Colosseum Codex: Messari Solana Portal, Verifiable Builds, Measuring Decentralization

🚀 Colosseum Accelerator Cohort 2

Colosseum's second accelerator cohort features 13 standout startups from the Solana Radar Hackathon. 

Out of 1,359 submissions and 39 prize winners, these teams stood out for their technical talent, vision, and drive. Each is now set up to build projects that will push the Solana ecosystem forward.

The teams selected (in no particular order) are: 

• GreenKWh: An off-grid DePIN network promoting decentralized renewable energy while balancing grid load during peak usage.
• AlphaFC: Gives football fans a real stake in their favorite clubs through tokens for key decisions like scouting, trades, and team management.
• Darklake: Bringing Wall Street efficiency to DeFi with lightning-fast, private, and MEV-resistant trades leveraging privacy-preserving execution powered by ZKPs.
• Supersize: An io-style game enabling players to experience real-time, fully on-chain, high-stakes multiplayer gaming.
• Tokamai: Catches development errors before your users do through real-time monitoring and alerting for Solana programs.
• Txtx: Takes away the stress and complexity of onchain infrastructure management with secure, robust, and reproducible blocks of code called Runbooks.
• The Arena: A fast-paced PVP trading game leveraging decentralized exchanges and novel socialfi mechanics.
• Reflect Protocol: A DeFi protocol powering a novel hedge-backed, delta-neutral stablecoin on Solana.
• Hylo: Building a new yield-bearing DeFi protocol that enables an autonomous, dual-token stablecoin system backed by Solana LSTs.
• Trenches.top: A platform to tokenize the reputation of alpha callers on Solana, unlocking new forms of competition and social speculation, while rewarding the most deserving callers.
• AdX: A next-generation decentralized ad exchange and network enabling real-time (encrypted blind auction) bidding to serve targeted digital ads.
• Watt Protocol: A volatility farming protocol using natural market arbitrage to generate real yield for users and foster liquidity for assets in the ecosystem.
• Pregame: A P2P sports wagering app that lets users bet against anyone online in a trustless manner.

During the 8-week program, these founders will move from devnet to mainnet, iterating, testing, and refining their products along the way. 

The program concludes with a private demo day for investors, followed by a public release of the event recording for the wider crypto community.

Introducing Colosseum Accelerator Cohort 2

📊 Messari Solana Portal

Messari's Solana Portal brings together all the data and insights you need to understand Solana’s ecosystem. 

It’s more than a data dashboard. It’s a resource that combines real-time metrics with curated insights to help users make informed decisions about Solana’s network.  

The Solana Portal simplifies this process by bringing everything into one platform, designed to work for anyone involved in the ecosystem.  

Here’s what you’ll find:  

Qualitative Insights  

1. Project Recaps: Quick summaries of updates, research, and reports covering the past week, month, or quarter. 
2. Key Updates: Real-time tracking and summaries of important events—on-chain and off-chain.
3. News & Media: An aggregated feed of news, videos, and podcasts from 500+ sources, with brief AI-generated summaries. 
4. Quarterly Reports: Regular reports showcasing growth metrics, developments, and on-chain activity. 
5. Announcements: Official updates in one convenient place.  

6. Resource Hub: A collection of documentation and useful links for the community.  

Quantitative Data  

1. Network Metrics: Data on active addresses, transaction volumes, fees, DeFi metrics (like TVL and DEX volume), and smart contracts.
2. Market Data: Price feeds, trading volume, and other market trends.
3. Statements: Structured reports that package key metrics into a traditional quarterly statement format.
4. Token Unlocks: Details on vesting schedules, allocations, and upcoming unlock events. 
5. Fundraising Insights: Information about fundraising activities, including rounds and key investors.  

By combining qualitative and quantitative insights, it makes it easier to find the information you need to make better decisions, whether you’re building, investing, or just learning. 

Messari Solana Portal

🏗️ Verifiable Builds

Verifiable Builds on Solana ensures that the programs running on-chain are identical to their publicly available source code. 

By using deterministic builds and cryptographic verification, developers can prove the authenticity of their deployed programs, fostering trust within the ecosystem.

For developers, Verifiable Builds streamline the process of maintaining open-source transparency. 

