Colosseum Codex: Alpenglow, Grid, Chainlink CCIP

As I'm writing this issue, everyone in Solana (except me😭) is at Accelerate where lots of big news is coming out.

The biggest being Alpenglow (featured below), a proposed change to how Solana handles consensus.

If you're not attending in person, you can watch all the sessions from Day 1 and Day 2.

We've also been very busy here at Colosseum HQ, making progress on the initial review of Breakout product submissions (organizing the data, clearing spam, etc.).

A public list of all hackathon project info and hackathon stats will be available very soon!

Here's the rest of what's happening on Solana this week...

🌄 Alpenglow

Alpenglow is a proposal from Anza with the goal of bringing finality down from the current ~12s to about 150ms. The core goals are to reduce latency, lower hardware demands for validators, and bring Solana’s performance closer to existing Web2 systems.

Alpenglow is a huge change because it uproots two core pillars of what have defined Solana’s identity since launch: Proof-of-History and TowerBFT voting.

In their place, it introduces:

1. Rotor: A redesigned data propagation protocol, refining the existing Turbine protocol.
2. Votor: A new consensus mechanism for block voting and finalization.

Turbine is the part of the protocol that moves raw block data from the slot leader to the rest of the network by turning each block into many small shreds, then forwarding those shreds through a multi-layer relay tree. 

Rotor improves on Turbine by erasure-coding each block into fixed-size “shreds” (UDP packets). For every shred it chooses one relay validator, proportionally to stake, and unicasts the packet to that relay. Each relay then gossips its shred to all other validators. 

TowerBFT is Solana's current consensus mechanism.

Validators cast votes on a chain of block hashes, and each vote comes with a “lockout” period that doubles every time a validator votes on a deeper block. Finality is achieved only after enough subsequent blocks have accumulated, so the network keeps a long queue of unconfirmed blocks in memory. 

Proof-of-History is woven into this logic where the PoH hash stream provides a linear time source that TowerBFT uses to order those votes.

Votor replaces TowerBFT with a two-mode vote protocol that runs entirely on block headers:

1. Single-round fast path (80% stake): Every validator signs the header with a BLS signature and gossips the 200-byte vote. The moment any node aggregates signatures from at least 80% of total stake, the resulting certificate finalizes the block immediately.
2. Two-round fallback path (60 % stake): If the fast threshold isn’t reached quickly validators begin a second round. A block finishes as soon as 60% of stake signs that round. 

Because both paths execute in parallel, the block finalizes as soon as either certificate appears.

The main engineering hurdle for Alpenglow is proving that every validator, especially smaller ones, can keep up with the new data path that places heavier real-time networking and CPU/GPU demands.

Agave, Firedancer, and any future clients must replace PoH scheduling, lockouts, and long vote queues with Rotor’s packet paths and Votor’s BLS quorum certificates. 

Off-chain services that use PoH for timing like block explorers, indexers, and RPC gateway, will need to switch to header timestamps and finality certificates.

A rough schedule is planned out with devnets and security audits expected through mid-2025 and a public testnet focused on relay performance and fault-injection trials targeting Q3 2025. 

A governance vote could take place later in the year, with activation behind a feature flag by early 2026 and full implementation once performance and safety metrics are met. 

This shift is not a routine update. It rewrites the core consensus model that sets Solana apart from other proof-of-stake networks. 

Alpenglow: A New Consensus for Solana

🏁 Grid

Squads has announced Grid, an API suite that lets Solana developers assemble banking  functions like payments, accounts, yield, trading, cards and analytics without having to manage blockchain primitives or relying on sponsor banks. 

It sits between onchain settlement and an app's UI, exposing programmable endpoints that resemble traditional fintech services.

Solana apps can recreate common money movements such as single payments, bulk transfers, real-time settlement, direct debit mandates, standing orders, account-information requests and card authorizations. 

Each workflow is powered by one or more of the following modules, which can be used individually or combined:

• Core: Provision stablecoin accounts, set payment policies, manage permissions and handle account recovery.
• Yield: Connect to traditional or DeFi yield sources so balances can earn interest natively.
• Trading: Give end-users access to thousands of tokens and tokenized assets through a single interface.
• Cards: Issue virtual cards that draw directly on stablecoin balances, enabling global spend without converting to fiat first.
• Data: Retrieve real-time account and transaction data, generate automated P&L and compliance reports and build custom dashboards.

Grid gives developers REST APIs to move money worldwide without wiring into banks or writing custom smart contracts, meaning less time spent on plumbing and compliance and more time on building features, while keeping user funds self-custodial from the start.

Grid: Open Finance For Stablecoin Rails

⛓️ Chainlink CCIP

Chainlink has released version 1.6 of its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) which includes support for Solana, the first deployment of CCIP on a non-EVM network. 

Solana programs can now invoke contracts on other CCIP-enabled chains, move tokens under the Cross-Chain Token standard, and consume Chainlink’s existing Price Feeds along with the newer low-latency Data Streams that deliver real-time market data directly onchain.

The immediate impact on the Solana ecosystem is three-fold: 

1. Liquidity expands as projects with a combined market value of about 19B expand with deployments on Solana
2. CCIP lowers integration overhead by supplying an audited, rate-limited transport layer that eliminates the need for custom bridges and the extra security reviews they require. 
3. v1.6 delivers cost and performance gains by batching cross-chain messages and using a leaner on-chain footprint, which reduces gas fees and speeds support for additional networks

With CCIP live, Solana developers can create decentralized exchanges that settle trades across multiple chains while executing at Solana’s throughput and fee levels, launch lending or collateral markets that draw assets from external ecosystems, or synchronize DAO governance or game state between Solana and EVM chains.

