Colosseum Codex: Crossroads Sprint Winners, SVM Interface, Jupiter Acquires Ultimate Wallet

🏃‍♀️ Solana Crossroads Content Sprint Winners

Solana Crossroads is a community conference hosted in Istanbul, Turkey on May 10-11. Participants of the "Content Sprint", which called for creative and viral posts focused on the event, were judged on their content’s ability to cause FOMO, its originality, creativity, design & overall quality, and the presentation.

Here are the winners (and a link to their content):

• 1st place ($2500 USDC): @lucylovelyn
• 2nd place ($1500 USDC): @fibonacci_sol
• 3rd place ($1000 USDC): @gbeni_wealth
• Best Design($1000 USDC): @Prinspire1
• Most Creative ($1000 USDC): @MilanCrypto_258

There was just a bit of controversy when it was discovered, after the announcement of the winners, that the original 2nd place submission was plagiarized from another creator leading them to be disqualified. The 3rd place winner was then moved up to 2nd place, and a new 3rd place winner was chosen.

Solana Crossroads Content Sprint Winners

👩‍🔧 Congestion Fixes

While we can't quite say mission accomplished yet, thanks to the hard work of a lot of people, confirmation times are back under 2 seconds, and the congestion issues we've been dealing with have improved.

Work also continues on v1.18 which will address many of the remaining performance issues and is tentatively scheduled for a May 27th release.

🔗 Introducing the SVM Interface

Anza is proposing to define the official SVM specification as an interface.

This strategy has two main benefits:

1. Decouple the SVM specification from the specific Agave implementation, allowing for a clear, minimal set of necessary features
2. Position SVM-specific integration testing on the interface, enabling reusable compliance tests for custom SVM implementations.

By separating the interface (specification) from the implementation, there's a clear distinction between the generic SVM specification and Agave’s specific SVM implementation, which supports the development of flexible and compatible SVM tooling, such as rollups.

The changes include introducing the SVM interface as a standalone Rust crate that is intentionally simple and comprised of traits. Other SVM projects can simply implement this interface and know they're spec-compliant.

This crate will then be implemented in Agave's existing SVM crate. The interface is designed to be specification-compliant and offers a foundation for Rust projects to build SVMs without starting from scratch.

By creating a clear distinction between the interface (specification) and implementation (Agave’s SVM), and providing composable tooling, the project aims to standardize how Solana SVMs are built and enhance the ecosystem's flexibility and client diversity.

Introduce the SVM Interface

📱 Jupiter acquires Ultimate Wallet

Jupiter, the leading Solana DEX, has acquired Ultimate Wallet, a developer of DeFi mobile applications, and their mobile team. This is part of Jupiter's Meta Accelerator Strategy and push into mobile offerings.

The Ultimate app will be sunsetted on May 22nd, 2024. After that you will only be able to retrieve your Ultimate Wallet recovery phrase to import into a new wallet.

Jupiter Acquires Ultimate!

💎 Developer News

Solana Project Template Benchmarking
Benchmarking is vital for program optimization, especially with technologies like Solana where efficiency and speed are so important. By having automated benchmarking and graphing integrated into the Solana Project Template, developers can easily measure the performance of their programs in terms of compute and size, identify bottlenecks, and verify improvements over time.

Moving from Ethereum Development to Solana
We already know Solana is the best blockchain to build on, right? As we help onboard developers from pother platforms, we must help them understand the differences between the two platforms. This guide covers key aspects such as Solidity smart contracts vs. Rust programs, Solana's account model, Fees & transaction details, Dev environments, SDKs, & tools.

Snapshot Consensus 2024
Consensus is exploring Solana’s latest blockchain technology, infrastructure and cross-chain capabilities, with a full day free event on May 30 in Austin, TX. Sessions will be presented by ​bloXroute Labs, ​Eclipse, Jito Labs, ​Pyth Network, The Render Network, and ​Wrapped.

Crypto x AI
The combination of cryptocurrency and AI represents a huge technological leap, with the integration of these two fields forming a major narrative in the current cycle. This article provides an overview of the evolving Crypto x AI sector, and features Solana-based projects io.net and Render as two examples of projects bringing AI and crypto together.

💸 Funding

Only1, a a decentralized content platform that resists censorship and charges creators lower fees, has successfully raised $1.3 million in a strategic investment round led by the Newman Group, boosting the total capital raised to $4.8 million.

⚙️ Tools & Resources

core-staking-example is a (non-production) staking example using Metaplex Core.

solana-dev-onboarding-rs is an on-going list of development resources, aimed at onboarding engineers to Solana development.

Local IDL Storage is a new developer tool on SolanaFM that lets you debug instructions in any network by locally uploading IDL as a file or a string.

⚡ Quick Hits

Why Hybrid NFTs (SPL-404) Are Kind of A Big Deal - Tensor

Coinbase Wallet adds Solana DEX integration - @CoinbaseWallet

SolanaFM adds supports for Metaplex Core - @solanafm

DePin projects have gained momentum on Solana blockchain - Blockworks

Bonkathon Judge Panels for All 5 Tracks Announced - @RadiantsDAO

Solana archive nodes are now available on Chainstack - Chainstack

Frankendancer (Firedancer networking with Agave runtime) expected on mainnet this year - @dj_d_sol

Solana is now live on Safeheron - Safeheron

🎧 Listen to This

Scraping Bits

Joe Caulfield, an esteemed expert in the Solana ecosystem, explores the technical underpinnings that make Solana a high-performance blockchain.

In this deep dive, we dissect the core components of Solana’s architecture, including its advanced runtime environment, the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), and the Transaction Processing Unit (TPU).

Joe gives us an insider’s look into how Solana achieves its remarkable speeds and what the introduction of the SVM means for developers and the network's future capabilities.

We also delve into the intricacies of the Transaction Processing Unit, explaining how it processes thousands of transactions per second and the innovations that help minimize bottlenecks and optimize throughput.

This episode is perfect for developers, tech enthusiasts, and anyone interested in understanding the cutting-edge technology that powers one of the fastest blockchains in the industry.

Joe Caulfield: Solana's Program Runtime V1 & V2, SVM, TPU, Anza's Agave Client

Bonus Episodes

The Solana End Game | Anatoly Yakovenko & Lucas Bruder - Lightspeed

This week Anatoly Yakovenko & Lucas Bruder join lightspeed for a discussion on the current state of Solana. Deep diving into the transaction problem as on chain volumes have exploded in recent months, Toly & Lucas explore the solutions that could help to increase chain performance & what's next for Solana.

Blockchain Innovations & Token Extensions with Solana's Head of Strategy - Proof of Talk

Austin Federa, Head of Strategy at the Solana Foundation, and a seasoned expert in blockchain technology, covers several blockchain innovations including Token Extensions.

Andrej Radonjic: Grass's Two Million Data Scraping Users Enabling Crypto x AI on Solana

GRASS is a viral crypto AI project built on Solana that aims to scrape and validate internet data for AI training. GRASS is a network of 2 million devices that scrape and clean web data in real-time. The data collected by GRASS can be used for training specialized AI models, fine-tuning models, and real-time inference.

Follow @mikehale on X or Warpcast!

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