Colosseum Codex: Accelerate Agenda, Onion DAO, State of Crypto Report

If you're participating in the Breakpoint Hackathon, don’t forget that all projects must be submitted by 11:59pm PST on May 16, 2025. Good luck! We can't wait to see what you've built.

📅 Accelerate Ship or Die Agenda

The Accelerate Ship or Die agenda for May 22–23 in New York City outlines a focus on the intersection of crypto, finance, technology, and policy.

Day 1 centers on the East Coast’s role in internet capital markets, institutional adoption, and asset tokenization. Sessions include infrastructure discussions, a panel on public crypto markets, and TradFi–DeFi crossovers.

Day 2 shifts to West Coast themes, emphasizing product development and UX, with presentations from Solana Mobile, Phantom, Hivemapper, and MetaDAO. Topics range from social graph innovations to consumer-facing tokenized products such as whiskey and fan experiences

A policy track on Day 2 includes participation from Senators Gillibrand, Scott, and Hagerty, Representative French Hill, and industry leaders like Kristin Smith.

The event will feature two stages and over 20 product booths, aiming to advance US leadership in crypto across infrastructure, product, and policy.

Accelerate Ship or Die Agenda

🧅 Onion DAO

OnionDAO is a four-week coworking space designed for developers working within the Solana ecosystem taking place in Chicago from June 16 to July 11, and offers Solana developers an extended opportunity to collaborate, build, and exchange knowledge in a shared space. 

The concept is modeled after similar initiatives like mtnDAO and aims to provide an alternative to short-term hackathons or conferences.

The coworking space is located in an 18,000-square-foot office in Chicago’s Loop district and provides:

• 24/7 access for participants
• Office amenities including monitors, conference rooms, and kitchens
• Social features such as a basketball court, ping pong, and informal gathering areas

The format is intentionally unstructured for most of the day, promoting collaboration and informal technical discussions. 

Scheduled activities are kept to a minimum, with the exception of targeted workshops, developer onboarding sessions, and optional evening or weekend events.

An example of a focused week is University Week, scheduled during the second week, which will target student developers and include potential mini hackathons or workshops.

The event is free to attend, applications are required for entry, and developers are encouraged to apply in advance.

Why "Onion"? Chicago's name originates from a Native American word meaning "place of wild onions."

Onion DAO

📜 21Shares State of Crypto Report

State of Crypto 14, the latest entry in a research series by 21Shares, dedicates the entire report to Solana.

The authors provide a deep-dive into Solana’s architecture, link performance metrics to emerging product categories, highlight where capital and users are concentrating, and flag infrastructure gaps that still need solving.

Key Highlights:

• In Jan–Feb 2025 Solana processed $364B, more than half of Nasdaq’s matched equity volume and ahead of both Ethereum and Coinbase during the same period. 
• Stablecoin float on the network has grown 600% in a year to more than $12B, attracting payments integrations from Visa, PayPal, Shopify and Stripe.
• DeFi TVL reached roughly $8B in Q1 2025, shrinking the ETH/SOL TVL gap from 20:1 to 5:1, and Solana has led DEX volume for six consecutive months. 
• New developer sign-ups rose 83 percent year-on-year, overtaking Ethereum for the first time.

The authors devote entire sections to two newer verticals:

• DePIN: Projects such as Helium, Hivemapper, Render and io.net demonstrate that real-world infrastructure can be coordinated onchain.
• AI Agents: Roughly two-thirds of open source AI agent activity tracked by GitHub now targets Solana thanks to toolkits like Agent Kit and hackathons.

Developers looking for high-volume use cases will find the full document worth a deep read.

State of Crypto #14: Solana - A Blockchain Built to Blossom

🚅 The Path to Decentralized Nasdaq

Max Resnick and Anatoly Yakovenko explore how Solana can evolve to match and surpass the performance of traditional exchanges like NASDAQ.