Tools like solana-verify-build make it easy to build, deploy, and verify programs, seamlessly integrating into CI/CD pipelines. 

This eliminates the risk of tampering during deployment and demonstrates a commitment to security and openness. The ability to publicly verify program integrity not only strengthens the credibility of development teams but also reinforces user confidence.

From a user perspective, Verifiable Builds enhance trust in the applications they interact with. 

Knowing that a program's code is publicly auditable and matches its on-chain version provides reassurance about its functionality and security. This transparency aligns with the decentralized ethos of Web3, promoting greater adoption and collaboration across the Solana ecosystem.

Verifiable Builds bridge the gap between developers and users, creating a more open, secure, and trustworthy environment for decentralized innovation.

How to Verify a Program

🌟 Measuring Solana’s Decentralization

The Solana Decentralization Report from Helius is a comprehensive analysis that examines various facets of decentralization, aiming to provide factual, data-driven insights for developers, stakeholders, and the broader community.

The main goal of the report is to assess Solana's decentralization across multiple dimensions, addressing criticisms and misconceptions about the network's structure and resilience. 

It highlights areas where Solana excels in decentralization and identifies opportunities for further improvement.

The Solana network is currently operating with a total of 4,514 nodes across 37 countries and territories. This includes 1,414 validators and 3,100 RPC nodes. One of the standout points is that no single validator controls more than 3.2% of the total stake. 

The largest concentration is in the United States, with 508 validators, which is about 37% of the total. Other significant locations include the Netherlands, the UK, and Germany. 

Client diversity is crucial for the health of any blockchain network. Solana initially launched with a single validator client, but efforts have been made to increase diversity in this area. 

The main client, Agave, is a fork of the original Solana Labs client and is written in Rust. It has a robust development community with 357 individual contributors.

We also have Firedancer, a new client developed by Jump Crypto, which is a complete rewrite of the validator client in the C programming language. 

Although it's relatively new, it already has 57 contributors. Firedancer aims to improve performance and add redundancy to the network.

Then there's Jito, a client that currently holds an 88% share of the network's stake. Jito is a fork of Agave and includes an out-of-protocol block space auction mechanism. 

However, this dominance is expected to change as Firedancer and other clients like Frankendancer and Sig are gradually introduced and integrated into the ecosystem. 

The developer community around Solana is vibrant and globally distributed. The most recent Radar hackathon attracted 13,672 participants from 156 countries. 

Despite the positive strides, the report highlights several areas where Solana could improve its decentralization:

• Validator Concentration: There's a notable concentration of validators and stake in the U.S. and EU. 
• Hosting Provider Diversity: With two hosting providers accounting for nearly half of the stake, there's a risk associated with potential outages or policy changes from these providers. 
• Client Dominance: The Jito client currently dominates the network's stake. While this client has its advantages, such dominance means that any issues with Jito could have widespread impacts. The introduction of Firedancer and other clients should help balance this out.
• Cost Barriers: The costs associated with running a validator, particularly voting costs and data egress fees, are significant. This is especially challenging for operators outside the EU and U.S., where costs can be higher. 
• Governance Participation: While governance processes are in place, increasing active participation in governance voting could enhance decentralization. 

Overall, the report paints a positive picture of Solana's current state of decentralization. 

Solana compares favorably to other blockchains in several key metrics, including stake distribution, geographical spread, and developer community engagement. 

Measuring Solana’s Decentralization: Facts and Figures

🔒 Anza Invalidator Team

The Invalidator Team at Anza is taking Solana's resilience to the next level with a redhat approach to adversarial testing. 

After the February 2024 outage underscored the need for deeper stress-testing, this small but scrappy team has been hard at work designing attacks that push Solana’s limits beyond what it might face in the wild. 

Their goal? To break the network so developers can fix it before anyone else tries.

The team’s work covers everything from denial-of-service (DoS) attacks to economic stress testing and even simulations of packet loss or delay. 

They’re not just targeting one validator client like Agave (which Anza develops) but testing vulnerabilities across the board, including Firedancer, so the entire ecosystem benefits from these brutal but essential exercises.

A particularly interesting area is their work on creating synthetic loads that mirror real-world transactions, helping ensure the network can handle complex activity as it evolves. 

They’ve also made strides in slashing development, using adversarial nodes to prove that misbehavior can be detected and punished effectively.

