Colosseum Codex: Themes for 2025, Accounts Lattice Hash, Winternitz Vault

🚀 Investments and Themes for 2025

Colosseum launched in early 2024 to help developers compete and experiment across a wide spectrum of Solana-based products through online hackathons. 

Since then, the team has reviewed thousands of submissions, accepted multiple cohorts into its accelerator, and made pre-seed investments in more than 20 promising startups. 

Drawing on that hands-on experience, Colosseum has identified 12 high-growth verticals that are set to shape the Solana and broader crypto landscape in 2025, each one addressing real-world challenges.

A key theme running through all twelve verticals is a renewed focus on real-world utility and sophisticated market design. 

Whether it’s a sports fan token that unlocks new ways to engage with your favorite team, or a next-gen aggregator that forward-sells staked yield, these protocols aim to bring deep liquidity, better user experiences, and new revenue streams on-chain. 

And while Colosseum doesn’t see AI as its own siloed vertical, the team expects AI to become an indispensable layer across each of these categories by streamlining data insights, risk management, and user onboarding in ways we haven’t even imagined yet.

For developers and builders looking to stay ahead, these areas offer opportunities to create new markets and leverage existing ones. Expect these verticals to play an outsized role as we move into 2025 and beyond.

Colosseum’s 2024 Investments and Themes for 2025

➰ Accounts Lattice Hash

Solana developers have introduced a proposal to tackle the state growth problem by implementing a lattice-based system known as the Accounts Lattice Hash. 

According to the proposal (SIMD-215), "the main goal is to scale Solana to billions of accounts and compute a ‘hash of all accounts’ in practical time and space.” 

One of the core changes involves homomorphic hashing, a method that verifies only the accounts that have changed, rather than reprocessing every account on the network. 

At the end of each epoch, Solana’s Epoch Accounts Hash mechanism must rehash all accounts. As the size of Solana state grows, this process becomes increasingly resource-intensive.

In contrast, the lattice-based method accumulates individual account hashes directly and updates only the accounts that have changed. 

By eliminating the need for full recalculations, the approach will reduce computational overhead. This upgrade also aims to preserve the network’s existing security level, offering a path to global scale without sacrificing safety.

If the community approves this improvement, Solana’s infrastructure could set a new benchmark for blockchain scalability.

New Solana proposal aims to fix scalability issues with ‘lattice’ system

🛡️ Quantum Resistant Winternitz Vault

Google’s quantum computing project Willow made headlines recently and raised concerns in the crypto world. 

Blockchains use cryptographic systems built on mathematical problems that quantum computers could solve much faster, ultimately making it possible to reverse-engineer private keys from public keys.

While we're still a long way off from that ever happening, Solana developer Dean Little has introduced the Solana Winternitz Vault, an optional quantum-resistant vault that leverages hash-based signature technology.

The Solana Winternitz Vault is essentially a specialized account system that uses hash-based signatures instead of traditional elliptic curve cryptography. 

The idea is simple: Each time a user makes a transaction, a new private key is generated and revealed, minimizing the chance of a quantum computer exploiting previously exposed public keys. 

Under the hood, it leverages Winternitz One-Time Signatures (W-OTS) along with a Merkle root structure for added security and tamper-proof verification.

While the vault is an entirely optional feature, its hash-based signature approach shows an awareness of quantum threats and a commitment to protecting user funds as quantum computing continues to advance.

Solana can be quantum-resistant today, here’s how

🗳️ Solana Founder Survey

Lightspeed polled 42 anonymous Solana founders on a variety of topics in the Solana space. 

Many founders remain bullish on Solana’s trajectory and culture, even saying if Solana didn’t exist, they wouldn’t be in crypto at all. 

However, among those open to other ecosystems, Base and Sui ranked as the most appealing. 

Founders also shared concerns about MEV on Solana, noting it drives up costs and makes transaction ordering more complex.

Memecoins got a “mostly good” label from respondents where AI agents were called “overrated” and seen by some as mostly hype. 

On the infrastructure side, founders said the demand for blockspace is growing fast, and they want bigger blocks to keep fees manageable.

Overall, founder sentiment highlights excitement about the future of Solana, a desire to fend off rising MEV concerns, and a readiness to innovate with new use cases.

Solana founders anonymously weigh in on other teams, VCs, and the alleged cabal

⚡ Quick Hits

10 AI Agent ideas you can build - @ideasdotfun

Dev Tips: The Payer-Authority Pattern - @blockiosaurus

Solana Token Accounts Made Simple: Why Should You Close Them? - RayBot

Solana AI Hackathon and Token Launches: A Note to Builders and Investors - @yashhsm

How might a quantum 0-day on Solana play out? - @deanmlittle

DePIN Will Grow 100-1,000x Over the Next Decade - Solana Floor

⚙️ Tools & Resources

solana-winternitz-vault is a quantum-resistant lamports vault that leverages Winternitz One-Time Signatures (WOTS) for security.

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

• GLAM is hiring a Founding Product Engineer to build an onchain asset management platform on Solana
• Jito Labs is hiring a Protocol Engineer to to build the future of decentralized finance on Solana
• SNS is hiring a Full-Stack Developer to help build out their platform
• Flipside is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to build solutions that leverage the power of blockchain technology
• Zeta Markets is hiring a Rust Engineer - Core Exchange Backend to build and optimize core backend systems

🎧 Listen to This

Cryptonews

In this episode, Jason Li, Co-founder of Solayer Labs, explains how their restaking protocol on Solana aims to boost blockchain performance, scaling solutions, including tokenizing real-world assets and using specialized hardware to reach 1M transactions per second.

Jason Li, Co-founder of Solayer Labs, on Restaking, Scaling Solana, Tokenizing RWAs, and more

Bonus Episodes

From Mixing Music to Teaching Computers to Trade - DCo Podcast

Shaw, the founder of AI16Z DAO and creator of the Eliza framework, explores how a seemingly simple idea of helping developers access better trading strategies evolved into a platform that's reshaping how we think about AI in crypto.

Follow @mikehale on X or Warpcast!

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