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TAPEDRIVE Named Grand Prize Winner of Colosseum Hackathon for Low-Cost On-Chain Data Storage Solution

TAPEDRIVE has won the grand prize in the latest iteration of the Colosseum hackathon-cum-venture accelerator, organized by the original Solana Labs hackathon organizers. According to an organizer, the event attracted numerous stablecoin projects, though the top prize was awarded to a solution addressing a core issue within Solana itself: the high cost of on-chain data storage.

Solana, currently the world’s busiest blockchain with rapid transaction speeds, faces significant data storage expenses. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko previously acknowledged the need to reduce data storage overhead, a challenge now tackled by TAPEDRIVE.

The TAPEDRIVE project claims a 1,400x reduction in data storage costs compared to Solana’s current model. It achieves this by bundling Solana data with inexpensive cryptographic proofs stored on-chain. A network of TAPE token incentivized miners stores this data, solving parallel challenges to prove they hold assigned portions of the archive.

TAPEDRIVE founder “Z” expressed surprise at the win; the project entered “kind of by accident.” They stated, “Glad to have a project aligned with the vision for Solana.” The solution notably avoids zero-knowledge proofs, relying instead on methods inspired by the first Colosseum hackathon winner, ORE, a viral proof-of-work game.

While the grand prize recognized the storage solution, the event also honored winners from diverse sectors including prediction markets, gaming, and stablecoins. Co-founder Matty Taylor noted the strongest stablecoin entries aimed at increasing crypto payment adoption within specific industries and regions.

TAPEDRIVE’s implementation of data storage circumvents zero-knowledge proofs as explained in the whitepaper of archiving platform Arweave, according to founder Z.