Colosseum Codex: Catstanbul Recap, SOL Market Research, PayFi Ecosystem Analysis
Jupiter Catstanbul Recap, Solana and the SOL Market, PayFi Ecosystem Analysis, Solana DevEx, SVM Chains, DAO Trends, Founder Tools, RWA Trends, Colosseum Podcast
🐱 Catstanbul Recap
Jupiter's Catstanbul, billed as an “un-conference,” combined product reveals, ecosystem strategy updates, and a memorable 20-foot ‘Burning Cat’ sculpture celebrating the burn of 3 billion $JUP tokens.
Jupiter also made several big announcements, including:
The Magic Fund, backed by Jupiter and Eliza Labs, offers up to $10 million in grants or investments for open-source AI projects. This aligns with Solana’s growing AI focus.
JupNet is a new framework for connecting multiple blockchains and bridging liquidity, data, and user authentication into one cohesive system. It's made from three core components:
- DOVE Network (Decentralized Oracles that Validate & Execute) integrates oracles, validators, and executors into a single network. It relies on a BLS-based mechanism to handle multi-chain finality.
- Omnichain Ledger introduces abstracted finality, allowing smaller transactions to settle quickly while requiring stricter proof thresholds for larger ones.
- Aggregated Decentralized Identity (ADI) does away with seed phrases by providing user accounts with built-in multi-factor authentication and recovery options.
Underpinning JupNet is an extended Solana VM, complete with BLS data structures and a Merkle-based aggregator for handling signature verifications.
Catstanbul Recap: Biggest Announcements from Jupiter’s Inaugural Event
📃 Solana and the SOL Market
A new research paper by Professors Craig Lewis and James Overdahl, both former SEC economists, provides a comprehensive look at how Solana improves upon the limitations of earlier blockchains, how its technology works, and how the SOL market compares to Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Key Takeaways:
- Solana vs. Legacy Chains: The paper details how Solana outperforms Bitcoin and Ethereum in scalability, efficiency, and cost, eliminating the need for Layer 2 solutions.
- Technical Advantages: Solana’s Proof of History (PoH), Gulf Stream, and QUIC protocol enable sub-second finality and high throughput.
- Market Structure & Liquidity: SOL’s market is analyzed across CEXs and DEXs, highlighting its depth, efficiency, and institutional viability.
- Decentralization & Security: Solana’s Nakamoto Coefficient of 18 ranks above many competitors, with a globally distributed validator network supporting its resilience.
- Institutional Interest: The authors compare SOL’s market dynamics to BTC and ETH, suggesting its potential for future regulated financial products.
The study was backed by the Solana Foundation, Helius, Jito Labs, Anza, DoubleZero, and others and positions Solana as the leader in blockchain scalability and market efficiency.
💵 PayFi Ecosystem Analysis
Messari's PayFi Ecosystem Analysis report, authored by Austin Weiler, provides an in-depth analysis of the PayFi (Payment Financing) ecosystem, its underlying technology stack, and the critical role that Solana plays in modernizing global financial systems.
PayFi aims to revolutionize how payments, lending, and liquidity work in global finance.
It leverages blockchain technology to eliminate inefficiencies in traditional financial systems, such as slow settlements, high fees, and lack of accessibility.
At its core, PayFi is built around stablecoins and tokenized assets, allowing businesses and individuals to access credit, trade finance, remittances, and microtransactions in a seamless, decentralized way.
With the rise of stablecoin adoption PayFi solutions have a strong foundation to disrupt the financial sector.
Solana's high throughput, low fees, and instant finality makes it one of the most scalable blockchains for payments.
Solana Pay allows merchants and consumers to transact directly, without third parties.
Solana’s open and permissionless infrastructure allows PayFi applications to seamlessly integrate with DeFi, liquidity pools, and lending protocols like:
- Huma Finance, a decentralized lending protocol offering credit lines for businesses using stablecoin-backed loans.
- Arf, which provides on-chain liquidity for cross-border payments, eliminating the need for pre-funded accounts.
- T+0 financing, leveraging Solana’s instant finality to eliminate settlement delays in global supply chains.
Blinks allow on-chain transactions directly from web and mobile interfaces, a critical feature for PayFi applications to integrate payments into social media, messaging apps, and e-commerce platforms.
Major institutions like Visa, PayPal, Circle, and Stripe are integrating with Solana due to its efficiency and liquidity.
For Solana developers, PayFi is an opportunity to build the next generation of merchant solutions, DeFi lending, embedded finance, or digital wallets.
💝 Solana DevEx
There are big plans for Solana’s DevEx that will make local development, tooling, and frontend integration more intuitive.
A central focus is the solana-test-validator, which is set to become even more powerful by simplifying setup, enabling quick time travel, automatically cloning missing accounts, and bundling sidecar services like indexers for advanced functionality.
Solana’s plan to supercharge the test validator focuses on simplifying setup, enabling quick time travel (warp to slot), automatically cloning missing accounts, and bundling sidecar services like indexers for advanced functionality.
Opinionated SDKs are also in the works. The aim is to offer sensible defaults to cut down on boilerplate, with escape hatches for developers who want deeper customization.
Equally significant is the push for broader language support, ensuring that any developer, regardless of whether they prefer Rust, TypeScript, or another language, has an official Solana library that handles key tasks such as transaction signing.
There’s also a list of bonus tools in development, including a compute-unit (CU) linter, a VS Code extension, automated UI generation from IDLs, and more robust default error messages.