Ultimately, the Invalidator Team’s mission is about keeping Solana ahead of the curve, building a network that’s robust enough to thrive under pressure, no matter what’s thrown at it.

Strengthening Solana: The Invalidator Team

🌉 Bridge to Turbin3

Bridge to Turbin3 is a free, two-week online program from Rise In designed to prepare you for Turbin3, one of the top Solana developer bootcamps.

Through this prep course, you'll strengthen your skills in Rust, Typescript, and the Solana ecosystem while earning a special "Rise In" certificate.

The application process is straightforward: apply online, complete onboarding steps, pass pre-selection, and join the kick-off event to start your Web3 journey.

Bridge to Turbin3

⚡ Quick Hits

Solana Changelog Nov 20 - Agave validator v2.0, loaded account costs (Video) - Solana

CU Optimization With setLoadedAccountsDataSizeLimit - Anza

Ship apps that people want to use with Orange DAO's Fellowship W25 - Orange DAO

Backpack Wallet, Blockaid prevent $26.6M loss from DeFi attacks on Solana - Cointelegraph

Introducing Squads Payments: Streamline Your Onchain Payments - Squads

Solana Crossroads speaker applications are now open - @SolanaCrossroad

ZK Compression support to the Aerosol Burner - @aerosol_ai

Sky Protocol’s USDS stablecoin is now live on Solana - @solana

Meet the top Ukrainian projects from the Radar Hackathon - @KumekaTeam

IslandDAO: Koh Samui Mockumentary - @islandDAO_DL

⚙️ Tools & Resources

release-program an example GitHub action that lets you build and deploy with solana-verify, and deploys with Squads when a program is tagged.

verify.sh is a script to verify all of your Anchor programs with OtterSec at once.

evm-sol-wa is a secure bridge enabling EVM wallet holders to control Solana accounts through message signing, providing seamless cross-chain wallet management capabilities.

voting_optimized is an optimized version of an anchor-vote program that reduced Compute Unit (CU) consumption from 3461 to just 60, a more than 98% improvement.

💸 Funding

Phantom, the leading non-custodial wallet on Solana, has acquired web3 security platform Blowfish to integrate its advanced fraud detection tools directly into Phantom.

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

• Deriverse is hiring a Protocol Engineer to develop DeFi programs in core/native Rust.
• Orca is hiring a Software Engineer (Backend) and Software Engineer (Frontend) to build out their DeFi products.
• Light Protocol is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to improve and scale open-source developer tooling.
• Pye Finance is hiring a Senior Rust Engineer to help develop the Pye protocol.

📅 Event Calendar

• From Zero to Blockchain Developer: 3 Day Solana Bootcamp, Berlin & Online, Dec 2-4

🎧 Listen to This

The Index

In this episode of The Index, Rennick Palley, Founding Partner at Stratos, examines the current state of blockchain technology, exploring the psychological barriers and market volatility that shape its future.

Rennick provides a firsthand look at the complexities of cross-chain transactions, highlighting how platforms like Solana deliver a smoother, faster alternative to traditional banking, and tools like Portal, which streamline blockchain’s intricate processes, making the technology more secure and accessible for users.

Through a comparison of Ethereum and Solana, this episode reveals why Solana’s user-centered, open-source ecosystem is gaining traction—and why prioritizing user-friendly products is crucial for blockchain’s ongoing growth.

A must-listen for anyone curious about the latest shifts in crypto and blockchain’s impact on global financial access.

Ethereum vs. Solana: Crypto’s Next Chapter with Rennick Palley, Partner at Stratos

Bonus Episodes

Blockcast – The Future of Content Delivery - Brave New Coin

Omar Ramadan, CEO and co-founder of BlockCast, discusses the challenges of content delivery in the current internet landscape, how BlockCast aims to decentralize content delivery using blockchain technology, the marketplace dynamics for CDNs, and Omar's vision for the future of internet broadcasting.

Solana's Total Economic Value Keeps Reaching New Highs | Dan Smith - Lightspeed

Dan Smith from Blockworks Research discusses what's happening on Solana as total economic value keeps reaching new highs, Solana's inflation, staking SOL, Solana's transition to a top three asset within crypto & comparing the 2021 cycle to today.

Follow @mikehale on X or Warpcast!

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