Colosseum Codex: Colosseum Eternal, Accelerate, Gill, Kite

I’m writing this week’s issue from mtnDAO, where the energy is overwhelmingly positive. If you only looked at X you'd think Solana was struggling, but the reality here is the complete opposite. The teams and builders gathered here are full of excitement, and the momentum is unstoppable.

The builders just keep building!

Lots of good news coming out for AI Agents, client frameworks, competitions, and a lot more, so here's a roundup of the latest news for Solana developers...

⏲️ Colosseum Eternal

Eternal is an ongoing challenge for builders looking to take their ideas to the next level.

At any point in the year, you can kick off your own four-week development sprint, build something great, and submit it for a shot at joining Colosseum’s next accelerator cohort with $250,000 in pre-seed funding on the line.

But that’s not all. Every team that submits to Eternal is also eligible for the recurring Eternal Award, a $25,000 USDC grant given out twice a year to the product with the biggest potential to push the Solana ecosystem forward.

Participants can start a 4-week development sprint via the Eternal dashboard, submit weekly progress updates, and provide detailed materials such as a product description, GitHub repo, pitch presentation, and technical walkthrough by the end of the sprint.

Throughout the quarter, a judging panel, including past hackathon winners, top Solana founders, and the Colosseum team, will evaluate a shortlist of the most promising projects.

Eternal isn’t meant to replace Colosseum’s major Solana hackathons. It runs when those aren’t happening.

In fact, if you’re serious about securing funding and joining the accelerator, participating in a hackathon first is a great way to improve your chances.

Alongside launching Colosseum Eternal, the dates for the next two Solana hackathons in 2025 have been announced.

The Solana Breakout Hackathon runs from April 14 – May 16, 2025, with details on tracks, sponsors, and prizes coming soon. The second global hackathon will kick off on September 25.

Announcing Colosseum Eternal and Solana’s 2025 Hackathon Schedule

🚀 Introducing Accelerate

The Solana Foundation has announced Accelerate, a dual-event conference in New York City focusing on advancing crypto infrastructure and innovation in the U.S. 

The event comprises two distinct segments: Scale or Die (May 19–20) and Ship or Die (May 22–23), each targeting different audiences and objectives

Aimed at engineers, developers, and validators, Scale or Die is an invitation-only conference that emphasizes Solana’s technical backbone. 

The specialized tracks include:

• Research: Consensus, fee economics, and cryptography (e.g., inflation controllers, SVM proofs).
• Applications: User/business-facing apps leveraging TEEs, MPC, and advanced tooling.
• Security & Privacy: Private payments, self-sovereign data, and verification systems.
• Core Protocol: Updates on SIMDs, lattice hashes, and network optimizations.
• Developer Experience: Tooling, indexers, and libraries streamlining Solana development.
• Infrastructure: RPCv2, Firedancer, MEV, and scaling challenges

Ship or Die focuses on showcasing crypto founders, applications, and tokens that drive innovation in internet-native capital markets, particularly emphasizing US-led advancements in blockchain adoption. 

Open to all attendees without an application process, it targets developers, entrepreneurs, and crypto enthusiasts. 

Key themes include:

• Launching consumer-facing crypto products
• Integrating DeFi with traditional markets,
• Exploring regulatory compliance frameworks.

Both events aim to catalyze U.S.-led advancements in blockchain technology, with Scale or Die strengthening technical foundations and Ship or Die amplifying real-world adoption.

Solana Accelerate

🐟 Gill JS Client

Gill is a new JS/TS client library for the Solana blockchain, designed to simplify development across environments such as Node, web, and React Native. 

Gill is built as an abstraction layer on top of Web3.js v2, addressing common challenges such as long function names, highly modular packages, and the challenge of piecing together multiple components when interacting directly with the blockchain. 

It leverages the existing libraries that underpin the new Web3.js v2, which makes it fully compatible with the established types and functions.

Developers can still access detailed, raw functionalities when necessary, so the simplicity of the higher-level abstractions does not come at the cost of power or control.

By implementing lightly opinionated patterns over raw Web3.js v2 calls, Gill reduces boilerplate code without sacrificing flexibility, making it easier to perform common tasks like creating transactions and making RPC calls

Gill offers a modern, developer-centric approach to interacting with the Solana blockchain by building on top of robust Web3.js v2 libraries and adding intuitive, lightly opinionated abstractions that significantly improve the developer experience

Gill: A JS Client for Solana

🪁Introducing Kite

Kite is also a new TypeScript framework that simplifies Solana development by reducing boilerplate and making common tasks easier by making them more accessible through single-function calls.

Built on Solana web3.js v2, Kite offers streamlined functions for wallets, SOL transfers, tokens, transactions, and Solana Explorer links.

Kite also allows developers to sign, send, and confirm transactions in a single function call, eliminating the need to manually manage blockhashes or transaction lifetimes.

With minimal dependencies and support for both browser and Node.js, Kite is an update of the widely used @solana-developers/helpers library.