If you’re interested in contributing to these efforts or have ideas of your own, you can join a new Telegram group of developers who want to advance Solana’s developer ecosystem together.
We’re building a better developer experience on Solana
⭐ Highlights of the Week
The Evolution of SVM Chains
Explore the rise of alternative SVM chains in 2025, their unique features, emerging projects, potential impact on blockchain scalability, developer tools, and user onboarding. (Dynamic)
69 trends in 2025-era DAO design
This article discusses key trends that are shaping the design of Decentralized DAOs in 2025 including reputation-based membership, legal compliance,, and community engagement, and many more. (@owocki)
All the Tools a First-Time Founder Will Ever Need
This curated list of tools covers everything from task management to social media planning and user feedback, helping founders handle product marketing without a big team or outside experts. (@SuperteamIN)
5 most rapidly growing tokenization trends to watch for in 2025
Discover five rapidly emerging tokenization trends set to transform crypto in 2025, from real-world asset securitization to innovative DeFi strategies, and learn why these developments could reshape the entire blockchain landscape. (CryptoSlate)
⚡ Quick Hits
Third-Party Payouts Now Available on Squads - Squads
How to Use AI to Build Solana Apps - Helius
Solana Collective presents the Winners of the 2024 Content XP Leader Board competition - @SolanaCollectiv
Virtuals expands to Solana ecosystem - Cointelegraph
Understanding Paladin: An Analysis for Solana Validators And Stakers - Lucas Bruder
Solana Launches Dubai Crypto Economic Zone: What You Need To Know - Forbes
⚙️ Tools & Resources
Jupiverse Kit is an open-source React components library powered by Jupiter’s APIs that simplifies building onchain Solana apps through unified wallet connections, customizable swap components, and streamlined developer tooling.
Bokken is an emulated Solana environment that allows developers to write integration tests in JS/TS that instantly confirm transactions for simultaneous testing of both program and front-end code.
ORAO Solana VRF with Callback provides on-chain randomness that enables secure callbacks for program interactions to power features like random NFT attributes, game levels, airdrops, and lotteries.
template-nuxt-anchor-basic is a Nuxt and Anchor template for full stack Solana projects using Nuxt/Vue instead of NextJS.
Feed Wallet is a biometric-secured, drain-proof crypto gateway that removes seed-phrase complexity, integrates AI transaction guards, and uses a relayer model to offer a secure and user-friendly entry point into Web3.
solders.litesvm is the Python wrapper for LiteSVM, a fast and lightweight library for testing Solana programs.
💸 Funding
- Ranger Labs, a Solana-based crypto derivatives aggregator, has raised $1.9 million at a $30 million valuation from backers including RockawayX, Asymmetric, and Big Brain Holdings to help it introduce AI-assisted trading products.
- Jupiter has acquired a majority stake in Moonshot, an app that allows users to buy memecoins using Apple Pay, and announced the acquisition of SonarWatch to enhance portfolio tracking on Solana.
👩🔧 Get Hired
- Ranger Finance is hiring an Engineer work on their trading system and upcoming projects.
- Squads is looking for a Backend Engineer to help build the future of payments.
- Pyth is hiring a Developer Relations Engineer (Solana) to help grow and support the Pyth Network developer community.
- LI.FI is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer (Solana) to build and maintain backend systems.
📅 Event Calendar
Solana APEX - Mexico City, Mexico, Feb 7
Solana APEX is a one-day event featuring talks, panels, and workshops for founders to showcase their projects, network with potential investors, and learn about the latest innovations in the Solana ecosystem.
Solana Bootcamp 2025, Korea, Feb 5 - Feb 28
Join the month-long Solana Bootcamp 2025 in Korea from Feb 5–28 for an immersive introduction to Solana development with weekly in-person sessions, Discord Q&A, and hands-on projects while learning directly from active ecosystem developers.
🎧 Listen to This
Colosseum
Hardhat Chad, the founder of Ore, a project that aims to bring Bitcoin-like functionality to the Solana blockchain, shares the unique challenges and triumphs of building a Bitcoin-inspired protocol on a proof-of-stake chain, the strategic decisions behind choosing Solana, the impact of Ore's launch on Solana's network congestion, and the importance of community building in a crowded crypto space.
Chad also reflects on his personal journey as a creator and entrepreneur, discussing the balance between ambition and practicality in startup life. He notes the necessity of staying connected with the community, and managing the responsibilities that come with being a founder.
The Colosseum Podcast | Episode #2 with Hardhat Chad of Ore
Bonus Episodes
Gaurav Sharma, CTO of IO.net, on DePIN, the Internet of GPUs, and AI Integration in Decentralized Systems - Cryptonews
Gaurav Sharma, CTO of IO.net, discusses the revolutionary Internet of GPUs, the role of DePIN in reshaping AI, Why IO.net Built on Solana, and how IO.net is democratizing access to computational power.
Interop Accelerates Solana - LayerZero
Solana Foundation's VP of Tech Matt Sorg joins LayerZero co-founders Bryan Pellegrino and Ryan Zarick to whiteboard the technical details of how interop on Solana works. From whitepapers to token standards to application ideas, this conversation covers it all.
The Pudgy Penguin Playbook With Luca Netz - Lightspeed
Luca Netz joins Lightspeed to discuss the origin and future of Pudgy Penguins, why Luca launched PENGU on Solana, building online communities, advice for founders, and much more.
Craig, founder of SuperPhoenixDAO, a project focused on acquiring and tokenizing in-game assets within the Star Atlas universe, explores these investments, community engagement, and the potential for cross-game integration within the Solana ecosystem.
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