The problem Solana Roads: Supercharging 🔥 Creator Communities solves

The rise of social media has given birth to a huge class of businesses built by independent content creators who earn lucrative sums of money. However, there’s one huge problem that every aspiring creator faces. The content creator market is saturated. The barriers to entry are higher. To achieve any form of success, creators need high-quality gear, a team, and marketing investments. All of that costs money that they, usually, don’t have. Because there is no funding available for creators, they have no choice but to take on freelance gigs and part-time jobs (or get into debt), thus, lowering their chances of success.

Creators do have an ace up their sleeve to tackle the lack of capital problem - their Fans. Many fans do donate generous amounts to their favourite content creators, but for most creators who aren’t popular with the majority - they fail to garner enough sums of money to jumpstart their content creation careers. There is a huge disconnect between creators and their fans.

Our goal is to turn the creator economy into an investment vehicle accessible to every individual. Solana Roads will be the roads bridging the disconnected creators and their fans. It is a platform wherein any content creator with zero coding knowledge can create their personal tokens and launch them on SerumDex. For eg. A creator can create personal tokens and declare that he'll be pledging 15% of his YOY revenue to token holders. The creators can then customise the benefits for their token holders, like NFTs tailored to their communities - the possibilities are endless!
Fans now won’t be simply donating to support their favourite content creators, but also investing in them. As the popularity of the creator increases, so will his revenue. Fans can stake their tokens in a liquidity pool for steady returns or HODL to sell later at a higher price. The ones who believe in their creators would be rewarded for their success.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest hurdle that we ran into was the lack of intuitive documentation and API reference guides for both Solana and Serum. Although there were some amazing articles from the folks at Serum and Bonfida, most of the reading materials that exist are fragmented and we read many articles to piece all the information together. Solana-web3.js and SPL token creations have very little documentation and no proper API reference guides on how to use them.
To tackle this, we created a google doc wherein we categorised every single article we found into sections so that we could refer to them whenever we wanted to.
There were a few minor roadblocks during the development period. We initially had a plan to use SvelteKit to build our web app. SvelteKit uses Vite as a bundler and Vite doesn't support Solana web3.js. Hence, we shifted to React.
Also, web3.js doesn't have a function that converts the public key string returned from the Solana wallet into the PublicKey class that is internally used by web3.js.
Any new token that is minted on the Solana blockchain is minted without any display picture and with the name of Unknow Token, which leads to poor UX. All the tokens' name and image have to be approved by the Solana Foundation before it can be seen anywhere. Merging this PR can take up to a week. Therefore to mitigate this, we take the name, token symbol and image from the users, display it on our platform and create a PR on the user's behalf for better user experience.