all the good memecoins have brought in terms of wider adoption (they are way easier to understand than NFTs) they are still very narrowly targeted at a certain person and personality type. If you’re not a degen the vast majority of memecoin, even the large ones, can be pretty off-putting
- Everyone likes cake. It’s fun and makes people happy.
Out of these shared experiences was born Cakes On Solana.
We’re on a mission to build a project that blends the best of Solana tooling and socialfi infrastructure to showcase what can be achieved for any project out there on Solana and create a memecoin project that isn’t just for degens.
Just to be clear: We are degens and we have nothing but respect for the genuine degens out there. But no one can argue that, right now, the memecoin space is so full of dirtbags and dirtbag behaviour that isn’t even close to being ‘in the gray area’. It’s straight up abusive. We want to build something that shows memecoins can be something fun AND safe to interact with.
We’re excited to show you what we have been working hard in the kitchen cooking up.
Here’s what to expect from us in the coming weeks and months. 
Tokens!
A lot gets written about tokens needing utility, and we agree with most of it, but honestly I don’t think you can call yourself a crypto project if you don’t have a token or use tokens in your product.
Tokens are such a core piece of crypto and offer so much functionality that you’re mad if you’re not leveraging that.
So we’ll be minting some tokens.
But let us warn you, if you thought minting a token on Solana was super easy now: Think again.
It’s not easy, and it’s taken us a very long time to get to a point where we can launch a basic memecoin to just an average standard.
There’s been so many bugs we’ve found with Solana tooling providers and such a lack of basic documentation it’s no wonder we don’t yet see a lot of diversity in the market as goes memecoins. Basically you need insider-like knowledge to handle these things even at the most basic level.
So along with our tokens we’ll be releasing our guides on how we went about minting our tokens so you don’t have to do all the learning we had to.
Plus we’ve partnered with a pretty cool new project on Solana that’s going to make using and managing new tokens a much better experience for dev and non-dev alike. No spoilers though!
Proof Of Cake
The main way you’ll be able to get a hold of our tokens is to earn them through our marketing and community management tools.
We’re calling this our Proof Of Cake distribution mechanism and it’s engineered to get our tokens into the hands of the right people.
It’s been an ongoing problem for crypto projects that they see far too many tokens in the hands of people who are not at all aligned with the long term vision of crypto as an enabling force.
Airdrop farming is ruining the chance crypto has to build long lasting products as the farmers themselves are not interested in crypto products or technology: They just want money.
So we’re out to ruin the party for these short term focused players and give other projects a blueprint to chase these people out of the industry for good and still keep the enormous power that token airdrops have to bootstrap new development and onboard legit users. 
How To SocialFi
There’s so much untapped potential we see in web3 native social media aka socialfi. The tools are here, it’s just no one is really using them well. Why just have a web3 social media profile exactly like your web2 only smaller and with a wallet you sign in with clunking up the UX?
We’re on a mission to show that there’s so much more you can do on socialfi if you’re a crypto project. We’ve been working closely with the socialfi platforms we’re on to help them help us showcase the huge potential we see with these tools.
We’ll be releasing platform by platform guides that will show you how we did what we did and how you can use the tools with your own projects. 
Zealy Quests
Along with socialfi there’s a growing number of web3 marketing and community management tools. We’ve been trialing a few of them and we’ll be launching our community program on Zealy. It’s currently only open to our wonderful testers (thanks for everything so far guys: you rock) but we’ll be launching it as soon as our tokens are live.
Unlike socialfi this is an area you do see people leveraging the tools well. But even then there’s not nearly enough innovation for our liking. We’ve been pushing Zealy to its limits and have been engaging directly with their team with feedback on features.
We’ll be releasing guides showing you how we have used Zealy and how you can learn from our experience to tailor to your own needs.
Not mention we’re hoping you love the Zealy experience we’ve got cooked up for you!