They argue that today’s blockchain architecture, particularly Solana’s single-leader model and reliance on Jito Auctions, puts market makers at a disadvantage, leading to wider spreads and less efficient markets.

Their solution is a fundamental redesign of Solana’s consensus to introduce multiple concurrent leaders, enabling fairer transaction ordering and reducing censorship risk.

The article also outlines a new fee-based system for merging blocks and proposes tools to give apps more control over transaction sequencing, with a high-level vision for unlocking competitive, decentralized markets.

The Path to Decentralized Nasdaq

⭐ Highlights of the Week

Proposed Handling of Resized Funds
This proposal is for a new approach for how to handle the Metaplex DAO excess SOL from the Token Metadata Resize program, suggesting to stake the unclaimed SOL, allowing NFT holders to claim their funds at any time while generating rewards to fund community driven initiatives like grants and public goods.

Crypto and the Evolution of the Capital Markets
This paper argues that blockchain can address inefficiencies in traditional securities markets by enabling efficient asset ownership and trading. By tracing the history of market inefficiencies since the 1960s, she critiques the current intermediary-heavy system, advocates for blockchain as a modern solution, and emphasizes blockchain’s potential to revolutionize capital markets.

Issuing Tokenized Equities on Solana Report
A new 26-page report explores how Solana is positioned to transform capital markets through equity tokenization. Key highlights include native compliance support via token extensions, the technical capacity to handle up to 10% of NASDAQ’s daily volume, and cost savings from programmable features like dividends, stock splits, and voting.

⚡ Quick Hits

History of Solana Security Incidents: A Deep Dive - Collins

Deep Dive: Solana DePIN April 2025 - Syndica

Bonsol Collective Spotlight: Darklake - @bonsol_labs

Kite documentation updated with how-to guides and demo programs - Kite

Storytelling like a Cult Leader (video) - Vitor Py

SIMD-0204: Building the Foundation for Slashing on Solana - Solomon Esenyi

Introducing SEZ Kazakhstan: The first Solana Economic Zone in the heart of Eurasia - @formacity

Who to Follow to stay up to date on the Solana ecosystem - @pattiruss_

LaunchLabs surpasses Pumpfun in 24h token graduates - @Adam_Tehc

Boost and Pop Social Announce Pioneering Web3 Social Partnership - @getboostso_

⚙️ Tools & Resources

public-audits is a list of public audits for anyone who wants to enhance the security of their Solana program or learn auditing to become a security researcher.

Solana-Rust-Client-Extension enhances the Solana Rust client with smart compute unit estimation, automatic optimization, rollup support for batch processing, and detailed transaction analytics, including success status, compute usage, and error messages.

anchor-it-here is a simple CLI tool to initialize a new Anchor workspace in your current working directory.

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

• Exodus is hiring a Staff Solana Engineer to lead our Solana integration efforts.
• Nous Research is hiring a Protocol Engineer to write smart contracts and engineer a bleeding-edge crypto network.

🎧 Listen to This

Lightspeed

Sergej Kunz, cofounder of 1inch, discusses 1inch's recent launch on Solana, a deep dive into building on the EVM vs SVM, 1inch's path forward, powering cross chain liquidity, and how to improve execution.

1inch Co-Founder: Launching On Solana | Sergej Kunz

Bonus Episodes

From Bitcoin on Solana to Quantum Vaults | Dean Little, Zeus Network Co-founder - The Index

Dean Little discusses JupNet’s frictionless cross-chain interoperability on Solana and his Quantum Vault project, which uses Winternitz One-Time Signatures to build quantum-resistant crypto storage.

Austin Federa, Cofounder of DoubleZero, on The Next Internet, The Future of Solana, and Validators - Cryptonews

Austin Federa, Co-Founder of DoubleZero, discusses the future of Solana, the network’s recent emergency patch, how DoubleZero aims to solve critical infrastructure challenges in distributed systems, the potential impact of AI, and the importance of scaling blockchain networks to support high transaction volumes.

Follow @mikehale on X or Warpcast!

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