Colosseum Codex: Electric Capital Report, Anza Research, 2025 Solana Events

gm! This will be the last newsletter of 2024 since I'm going to be enjoying some time off to celebrate the holidays 🎄

If 2024 was any sign of what the future holds for Solana, 2025 is going to be even better. I'm glad I'm on this ride with you and I can't wait to kick off the new year and to keep bringing you everything you need to know to build on Solana!

Now, let's take a look at what 🎅 has in his bag for all you good developers…

🔌 Electric Capital Developer Report

For the first time Solana has overtaken Ethereum as the #1 blockchain for new developers, according to Electric Capital's 2024 Developer Report. 

Out of 39,000 developers exploring crypto this year, over 7,600 chose to build on Solana. This marks an 83% year-over-year increase in new developer activity for the Solana ecosystem.

Solana has built momentum over the past year, even through price volatility and market cycles, and the work is starting to show. 

The report highlights a few overlooked wins for Solana:

• Solana handled 81% of all DEX transactions across all blockchains this year.
• It surpassed Ethereum in total DEX settlement volume, hitting $574 billion for the year.
• Adoption is scaling quickly where 1.7 million unique wallets transacted on Solana in 2024, 7x more than any other chain.

While Ethereum remains the largest ecosystem overall and continues to dominate in total active developers, Solana’s growth signals where the next generation of builders is headed. 

The report also points to a larger global trend of developer activity spreading out across continents, with Asia leading the way. 

India, in particular, onboarded the most new crypto developers this year, and Solana is now the top ecosystem for developers in the region.

For Solana developers, this is validation. The ecosystem is thriving and attracting more builders and real-world adoption than ever.

Solana overthrows Ethereum’s 8-year reign as top ecosystem for new devs

🧙 Anza Research

Anza has launched a cutting-edge research team, spearheaded by renowned distributed systems expert Professor Roger Wattenhofer and his two PhD students, Kobi Sliwinski and Quentin Kniep, from ETH Zurich. 

Their goal is to elevate Solana’s protocol with a deeply academic approach.

Key Areas of Focus:

• Designing a more performant and provably correct turbine-based consensus algorithm.
• Enhancing latency, resilience, and network economics.
• Addressing adversarial behavior in distributed systems to ensure state-of-the-art resilience.

This team’s academic rigor and experience in distributed systems, Rust programming, and major blockchain projects like Dfinity, Sui, Ethereum, and Algorand position them to bring unexplored improvements to Solana.

Anza Research: A New Chapter for Solana’s Protocol

📅 Solana Events in 2025

The Solana Foundation is prioritizing Community-led events that bring together developers, founders, validators, product managers, and strategists to build, iterate, and connect in ways that drive actual results.

The schedule for 2025 includes several key opportunities for developers.

In May, two flagship events in New York City will anchor the American crypto scene, starting with a highly selective, application-only conference for those deeply engaged in building on Solana.

This event will be followed by a larger conference welcoming the U.S. crypto industry as a whole and introducing a new audience to what's happening in the Solana ecosystem.

Around the world, APEX events will take place in major cities like Mexico City, Cape Town, Budapest, Singapore, and Mumbai, each designed to highlight high-quality applications tailored to local communities.

Startup Villages, inspired by the success of gatherings like mtnDAO, will provide extended periods for developers and entrepreneurs to work together, refine products, participate in workshops, and form lasting connections.

Community-led hacker houses and independent conferences will continue to offer spaces for builders to meet, experiment, and share knowledge.

Finally, Breakpoint 2025 in Abu Dhabi remains the ultimate moment for the ecosystem, bringing the global Solana community together to celebrate achievements and set the course for the future.

Gather to Build: Solana Foundation Events in 2025

🎩 MagicBlock Ephemeral Validator

MagicBlock has open-sourced the MagicBlock Ephemeral Validator, a lightweight, non-voting SVM runtime designed to replace traditional Web2 servers.

Ephemeral Validators work by cloning accounts just-in-time within ultra-fast SVM instances, executing tasks, and updating the mainnet state upon completion.

The validator enables real-time, elastic computing directly on Solana, eliminating the need for centralized servers by implementing application logic entirely on-chain.

The core innovation lies in Ephemeral Rollups, which extend Solana by offering serverless, elastic compute.

