Born on Solana: From Concept to Code
Solana was and will always be our nesting ground. Technology matters, but community matters more.
I've been “in crypto" since Bitcoin was $430. When I read the 2008 Satoshi paper, I became fixated on the idea of cutting banks out of the act of commerce. What had a bank ever done for me? Or for journalism?
I first conceptualized CTRL+X on October 13, 2015 as a way to utilize the properties of the blockchain to benefit journalists. “Encouraging writers to demand ownership of the copyright to their own work, so that work can be shared freely with the world, not only the readers of the publishing house,” was what I wrote in the first of many notes titled, “CTRL+X.”
My vision was crystal clear. But when I pitched these ideas to the big journalism foundations in New York, they didn’t get it. One of my advisors in the journalism world said I was too early. “10 years too early,” to be exact. It was hard to hear. At 29, I had already experienced just about every imaginable problem in the journalism industry, and I was ready to dedicate my life to solving them.
But the industry wasn't ready for me. Years passed since that first burst of inspiration, while I watched the evolution of the blockchain industry with skepticism. Crypto scammers and NFT hijinks in the art world left me doubting my ‘eureka!’ moment. Throughout the many rug pulls, I felt relieved to be distanced from the chaos. I’d had enough chaos from the journalism world to last a lifetime. Not my circus, and thankfully, not my monkeys, I would tell myself, after reading the crypto headlines.
Leap and the Net Will Appear
A decade flew by. The blockchain landscape transformed completely—multiple chains, countless wallets, thousands of companies and applications. What was once a niche technology had exploded into an ocean of possibilities. The expansion brought complexity, but it also reintroduced the possibility of CTRL+X. It had been 10 years and nobody had cracked the blockchain-for-journalism problem yet. If I didn’t try, who would? Maybe now, I would be right on time.
I wasn’t sure where to start, so I dove headfirst into the world of blockchain hackers. “Leap, and the net will appear,” I always say. And the Web3 Summit hackathon seemed like the perfect diving board. Though I'd been mentoring at hackathons since the origins of blockchain technology, I'd never been a participant myself. But I knew that’s where the other builders would be—people who know that changing things isn’t as hard as you’re made to believe in the corporate world.
I was right, and that leap led me to Hyun-Kyung (Juli) Yi, a talented developer who shared my vision for transforming digital publishing. She had previously built a web3 content management system, so she had the perfect set of skills. As Juli and I planned our approach, a member of Solana’s developer relations team came over to see what we were up to. As I explained my vision for CTRL+X to him, I watched his eyes grow wider. “If you can pull this off, this is gonna be huge,” he told us. We had been planning to build on Ethereum, but he introduced us to Solana's tech stack and convinced us it would be even more powerful than Ethereum for our use case.
And that’s how CTRL+X, the software company, was born—from concept to real-life code. I had to transmit my message over the right channels so it could be received by people who resonated with it. Meeting Juli and members of Solana’s Superteam Germany set CTRL+X on a trajectory that would fundamentally shape its development. And that was just the beginning.
Come for the Community, Stay for the Technical Advantages
Juli and I joined forces again for the Colosseum Radar Hackathon. We reconvened at the w3.hub, the epicenter of blockchain innovation in Berlin, where we participated in the Solana Buildstation, a hub to support builders during the 5-week run up to demo day. It was here that I first met Eloi Sanchez, a brilliant blockchain engineer who is now a core member of the CTRL+X dev team.
As we mapped our path to victory, I took the opportunity to do some due diligence on Solana before going all in. I wanted to believe that Solana was the path forward, but as a journalist, I never take what anyone tells me at face value. Diving deeper into the differentiating factors between Solana and other blockchains, I discovered aspects of my own business I hadn't even considered. For example, comparing the energy consumption between Solana and Ethereum got me thinking about the energy consumption of the media industry on the whole, and how much energy a p2p system like CTRL+X could save (up to 70% compared with web2 content delivery systems). When I extrapolated the differences with some modest estimates of product adoption, I found that building the CTRL+X core on Solana rather than Ethereum could result in energy savings equal to roughly the annual energy output of Finland. Though we’re interested in exploring cross-chain options in the future, Solana was and will always be our nesting ground.
We’re just scratching the surface of exploring the technological advantages Solana brings to CTRL+X, but when we reflect on our foundation in the software development world, it will always come back to the Superteam Germany community. Led by Patricia Albrecht, a powerhouse in the business world who has advised startups for organizations like the European Commission and Google, and Carlo Abdel-Nour, a community builder in the truest sense whose professionalism and enthusiasm for the community knows no bounds, Superteam Germany has provided the infrastructure for CTRL+X to grow from a seedling of a concept to a full-blown, fundable software business.
The community’s support goes way beyond words. The Solana Foundation recently awarded CTRL+X a grant to help develop our MVP, a tangible vote of confidence in our mission. If it wasn't for Solana, CTRL+X might still be in the conceptual phase rather than halfway through our MVP build. The entire Solana Foundation and Superteam Germany community demonstrated something critical to CTRL+X's ethos: technology matters, but community matters more.
And now? Now, when I read about bizarre news in the blockchain world, I shrug. That’s my circus! And these are my crypto monkeys. I’m happy to be one too. I'm in good company here.
This post was written by Arikia Millikan and edited by Terrence Russell. Glitch Albatross provided editorial support.
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Arikia Millikan
Arikia Millikan
Arikia Millikan