Colosseum Codex: $60M Fund I, Blinks, ZK Compression

Since this is a Solana developer newsletter, It's safe to assume you're a developer, so I have a favor to ask:

Can you all slow down... just a bit?

I'm trying to pack in all the good stuff each week, but there's just too much good stuff!

I even channeled my inner Lady Whistledown (for any Bridgerton fans reading this) to make this humble request.

Now I know you won't slow down anytime soon (I really don't want you to) and I'll do my best to keep up.

It's exciting to see so many big things happening in the Solana space that are OPOS and I can't wait to see what you build next!

There was some BIG news this week with Colosseum Fund I, Actions & Blinks, VanEck's filing for a SOL ETF, and ZK Compression, along with a slew of new testing tools, making it a week of wins for Solana developers, so here's all the latest news...

💰 Colosseum Fund I

Colosseum has secured $60 million for its first fund, named Colosseum Fund I with a focus on pre-seed investments in winners of Solana Hackathons.

The funds will be used to grow Colosseum's programs and accelerate the development of early-stage projects on Solana.

It's evident that there is a market demand for novel, specialized venture products in crypto, and we are excited to have a diverse group of investors, including ecosystem founders and hackathon alumni, alongside us to realize our vision for Colosseum

Colosseum has already deployed $2.75 million across 11 companies including Ore (a mineable token project), Urani (a Solana intent-based swap aggregator), and BlockMesh (a Solana-based DePIN project) and other winning projects from the Renaissance Hackathon.

The timeline for the full deployment of the fund is expected to occur over three to four years, depending on the size of future cohorts and the need for follow-on investments.

Announcing Colosseum Fund I

⛓️ Solana Actions & Blockchain Blinks

Blockchain Links & Actions, or just Blinks, are a new primitive introduced by the Solana Foundation and Dialect that transform onchain actions into links you can share anywhere on the internet.

Blinks enable blockchain transactions to be initiated from any website, social media platform, or QR code, removing the need for users to leave their current environment or requiring a dedicated dApp.

Blinks borrow concepts from Farcaster Frames, while Actions incorporate the models of Solana Pay transaction requests and Dialect smart messages. Together, they give Solana developers a powerful new tool to create new experiences and onboard more users to Solana.

Actions are APIs that enable onchain transactions. These transactions can be initiated via various means such as buttons on websites, widgets, or QR codes. Essentially, an Action is an API endpoint that returns a Solana transaction to be viewed and signed by the user, and executed on-chain.

Blinks extend the functionality of Actions by turning them into shareable, metadata-rich links. Blinks enable clients, such as wallet extensions and bots, to present additional UI options for interacting with Solana Actions directly.

Blinks can be linked to an Action in three ways:

1. Explicit Action URL: Sharing a specific Action URL, e.g., solana-action:https://actions.alice.com/donate, which supported clients like Dialect can render.
2. Website Link: Sharing a link to a website linked to an Action API through an actions.json file at the root of the website.
3. Embedded Action URL: Embedding the Action URL into a URL of a Blink provider like https://blink.to/?action=<action_url>.

These links enable wallet extensions to present additional UI options for interacting with Solana Actions directly.

Blinks can be used for NFT Transactions, Donations and Crowdfunding, DAO Voting, Raffles & Sweepstakes, and open the door to many other types of use cases.

To get you started check out these articles, dive into the Solana Actions repo (in Tools below), and play around with Znap (also in Tools), an early Rust-based framework shared by Heavy Duty Builders for developing Solana Action APIs.

Blockchain Links and Solana Actions (Solana)

Introducing Blinks & the Actions Stack (Dialect)

A Complete Preliminary Introduction to Solana Actions & Blinks (@adlonymous)

🗜️ ZK Compression

ZK Compression is a new primitive introduced by Light Protocol and Helius Labs, designed to enhance Solana's scalability and performance.

By leveraging zero-knowledge proofs and state roots, this technology will also address the state growth problem on Solana, while maintaining the security, performance, and composability Solana developers rely on.

ZK Compression works by storing only state roots (fingerprints of all compressed accounts) on-chain, while the detailed data is kept off-chain. It uses small validity proofs to ensure the accuracy of the compressed state without revealing the full data, and utilizes calldata to minimize on-chain storage requirements.

It drastically lowers the cost of on-chain operations, making tasks like airdrops significantly cheaper. Additionally, it is fully composable and two-way compatible with existing SPL tokens, allowing seamless integration with existing Solana applications.

This offers a 10,000x improvement in scaling capabilities, enabling developers to build and scale applications more efficiently.

However, the introduction of ZK Compression has sparked debate, particularly around its naming. Critics argue that the ZK term might mislead users into thinking it functions like a traditional rollup.

Some in the Ethereum community have labeled ZK Compression as a Layer 2 (L2) solution, but this is just wrong.

ZK Compression is not an L2 because transactions and state transitions occur directly on Solana, not on an auxiliary chain. The compressed state is stored on Solana as calldata, unlike traditional L2 solutions that store state off-chain and then update the main chain.

ZK Compression operates entirely on Solana, without the need for a separate execution layer or external sequencers. It preserves the benefits of L2 scaling without the associated complexities and limitations.

ZK Compression represents a significant advancement in Solana’s scalability, providing developers with powerful tools to reduce costs and enhance performance, all while maintaining the integrity and simplicity of Solana’s L1.

What is ZK Compression?

📈 VanEck Solana ETF

VanEck has filed for the first Solana ETF in the United States.

The ETF, named the VanEck Solana Trust, is designed to reflect the performance of SOL's price by directly backing the Trust’s shares with SOL.