This allows for fully on-chain real-time applications, such as gaming, decentralized social networks, and high-frequency finance, while maintaining all smart contract logic and state on Solana.

This open-source release marks the beginning of a multi-month effort to fully develop and open-source MagicBlock.

Open Sourcing the MagicBlock Ephemeral Validator

⚡ Quick Hits

Submissions for the Solana AI Hackathon are now LIVE until 11:59 PM EST, Dec 23rd - @sendaifun

Why Web3 Communities Need More Than Just Financial Incentives - Harkness Institute from Turbin3

Solana DePIN Quickstart Guide for Founders - Solana

Solana Consensus - From Forks to Finality - Neodyme

Using ZKPs on Solana with the SP1 Solana Verifier - Succinct

SVM Merklization on SOON - Soon SVM

The Rebirth of Privacy on Solana - Arcium

Introducing Fuse Off-Ramp - Fuse

Curated shortlist of Solana ZK Compression resources - @swen_sjn

Collecting the Price of Everything: Introducing Pyth Energy Feeds - Pyth

⚙️ Tools & Resources

anchor-escrow-2025 is an Anchor example of a Solana Escrow program.

super-smart-contracts provides a simple example of a Super Smart Contract using OpenAI API to respond to queries that can interact with users, learn from them, and adapt to their needs. 

solana-test-validator is a Docker image for the Solana Test Validator built each night for linux/amd64 as well as linux/arm64 platform with nightly builds from the latest version of Agave client.

idl-program is an IDL solution for native Solana programs that leverages a metadata program instead of requiring an empty Anchor program. This approach supports compressed JSON or URL-based storage.

💸 Funding

• Netrunner, a Solana-focused crypto tax tool, has announced a pre-seed raise led by Solflare Wallet, alongside notable angels and syndicates.
• VanEck has invested $2.5 million into DAWN, a Solana-based DePIN project aiming to build on the shift toward a fully wireless internet era driven by 5G and Starlink rollouts.

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

• Hylo is hiring a Senior Protocol Engineer to build Hylo's protocol in Rust/Anchor.
• SevenLabs is hiring a Full Stack Developer to build and maintain Solana projects.
• Crossmint is hiring a Full-stack Engineer (US) help develop the platform.
• Pyth Network is hiring a Developer Relations Engineer (Solana) to help Solana developers integrate with Pyth Network’s products.

🎧 Listen to This

Unchained

The 2024 Developer Report from Electric Capital reveals many shifting dynamics.

For starters, for the first time in eight years, Ethereum was not the top chain for new developers—Solana was.

Meanwhile, Asia has emerged as the leading hub for crypto development, taking the top spot from North America, which dropped to third.

In this episode, General Partner Maria Shen explores how Ethereum’s Layer 2 solutions are bolstering its position despite fierce competition, why the Bitcoin developer ecosystem remains steadfast, and how emerging projects like EigenLayer are capturing builders’ attention.

She also dives into the top crypto technologies that are fascinating devs, and how their usage and development activity differ across the globe.

How Solana Beat Out Ethereum to Nab New Crypto Developers in 2024

Bonus Episodes

Why More Teams Are Building On Solana - Lightspeed

Lightspeed discusses the numerous teams coming over to build on Solana, the Pudgy Penguin token launch, raising Solana's block limits the impact of sandwich attacks, and more.

Web3 Monetization: How DRiP Empowers Creators with NFTs and Community Growth - Building Web3

In this episode of the Building Web3 Podcast, host Jax Dwyer sits down with Jom, Head of Creators at DRiP, to uncover the unique opportunities DRiP offers for creators navigating the challenges of Web2 and Web3 content distribution.

Ambient Network: Decentralized Environmental Sensors on Solana - Developer DAO

Gilad Penn (CTO) and Luca Franchi (CEO) from Ambient Network discuss their work building the world’s largest decentralized network of environmental sensors and ambient data on Solana, the vision and technology behind Ambient Network, and opportunities for developers to get involved through APIs.

How Memecoins Will Create the Most Millionaires in History (with Luca Netz & Meow) - When Shift Happens

Two of the sharpest minds in Web3 Luca (Pudgy Penguins) and Meow (Jupiter) dive deep into the future of crypto, community, memecoin driven wealth creation, and the highly hyped PENGU launch.

Follow @mikehale on X or Warpcast!

Thanks for reading ✌️

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