Documentation, example contracts, and code samples are available through Chainlink’s developer portal. 

CCIP v1.6 Is Now Live: Unlocking Solana Support

⭐ Highlights of the Week

Chainlink Build on Solana Program
Chainlink announced the Build on Solana Program, a Chainlink Labs and Solana Foundation initiative that offers technical mentorship, ecosystem incentives, and joint marketing support. Participating projects must commit to building on Solana, integrate Chainlink services such as CCIP, and align long-term with both ecosystems.

ZK Compression V2
ZK Compression V2 (live on testnet) makes rent-free tokens and accounts up to 70 percent more efficient, cuts storage costs by about 1,000x, and lowers state-root update costs 250x. The release adds improved SDKs, completed audits by Ottersec and Accretion, with additional audits in progress. Mainnet rollout is planned for the next several weeks pending final audit completion.

Solana Compute Usage
This deep-dive from Syndica shows that Solana’s daily compute consumption grew 40% year over year to about 3.8 trillion compute units, while blocks now use 79% of their 50 million-CU ceiling, and median non-vote throughput rose from 800 to 1,100, although program efficiency slipped from 28% to 25%.

State of Solana Q1 2025
Messari’s State of Solana report covers every major thread shaping the network, including growth in Chain GDP, stablecoin usage, and DEX volume. The report also covers network upgrades, institutional growth, governance updates, and significant infrastructure developments, offering answers for anyone looking to stay up to date on Solana's evolving ecosystem.

⚡ Quick Hits

What are Solana Commitment Levels? - Helius

Finding Fractures: An Intro to Differential Fuzzing in Rust - Asymmetric Research

Jito Bundles: Bundle Solana Transactions with Rust - QuickNode

Solana Changelog: Anchor Upgrades Discussion (video) - Jacob Creech

Announcing the Helius [REDACTED] Hackathon Winners - Helius

Introducing Gavel: A Token Distribution and Liquidity Bootstrapping Platform - Ellipsis Labs

Net New Assets: How 3 Solana Projects Show the Rise of Consumer Crypto - Blockworks

⚙️ Tools & Resources

Data Anchor is an open-source platform that lets Solana developers push offchain data blobs, anchor their hashes on-chain, and later query them via a CLI/SDK, avoiding custom backend work and high storage costs.

IDL Guesser is an open-source tool that automatically recovers the IDL information from closed-source Anchor-based Solana programs.

LumoKit is a Python AI toolkit framework that combines LLM capabilities with blockchain tools to enable users to perform various onchain actions and gather research data through a conversational interface.

Swig is a smart wallet SDK designed for Solana that enables developers and users to easily manage transactions, permissions, and authentication methods at a significantly lower cost.

sBPF-Natural-Number-Sum is an example minimal Solana program written in low-level sBPF Assembly to compute the sum of the first n natural numbers, and is optimized for CU efficiency and includes overflow detection to ensure safe usage of 64-bit unsigned integers (u64).

💸 Funding

• Alchemy has acquired Solana infrastructure provider DexterLab for an undisclosed sum to equip Alchemy with native Solana tooling and give the Solana ecosystem stronger enterprise-grade infrastructure.
• Solana ticket resale exchange XP has raised $6.2 million in seed funding led by Blockchange, with L1D and Reflexive participating, to expand the platform into fan-perk rewards and peer ticket-resale features.
• Solana DeFi startup True Markets has closed an $11 million Series A co-led by Accomplice and RRE Ventures, with Reciprocal, Variant and PayPal Ventures joining, to expand its newly launched mobile non-custodial trading app and develop CeFi/DeFi integrations.
• Fermi Labs raised $1.2M in a pre-seed round, led by Equilibrium Labs and Big Brain Holdings to build a scalable, capital-efficient orderbook DEX on Solana.

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

• Written is hiring a Solana Smart Contract Developer
• DoubleZero Foundation is hiring a FPGA Developer
• Pyth Network is hiring a Platform Engineer
• Magna is hiring a Senior Software Engineer (TypeScript)
• Based is hiring a Data Engineer

📅 Event Calendar

Solana Summit APAC 2025, Da Nang, Viet Nam, June 5-7
The 2025 Solana Summit APAC gathers 1,000+ founders, developers and investors for three days of workshops, fireside chats and networking, featuring a DePIN Mini Summit, a GameFi Gaming Village, and a VC Demo Day, making it the region’s premier event for coding, collaboration and deal-making.

🎧 Listen to This

Talking Tokens

On the latest Talking Tokens podcast, Dialect CEO Chris Osborn recounts co-creating “blinks” with Solana (now 600+ integrations), details Dialect’s push for seamless, secure crypto UX across mobile and desktop, previews multi-chain expansion and on-chain financial tooling, and urges developers to embed blinks for trusted one-click actions in their own apps.

This Solana Startup Is Finally Making Crypto Easy to Use - Chris Osborn, CEO of Dialect

Bonus Episodes

Self-Custody. No Seed Phrase. w/ Ouriel Ohayon (Zengo) - Validated

Zengo co-founder Ouriel Ohayon discusses the failures of traditional custody, how Zengo’s password-free MPC wallet resists hacks, physical attacks and key loss, while outlining a revenue model that preserves UX and security.

Interview with Joe C - Devs at a Bar

Anza core engineer Joe C demystifies Solana’s transaction lifecycle by covering the scheduler, RPC/validator decoupling, PoH–runtime interplay, re-entrancy attack defenses, and new account-data tricks, while urging developers to master the runtime’s inner workings.

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Thanks for reading ✌️

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