Epics DAO Releases Updated White Paper and Report on the Current Solana dApp Development Environment — Emphasizing the Importance of Open Source During the Solana Kit Transition

ELSOUL LABO B.V. (Headquarters: Amsterdam, the Netherlands; CEO: Fumitake Kawasaki) has announced that its open-source project Epics DAO has released an updated version of its white paper, along with a new report analyzing the current state of Solana dApp development.

Epics DAO is an open-source development initiative centered around a competitive NFT trading card game. It aims to create a new type of platform that integrates incentives, gaming, and social contribution through Web3 technologies. With this white paper update, Epics DAO clarifies its decision to prioritize the improvement of the overall Solana development infrastructure before advancing its platform’s own feature development.

Current State and Challenges of Solana Development

The Solana network has completed its v3 upgrade and is preparing to introduce the next-generation high-speed update known as “Alpenglow.”
In this new era, migrating from the legacy development library @solana/web3.js to @solana/kit has become essential for building dApps and Web3 applications.

While @solana/web3.js remains widely used with approximately 870,000 weekly downloads, its development has effectively ceased. Meanwhile, its successor @solana/kit — which reached version 5.0.0 just six days ago and continues to be actively developed — currently sees around 30,000 weekly downloads.

Since its major release in February, Solana Kit has undergone significant performance optimizations aligned with the upcoming Alpenglow architecture, improving communication efficiency, signing performance, and memory management. However, the lack of surrounding tooling, developer resources, and real-world implementation examples has slowed adoption across the ecosystem.

There is still no successor to the Wallet Adapter, and related projects such as Wallet Standard and gill remain under development. As a result, building dApps that involve transaction signing or wallet integration requires extensive manual implementation, making development inefficient and fragmented.
Consequently, many projects continue to rely on Web3.js, and the necessity of migration to Solana Kit is not yet widely recognized.

Epics DAO aims to address these challenges by contributing to the improvement of Solana Kit–based development environments, sharing information, and creating open-source examples. The goal is to ensure that all developers can fully utilize the latest Solana development stack as the network enters a new era.

During the development of its NFT card game on Solana, Epics DAO faced various issues such as transaction failures and RPC instability.

To address these challenges, the team created and released solv — a custom validator and RPC management tool — which later evolved into Validators DAO, SLV, and ERPC.

These efforts were aimed at reducing the technical debt within the Solana ecosystem and promoting the standardization and stabilization of its infrastructure.

Leveraging the experience gained through these initiatives, Epics DAO continues to focus on building an easier and more reliable environment for Solana developers.

Solana Foundation’s New Direction: Launch Portal

The Solana Foundation has also recognized these infrastructure gaps and recently launched a new developer portal called “Launch.”

This portal introduces a new generation of Solana dApp development tools, including Kora, CommerceKit, and Attestations.

Kora: Enables transaction fee payments in tokens other than SOL
CommerceKit: A toolkit for building e-commerce applications on Solana
Attestations: Provides identity verification and proof mechanisms on the Solana network

Kora, in particular, is a breakthrough for the Epics game platform, enabling all transaction fees to be processed entirely in $EPCT.

Previously, users were required to pay fees in SOL, creating unnecessary friction. With Kora, gameplay will become more seamless and user-friendly.

Development Policy and Future Direction

Epics DAO will temporarily postpone the release of its platform’s Beta version to focus on open-source development and documentation around Solana Kit and wallet connectivity.

In collaboration with Validators DAO and ERPC, the project will strengthen the SDK, wallet integration, and network layers required for Solana dApp development — providing developers with a safer, faster, and more reliable foundation for building and experimentation.

All research outcomes and tools will be released as open source, contributing to the growth and resilience of the global Solana development community.

Epics DAO is committed to advancing open-source development as a public good and aims to build a sustainable model that incentivizes and supports long-term innovation across the Solana ecosystem.

References

Epics Whitepaper: https://storage.epics.dev/EpicsWhitePaperEN.pdf
Epics DAO Official Website: https://epics.dev/en
SLV: https://github.com/validatorsDAO/slv
ERPC: https://erpc.global/en
Validators DAO Official Discord: https://discord.gg/C7ZQSrCkYR
Solana Kit: https://github.com/anza-xyz/kit
Solana Launch: https://launch.solana.com/
Gill SDK: https://github.com/gillsdk/gill
Solana Wallet Adapter: https://github.com/anza-xyz/wallet-adapter
Solana Wallet Standard: https://github.com/wallet-standard/wallet-standard

Epics DAO Releases Updated White Paper and Report on the Current Solana dApp Development Environment — Emphasizing the Importance of Open Source During the Solana Kit Transition

Current State and Challenges of Solana Development

Solana Foundation’s New Direction: Launch Portal

Development Policy and Future Direction

References

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