Introducing Kite: the Modern Solana TypeScript Framework

While both Kite and Gill aim to simplify Solana development, Kite appears to focus more on providing high-level, single-function solutions for common tasks, while Gill emphasizes a balance between abstraction and low-level access. Developers can pick which option works best for them.

⭐ Highlights of the Week

Solana's Technical Product Strategy for 2025
The Solana Foundation is embarking on a series of initiatives to address key challenges in the ecosystem. With plans to enhance SocialFi tooling, overhaul the read layer, improve mobile integration, and introduce innovative features like usage-billed APIs and advanced security measures, Solana is positioning itself as the platform of choice for building products with real users and meaningful impact.

Solana Global Creator Competition
The Solana Global Creator Competition is a 10-day online event from February 25 to March 5 to showcase creative talent in 2D Animation, 3D Animation, Content Creation, AI-Generated Videos, and Design. Organized by Little Unusual, the competition offers a $110,000 prize pool and provides mentorship, workshops, and resources. Registration is open now.

Solana Contentathon 2025
The Solana Contentathon, hosted by Solana Collective, runs through March on Superteam Earn. It includes 50 tracks covering essays, marketing material, tutorials, guides, dev docs, and visual content, with over $100k in prizes. The event aims to generate educational and marketing content for the ecosystem while giving contributors a way to showcase their work.

⚡ Quick Hits

Coinbase AI AgentKit is now on Solana - @MurrLincoln

Analyzing Solana On-chain Data: Tools & Dashboards - Helius

Why Use Decentralized Data Storage Like Mobile shdwDrive Instead of Centralized Alternatives? - Solana Floor

Meet Sigverify, the bouncer of the SVM Transaction Processing Unit (TPU) - @wdotsol

Solana Agent Kit is now live with Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) - @sendaifun

Taurus Brings Its Enterprise-Grade Digital Asset Custody and Tokenization Platform to Solana - Taurus

The Secret to Killer Web3 Content - @DeCharge__

⚙️ Tools & Resources

Surfpool is an in-memory testnet that provides a testing environment that dynamically fetches missing Mainnet data as needed, eliminating manual account setups and streamlining development, debugging, and education on Solana.

GeckoTerminal DEX and DeFi API lets developers access price, market data, and historical charts of any token by calling the API through RESTful JSON endpoints.

Pinocchio Solana Program Template is an example that uses Pinocchio for optimized performance, Shank for automated IDL generation, and Codama for client generation, all integrated with Rust-based integration tests using solana-program-test.

SANA (Solana AI NFT Agents) is a platform that combines AI technology with NFTs on the Solana blockchain, utilizing Metaplex Core that allows users to create unique AI agents as NFTs that can be trained, updated, and even rented out to others.

💸 Funding

FrodoBots Lab, a company specializing in crowdsourcing robotics data through gaming, has raised a $6 million seed round led by Protocol VC and included participation from various investors such as Big Brain Holdings, Solana Ventures, Virtuals Protocol, and angel investors including Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

• Accretion Labs is hiring a Solana Security Auditor to hunt bugs in Solana programs and help projects ship safer code.
• Helius is hiring a Forensic Researcher to monitor and write about suspicious onchain activity to prevent fraud proactively
• QuickNode is hiring a Senior Developer Advocate - Solana Ecosystem (USA) to streamline developer adoption of Solanaand form key relationships with builders.
• Helio is hiring a VP of Product & Engineering to lead the engineering and product teams

📅 Event Calendar

Solana Summit: DePIN & Hardware Edition, Bengaluru, Karnataka India, March 25
A 1 day in-person gathering with product presentations, fireside chats and workshops from the best founders, investors and developers from the global Solana DePIN Ecosystem.

🎧 Listen to This

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From proof of reserves to Backpack’s new perpetual futures system, they dive into how exchanges can build trust in a post-FTX world.

CEX vs. DEX in 2025: The future of trading feat. Armani Ferrante (Backpack)

Bonus Episodes

The Potential of Blockchain to Support Complex Financial Operations - TradeTalks

Michael Repetny, co-founder and CEO of Marinade Labs, discusses how Marinade came out of a Solana Hackathon, and the potential of blockchain to support complex financial operations to by leveraging the Solana network.

DeFi, DePIN, and Solana's Future with Tushar from Multicoin Capital - Building Web3

In this episode, Tushar, co-founder of Multicoin Capital, discusses blockchain investments, DeFi, meme coins, Solana, DePIN networks, and the importance of focusing on utility-driven applications rather than hype-driven assets in the blockchain space.

An Update On The Solana Thesis | Santiago Santos - Lightspeed

Santiago Santos joins Lightspeed to talk about why crypto is poised for faster adoption, his updated Solana thesis, key opportunities in 2025, and the future of Inversion.

Why Doodles Is Launching Its $DOOD Token on Solana - Coinage

Austin Hurwitz, Head of Strategy and BD at Doodles, a well-known Ethereum NFT project, joins Coinage to discuss the decision to launch its own $DOOD token on Solana and why now is the right time.

Follow @mikehale on X or Warpcast!

Thanks for reading ✌️

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