SOL’s decentralized nature, high utility, and economic feasibility align with the characteristics of other established digital commodities, reinforcing our belief that SOL may be a valuable commodity with use cases for investors, builders, and entrepreneurs looking for alternatives to the duopoly app stores

VanEck argues that SOL functions similarly to digital commodities like Bitcoin and Ethereum, and that it should be classified as a commodity despite the SEC previously labeling it as a security.

The ETF will not engage in staking or earning additional SOL.

Instead, it will value its shares daily using the MarketVector Solana Benchmark Rate, which is based on prices from a carefully selected group of trading platforms.

This move follows VanEck's previous successes with Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs and aims to meet the increasing demand for secure and regulated digital asset investment products.

Bitcoin ETF issuer VanEck files for Solana ETF in the US

🏅 Solana Summit APAC Hackathon Winners

A part of the recent Solana Summit APAC was a hackathon and the winners have been announced:

1. @DeStreetdApp is a non-custodial dApp that enables copy trading with your friends and community.
2. @requestdapp is a platform for onchain events, tickets, & marketplace.
3. @AidEyeKit is a toolkit enabling app makers to create visual guides within apps.
4. @crediblefin is a liquidity layer for tokenization, unlocking credit for tokenized assets, private credit and trade finance.
5. @itheum is building the data layer for the AI era by tokenizing your data using NFTs.

Congrats to all the winners!

💎 Developer News

Speedrun Honeycomb Track
Honeycomb Protocol, which offers a suite of tools for Web3 game developers, has added a track to Solana Speedrun Game Jam 3 with a $600 USDC prize for the best games that use the Honeycomb Protocol.

DePIN x Meme Coin Summit NYC
This summit, hosted in New York on July 16, explores the intersections between meme coins and DePIN projects, which often struggle to attract attention and capital. The goal is to guide founders towards a product-centric roadmap through focused execution and collaboration.

⚙️ Tools & Resources

solana-actions are specification-compliant APIs that return transactions on the Solana blockchain to be previewed, signed, and sent across a number of various contexts, including QR codes, buttons + widgets, and websites across the internet.

awesome-blinks is a community curated list of awesome Solana Actions and Blinks.

znap is a Rust-based framework designed to simplify the creation of APIs that are compatible with the Solana Actions specification with Rust eDSL for writing Solana actions, macro collection, and a CLI for developing complete Solana actions

mollusk is a fast SVM program test harness designed to directly invoke the loaded executable program using the BPF Loader, bypassing any transaction sanitization and runtime checks, and instead directly processing the instruction with the BPF Loader.

litesvm is a fast and lightweight library for testing Solana programs. It works by creating an in-process SVM optimized for developers. This makes it 5x faster than alternatives like solana-program-test and solana-test-validator.

valid8 is a cli tool that simplifies managing Solana test ledgers for development and testing purposes. It allows you to clone accounts from the Solana blockchain and store them in a local ledger compatible with the solana-test-validator.

Anchor 0.30.1 introduces significant enhancements, including the ability to convert legacy IDLs (pre-Anchor v0.30) to new IDLs, and new CLI commands for building and converting IDLs.

yellowstone-vixen enables dApp developers to build program-aware change event streams for Solana, with a runtime, parser, and handler specifications to create custom indexes for specific programs, accounts, and transactions.

💸 Funding

Shaga, a decentralized gaming network that turns personal devices into compute nodes, raised $1 million in a Pre-Seed funding round led by Arca with participation from Skybridge, Aurory, Quotient, Marin, and other Angel investors.

⚡ Quick Hits

Backpack Wallet now supports Solana Devnet and Custom RPCs - @Backpack

Core AppData and LinkedAppData external plugins live on Devnet - Metaplex

Introduction to Solana development course - BlockDevs

Dive into the future of onchain data with the Irys SDK - @irys_xyz

Solana’s Potential to Dominate $8B RWA Market - Cointab

SpringX Solana: Forging Deep Bonds in a Lite yet Hardcore Journey - BuilderDAO

Seed constraints for optional PDA signers - @BasedOrion_

Introducing Shyft's Worldwide gRPC Network - @Shyft_to

Asynchronous Program Execution (APE) in Solana - @aeyakovenko

🎧 Listen to This

The Next Billion

Join host George Harrap and guest Frank Mathis, Co-Founder & CEO of GenesysGo, as they explore why Solana is at the forefront of the DePIN revolution and how DePIN projects on Solana are paving the way for accessible and reliable Web3 solutions.

In this episode, they delve into Solana's mobile-first architecture, the advancements in ShdwDrive's V2 deployment, and much more.

Frank offers valuable insights on the future of decentralization on mobile platforms, the significance of user-centric dApps, and the journey to Mainnet.

Why Solana is Leading the DePIN Game, ft. Frank Mathis, CEO and Co-Founder of GenesysGo

Bonus Episodes

The Infinite-LST Future w/ FP Lee (Sanctum) - Validated

In this episode, Austin chats with FP Lee from Sanctum about the liquid staking landscape on Solana. FP provides an overview of Sanctum's product suite and the various types of Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs) in the ecosystem, including Validator LSTs, Project-based LSTs, Individual LSTs, and No-Loss Lottery LSTs.

Exploring Futarchy: Governance by Markets with MetaDAO's Founder - Solfate

James and Proph3t explore futarchy, a governance model where decisions are based on market predictions of their impact on a reference asset's price. Proph3t discusses his journey of discovering futarchy and his motivation to implement it in MetaDAO. They cover MetaDAO's vision, proposal-raising process, and accountability mechanisms.

Follow @mikehale on X or Warpcast!

Thanks for reading ✌️

I hope you found something useful here! If you have any suggestions or feedback just let me know what you think.