Vybe Network (Serum Pulse) — Bringing Data and Infra Solutions for Devs — Serum Stories #9
“We’ve been pleasantly surprised by how vocal and excited the community is…We also love how supportive and collaborative the dev teams are on Solana; it really feels like everyone is genuinely interested in building a more robust ecosystem together.”
Welcome to Serum Stories #9
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Project Serum provides infrastructure for the wider Solana ecosystem. The ‘lower level’ action doesn’t stop there: analytics data is like a second lifeblood for financial dApps and means a world of difference for developers and, further downstream, the end user.
This week, we’re delighted to introduce Vybe Network, previously known as Serum Pulse — the premier analytics platform and intuitive dashboard for market and staking data for the Serum and Solana communities. The Vybe Network team shares their big news about the new network solution they’re creating for developers, the shift from Serum Pulse to Vybe Network, and their incredible experiences as founders, devs, and close friends.
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What’s up Next
1.— What is Vybe Network and how is it different from Serum Pulse
2.— The founding story and building on Solana
3.—Why middleware matters
4.— Reflecting on the experiences so far and what’s in store for the future
5. — Discovering Serum!
6. —The idea behind Vybe
7.—Next on the roadmap
8. — Secret ingredient
9. — What makes it all worth it!
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1. For those who are not already in the know, what is your 30 second elevator pitch for Vybe Network?
Vybe Network is a middleware solution for workflow management and data-indexing. Our goal is to help dev teams on Solana build and deploy their own data infrastructure as easily and efficiently as possible. Ultimately we hope Vybe Network will be the key to powering data processing and analytics for all dApps built on Solana.
2. Your team first started out as a different project called Serum Pulse. How did you guys go from that to Vybe Network?
Yep! Most people probably know us from our first project Serum Pulse, which is a data analytics platform for Serum markets, Bonfida and Saber.
Our initial idea was to build out a fully fledged analytics website for all the major protocols on Solana, similar to Dune or Nansen on Ethereum. However, when we started talking to dev teams early on, we learned that a major pain point teams had was extracting, storing and manipulating data from the blockchain. We realized we could leverage what we learned from building Serum Pulse to create infrastructure and tooling for these teams, who in turn can spin up their own analytics and gain valuable insights about their product.
3. Who do you see being the main users of your platform? Has anything about the overall reception of Serum Pulse in the community surprised you?
Currently our focus is on dev teams who have data and infrastructure needs. We want to adopt a very user-centric approach and work closely with a few teams to figure out their pain points and objectives during our beta stage. However we definitely see the broader community benefiting from Vybe Network indirectly as more teams have the capability to deploy their own infrastructure and create their own “Serum Pulses”.
We’ve been pleasantly surprised by how vocal and excited the community is. We also love how supportive and collaborative the dev teams are on Solana; it really feels like everyone is genuinely interested in building a more robust ecosystem together.
4. You mentioned before that the Vybe Network team are close friends and that some of you first met at work. Small world!
What’s the story behind how everyone got connected and started building out Serum Pulse and Vybe? What is it like to be such close colleagues and all working on the same thing?
That’s right! All of us have worked with each other at some point at different companies. We’ve always had great chemistry in and out of the workplace so collaborating on our own project came naturally for us.
Arun created the first iteration of Serum Pulse after he realized there weren’t projects focusing on data analytics and dev tooling in the last Solana Season Hackathon. He pitched the idea to us one day after some mini-golfing and we’ve been moving quickly to develop our project ever since.
Working together as close colleagues has been great so far! There’s a lot of trust and collaboration between us and we openly bounce ideas off of each other throughout the day. We all have our own unique expertise and skill sets, and that really brings the whole project together. Most of us are still working part-time on Vybe but we’ve all been actively taking ownership of our work and constantly bringing new ideas to the table.
5. We also thought this was a fun story: How did you first learn about Project Serum?
Arun actually first found out about Project Serum through some pretty stealthy ad work by the Blockfolio team. During the Project Serum launch there was a little banner ad for Serum that would just continuously grab his attention. After seeing the ad too many times, he decided to dig in and was pleasantly confused on how it was possible to build a CLOB on a Layer 1 blockchain. From there, a doorway opened into the world of new possibilities that Solana enables, and the rest is history.
6. What made you think of building middleware? What was the thinking behind building Vybe Network specifically?
Middleware is quite limited on Solana right now, so we think building a simple to use and effective solution for teams to access and utilize program data will be a huge value add to the entire Solana community.
Additionally, building out data infrastructure and dashboards have kind of been our team’s bread and butter in our previous day jobs, so the product vision and many of the ideas we had for Vybe and Serum Pulse came naturally to us.
7. What are some of the next set of features or types of partnerships your team is looking at next? What’s on the roadmap for Vybe Network?
Speaking with the Project Serum and Saber team has really helped us hone in on our product vision and goals and we definitely want to continue doing that.
Currently, we have an alpha product and a nifty “one click deploy” feature that’s almost good to go so we’re excited to have some dev teams test it out and give us their thoughts. We’re really trying to solve one immediate problem at a time by listening to the community and our users, so hit us up!
As for an official roadmap, we need to test our unified API and one click deploy feature a bit further before moving onto the workflow management portion of Vybe. Further down the line, we may or may not have a token in the works…
8. Do you believe there’s any “secret ingredient” that makes your team what it is today?
Our secret sauce is a positive mentality and raw determination. Another factor is our ability to quickly ideate and iterate on our ideas. We all have experience working in fast-paced startup environments and it’s definitely been applicable in the crypto space.
9. Would you like to share some of your positive or most favourite experiences in these past few months at Vybe Network? What would you say makes it all ‘worth it’?
Believe it or not…we’ve only been working on Vybe and Serum Pulse for a little over two months!
In that short amount of time however, I can say the best part of this experience is seeing all the positivity and excitement from our users (shoutout to @digitaldan!) and meeting with the different teams building on Solana. It’s been amazing so far and we are all super hyped for what’s coming next!
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We hope you enjoyed the interview!
We would love to continue having these kinds of conversations with all the incredible teams building on Serum and sharing them with you. Just let us know who you want to read about next!
You can keep up with the Vybe Network team and development through their Twitter, Medium, and of course, their website.
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Getting Started with Project Serum
Read Serum Roadmap 2.0
Read An Ultimate Vision for Project Serum
Read Building on Serum’s Vision
Check out Serum’s Developer Resources and Project Ideas
Listen to Sam Bankman-Fried’s breakdown of the Serum ecosystem