Do to Earn <> spam
Let’s face it: The Do To Earn model has mostly failed. Starting way back with Stepn, Axie and Steemit we’ve seen many attempts at using the same token incentives that have been so successful in bootstrapping blockchain networks and defi products to try and build consumer facing apps with limited success.
It’s true those 3 projects still exist and some are moderately successful but they are a shadow of their former selves and have struggled to rid themselves of low value users and the dreaded bots.
The same has been true of many of the projects that followed in their footsteps.
Free money is the death of most consumer facing products in crypto. A quick overview of any socialfi project that have used token rewards reveals platforms choked with spam content and bot driven engagement and little to no legit users.
Even Mirror, an OG in the decentralised blogging space who has never even mentioned a token, has seen a large chunk of all their blog posts come from bots who are speculating that maybe Mirror will one day launch a token. It’s madness and it is only getting worse.
You can’t follow the same rules as web2 and offer easy onboarding if you’re also going to make access permissionless. The bots and spammers will eat you for dinner. Especially if you throw token incentives in there.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t have decentralized and permissionless consumer apps, with token incentives, that are spam-free. You just need to follow the lessons that successful crypto apps have followed to use tokens to incentivise value creation and de-incentivise value extraction.
It’s more profitable to:
- Validate transactions correctly on Solana
- Create good blocks on Bitcoin
- Stake GLP long term on GMX (or any of their partners)
- Provide reliable mobile data connections on Helium
- Provide accurate mapping data on Hivemapper
All these products use token rewards to help drive usage. All of them have little to no spam.
Now content driven apps are harder to design for, and do lend themselves to more centralised moderation in order to protect against spam and fraud, but it’s not impossible, and you don’t need to design something as complex as Ethereum’s consensus mechanism.
Even in the simplest products you can have designs which negate spam. Memecoins have no spam. There is no advantage to holding 10 wallets with 100 WIF over holding one wallet with 1000 WIF. In fact it’s cheaper, transaction fee wise, to hold just one wallet.
We’re going to be employing a bunch of incentive designs, via our tokenomics, that will increase value for everyone.
We’re not stupid though.
Our team has a strong cyber sec background so we know fraudsters won’t be that easily defeated. However we feel we have a unique perspective, due to our experience fighting cyber attacks that isn’t common among crypto projects (especially not retail focused ones). We know you can’t think the best of people in the online space today; you need to view your designs from a fraudster’s mindset and design from defensive principles first.
From little, silly, ideas; big things can grow
By now you should be pretty clear this ain’t your standard memecoin project.
For an example of a typical memecoin project see: https://thesonicgoat.com/ (and this is one of the better ones out there!)
It’s more than that. We’re on a cake-fuelled mission to do things differently.
We have some BIG ideas. Nothing we can share right now but expect to see us start to reveal our much grander vision over the coming months.
Will we get there? Who knows.
But you’ll never know if you never try and we’re all about getting stuck in and having a go. 
Let’s get baking!
We’re excited for you all to come along this journey with us as we fight to take back the narrative from the fraudsters and airdrop farmers, teach you how to build your own projects, introduce a whole heap of newbies to all the things that we love about this space and, most importantly, have a whole heap of fun.
For now what you can do to be involved is simple: Go to https://cakesonsolana.com/ and follow the links to follow us on all our socials and start engaging with us and our small, but growing, community.
Here’s a few ways you can get directly involved straight away.
Make GoT art, Win your art as NFTs!
Enter our Game Of Thrones art contest on Solarplex. Hurry entries close soon!
Celebrate the baking paper with us
Mint the (free!) NFT we’ve produced to celebrate the official launch of the project.
Go on: you can have some cake. 
Special Bulb Bonus
We've cross posted to our Medium blog as well but to show our love for all things Solana socialfi we've got a special extra for our Bulb readers.
We're giving away 3 prizes of 1K $BULB to commentors on this post.
And if this post gets over 500 points; we'll make 2K $BULB each!
UPDATE
Congrats to our comment winners @cryptonewbiemom @HattyHats and @yusman
We've tipped one of your articles 1K $BULB each!
