A conversation with Solana's new 14-year-old intern, Gajesh Naik

Age is no barrier for Gajesh Naik. At 14, Naik is a coder, entrepreneur, popular crypto influencer — and, starting this week, an intern at Solana Labs, the startup behind the Solana blockchain.

Naik has also worked on Ethereum, Avalanche and Polygon as part of building his previous and current startups. But he says Solana is better for its speed and throughput. While his internship will only last four months, he plans to help improve the network's usability and composability.

The Block sat down with Naik, a resident of Goa, India, to discuss how he got introduced to coding, crypto, his journey in crypto to date and what exactly he plans to do for Solana.

The following conversation has been edited for clarity.

You started coding at the young age of seven. What got you interested so early?

My dad's close friend is an IT professor at Goa University. In May 2015, he told my dad about an IT summer boot camp where they teach programming to kids. My dad then informed me about the boot camp and I was super interested in it because I wanted to build some games and just learn new stuff. I was a big game addict. I started playing games when I was five. Angry Birds, Temple Run, etc.

So I joined the boot camp that lasted for two weeks. It was mainly about how the AI and VR space is evolving. They also taught us the programming language called Scratch, which is like the friendliest programming language for kids.

After the boot camp was over, I built some games, including ping pong, mini Minecraft (without multiplayer) and car racing, based on the Scratch programming language. Then I started to dig into it more and learned other programming languages, beginning with C. I also learned C++, Java, Advanced Java and Python. 

I learned Python on my own. The other languages I learned from various institutes. It took me around three years to learn all these programming languages.

How did you get introduced to crypto? 

In September 2020, I got to know about a crypto seminar through a Goa-based IT group I'm part of. The seminar was hosted by Naimish Sanghvi, founder of crypto news outlet Coin Crunch India and Jason Fernandes, an Indian blockchain entrepreneur. 

The seminar was about the basics of blockchain and bitcoin. There was also a quiz there and I won a prize of $5 in bitcoin at the time. 

Before that, I had heard about bitcoin in 2017 and like most people, I thought you could only buy one whole bitcoin. But it was priced at around $15,000 at the time, which was too expensive for me, so I didn't get into it.

But when I won $5 in bitcoin, I understood that bitcoin can be bought in fractions too. Then I started to learn more about blockchains and got interested in Ethereum and started to dig deep into it.

After that, I started using some dapps. The first dapp I used was Uniswap and then Harvest Finance. I started yield farming in Harvest Finance.

While using these dapps, I also got to know that these are coded in Solidity and it is something that I should learn. Then I just bought some Solidity courses on Udemy. After learning Solidity, I started freelancing via Fiverr, Upwork and email. People started emailing me about freelance gigs after my crypto videos were out. I freelanced for around three months.

Then after that, I thought, let's start an experimental project in crypto. So I founded Gaj Finance.

What is Gaj Finance? You also built StableGaj and are currently working on a project called Taksh. Tell me about all your crypto projects to date.

Gaj Finance was previously known as PolyGaj. It was my first crypto project. I built it to experiment and learn. It was a bootstrapped project and launched in May 2021. 

Gaj Finance was a one-stop multichain DeFi and NFT platform, supporting Avalanche, Polygon and Ethereum blockchains. It offered auto compounding vaults (a yield farming strategy that automatically harvests and reinvests rewards for compounded gains), NFT marketplace, a bidding game, NFT farming and a liquidity mining program.

Gaj Finance achieved $7 million TVL (total valued locked) at its peak in 2021. Its performance was good until the market started tanking. People then left the platform and revenue from fees started going low. I then shut down the project in February 2022.

My second crypto experiment project was StableGaj. It was the lowest-fee stablecoin swap platform on Polygon. I had received a grant of $10,000 from Polygon to build it. StableGaj was launched in July 2021 and achieved a TVL of $1 million in the first week of the launch.

But there was too much competition from the second week. Anons started to fork Curve. During that period, I had no investors and guides, so it had been hard to evaluate. It was just a one-person show.

I then rebranded StableGaj to Taksh with its new mission. 

Taksh is a VC-backed project. It raised $300,000 in pre-seed funding in October 2021 from several angel investors, including Ravindra Kumar, CEO of Frontier; Farid Rached, head of growth at Ava Labs; Pavel Bains, CEO of Bluezelle and Ravish Naresh, CEO of Khatabook and COO of Housing.com.

Taksh is a Solana-based no-loss prize game or lottery. It lets users deposit tokens in pools and offer an opportunity to win a pool prize. Each pool holds a weekly draw. Prize money is generated through interest accrued on deposited funds. All participants earn rewards. It is similar to PoolTogether.

Taksh is currently raising a seed round worth $800,000. Around 90% of that amount has already been committed by some of the big names in the crypto industry. 

We are a team of seven at Taksh, including me. I started hiring people last August. Pratik Gandhi, head of marketing at Covalent, helped me recommend some people and I ended up hiring a marketing head and a design head. Then I hired four more people from my own network — two coders and two designers.

I plan to convert Taksh into a DAO in the near future. I'm currently part of three DAOs: SuperteamDAO, DosaDAO and the Friends with Benefits DAO.

When did you get interested in Solana and how did you land an internship at Solana Labs?

In November 2021, I got deep into Solana. Before that, I was lightly aware of Solana. At that time, learning Solana's development was very tough. Its programming language and architecture were very hard to understand. But around last November, Armani Ferrante from Project Serum launched a framework called Anchor. Anchor is like an easy tool for creating Solana programs. So it was a great way for me to get started with Solana.

After learning Solana development via Anchor, I started writing Solana programs and published them on GitHub.

I also created a mini YouTube video series on Solana development. I then recently met Akshay BD in Bengaluru at a seminar. He is an advisor at the Solana Foundation. I told him about my Solana video series and he then suggested that I do an internship at Solana Labs. Around that time, I was also thinking about taking a break from school to go full-time into crypto. But then I changed my plans after I got to know that I have to complete my 12th class to get a student visa to study abroad.  

Following Akshay's advice, I contacted Raj (Raj Gokal, co-founder of Solana Labs). I asked him if there was a space for an intern and he said yes. That's how I landed an internship at Solana Labs.

Why did you want to join Solana as an intern when you are already working on your own project?

I want to learn new stuff. I love Solana. If you compare it with other blockchains like I have built dapps on several blockchains, including Polygon and Avalanche. Their main problem is that their EVM [Ethereum Virtual Machine] sucks. They are basically very low-performing EVMs and have a limited TPS [transcations per second]. They are not very scalable. Solana is fast and I want to learn its tech stack. I am looking forward to learning from the legends and build some stuff as an intern.

What kind of stuff? 

It is mostly related to improving usability and composability (cross-chain functionality) of Solana. The end goal is to make users' life easier.

On the usability side, I'll be working on Solana Pay (a payments protocol for merchants and commerce) to make it easier for users. For example, we'll bring a points system for Solana Pay, which will allow users to earn points as rewards in a token form for purchasing goods online and paying via Solana Pay.  Those points can then be used to get discounts or get access to exclusive products.

On the composability side, I'll be working on enabling cross-chain functionality for Solana NFTs. That means onboarding people from other blockchains to Solana without requiring them to exit those blockchains. For example, if someone is an Ethereum maxi and wants to mint an NFT on Solana, they have funds on Ethereum so that they can pay on Ethereum and the NFT will be minted on Solana. In short, the work involves enabling cross-chain NFT minting on Solana. 

I'll also be helping Indian developers build Solana dapps by teaching them coding in Rust (Solana's programming language).

Editor's note: Gajesh Naik’s father, Siddhivinayak Naik, gave parental consent for this interview. 

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