codex

Colosseum Codex: Metaplex Core, Circle CCTP, and cHack Winners

Colosseum MetaDAO Investment, Metaplex Core, Circle CCTP, cHack Winners, Solana Crossroads, and IslandDAO

Mike Hale

Mar 28, 2024 — 7 min read

🗳️ Colosseum’s Proposal to Invest in MetaDAO Passes

Colosseum is investing in MetaDAO, a project that has quickly become a focal point for top Solana developers, including winners from previous hackathons.

MetaDAO's aims to evolve DAO governance through "Futarchy", a more effective way to align incentives emphasizing decision markets over traditional voting.

MetaDAO plans to offer an improved governance mechanism to other DAOs with its "Futarchy as a Service" (FaaS) product.

Despite being in the early stages, the project is already showing potential for growth and Colosseum is backing its commitment with a $250,000 investment into MetaDAO.

This partnership not only signifies a strong belief in MetaDAO's mission, but also aligns with Colosseum's mission to support Solana projects that bring long-term benefits to developers and projects.

Colosseum becomes MetaDAO's first venture investor

🏎️ Metaplex Core Live on Devnet

Metaplex has become a pillar of the Solana ecosystem, serving as a foundational platform for the creation, sale, and management of NFTs by providing a framework that leverages Solana's high-speed and low-cost transactions.

Despite the success of Metaplex, the underlying Token Metadata (TM) standard it uses is not without limitations, and often resulted in increased complexity and higher costs for minting and managing digital assets.

It required multiple accounts for each asset to store metadata, the asset itself, and various other components, leading to bloated, inefficient transactions..

In response to these challenges, Metaplex Core was developed with the goal to redefine the standard for digital asset creation and management on Solana.

Metaplex Core introduces a modern, simplified approach to digital asset creation and management, marked by its cost efficiency, streamlined developer workflows, and enhanced flexibility through an innovative plugin model.

By consolidating asset data into a single account, dramatically reducing the costs and complexities associated with asset minting and management and reduces the overall transaction load on the network

One of the most noticeable improvements Metaplex Core brings to the digital asset space is cost efficiency.

While minting an NFT using the previous Token Metadata standard could cost around .022 SOL, the same operation via Metaplex Core reduces this expense by almost 90%.

Metaplex Core's objectives are more than just cost reduction. It offers developers advanced features like enhanced collection management, sophisticated plugin support, and out-of-the-box indexing for improved asset discovery.

Metaplex Core introduces an advanced plugin architecture, designed to extend the functionality of digital assets through customizable lifecycle events. This architecture allows developers to implement a wide range of custom behaviors.

For example, a Transfer Delegate plugin might enable an asset to be transferable only under certain conditions, while a Burn Delegate plugin could restrict the burning of an asset to specific scenarios.

Plugins can be broadly categorized into three types based on their management and application:

Owner Managed Plugins - These plugins can be added or removed by the asset's owner and are typically used for operations that affect the asset's transferability, usability, or other dynamic characteristics.

Authority Managed Plugins - This category includes plugins that can be controlled by a designated authority, offering functionalities like royalties or metadata updates. These are crucial for assets that require ongoing management or updates beyond the initial creation.

Permanent Plugins - As the name suggests, these plugins are permanently attached to an asset at the time of its creation and cannot be altered thereafter. They are used for defining immutable characteristics or behaviors of the asset.

For Solana developers, Metaplex Core eases the technical burdens of asset creation and enables more interactive digital experiences.

Metaplex Core: Next Generation Solana NFT Standard

🌉 Circle CCTP Live on Solana

Circle has introduced its Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) to the Solana ecosystem, enabling developers to swap USDC tokens natively between Ethereum and various EVM-compatible blockchains, as well as non-EVM chains.

This development makes it easy for developers to transfer USDC across different blockchains in their apps.

Popular Solana projects like Wormhole, Cube Exchange, Jupiter Exchange, Drift Protocol and Sphere Labs are among the first to support CCTP, with more expected to add support soon.

Developers that want to implement CCTP in their own apps should refer to the documentation and integration guides provided by Circle and the supported platforms.

Solana welcomes Circle’s cross-chain transfer protocol

▶ Inside the Colosseum: Nurturing Solana’s Rising Stars

In the latest episode of Web3 Unpacked, Rich Pasqua of MVMT speaks with Colosseum Co-Founder Clay Robbins about how Colosseum is attracting, accelerating, and investing in the next wave of talented founders in the Solana ecosystem.

💰 cHack Winners

The cHack hackathon has come to a close and the winners have been announced!

These projects are being recognized for advancing the technology surrounding Solana NFT compression and NFT tooling.

Grand Winner:

Torque (formerly Onnyx) is developing a protocol aimed at creating a decentralized attention economy. It assists developers in initiating on-chain campaigns by utilizing cryptocurrency primitives to achieve wider distribution.

Second Place:

LightDAS introduces a streamlined Metaplex API designed to let developers index particular Merkle Trees, enabling users to index only the necessary data. This reduction in overhead offers alternative methods for accessing digital assets.

Third Place:

Filtoor offers an open-source solution for filtering NFT spam, featuring a self-hosted model, an API service, and a transaction explorer for comprehensive oversight.

Projects were also judged across several categories:

cBoxes (Gaming) - The cBox program empowers cNFT holders to authorize transactions for their PDA linked to the cNFT, essentially turning the cNFT into a portable wallet. This innovation unlocks exciting prospects, such as enabling characters to have items that can be passed along or the use of loot boxes in games!

MSG.LAND (Consumer) - This decentralized and open network is designed for social postings, allowing you to share up to 1kB of compressed data. These posts are verifiable on-chain and can be made for the same cost as minting a cNFT.

Picobot (Mobile) - This user-friendly Telegram bot for NFT trading bot facilitates an effortless NFT trading process accessible from any device with just a few clicks, catering to NFT traders of all levels.

Teleport Domains (RWAs) - A system designed for buying and selling web2 domains in the form of NFTs.

Shaga (DePIN) - Shaga offers a cloud gaming service enabling players to enjoy high-demand games on their personal devices by utilizing remote, high-performance computers. This initiative tackles the shortage of self-custodial technology in web3 gaming.

Dev Tooling: Torque (See Grand Winner above)

Announcing cHack Winners!

💎 Developer News

Solana Crossroads
Crossroads, hosted in Istanbul, Turkey on May 10-11, is Solana's premier annual community conference. It's a focal point for developers, community members, ecosystem builders, and crypto enthusiasts to accelerate their growth, expand their networks, and contribute to the Solana ecosystem. The event features a series of educational sessions designed to spark innovation and foster collaboration.

IslandDAO
Scheduled from May 17 to June 14 on the beautiful island of Crete, Greece, this event hosted by IslandDAO and the Solana Foundation fosters a collaborative and immersive experience for attendees. The program includes panels, workshops, and talks with founders and core developers, along with fun networking events such as beach excursions, windsurfing, jet skiing, sailing, site seeing, and golf.

Switchboard On-Demand
Switchboard On-Demand is live on Devnet! Initially, Switchboard used a push-based model, where oracles automatically push price data onto the blockchain without waiting for an actual request from a program. With the shift to an on-demand model, data is only fetched when a request is made by a program. This reduction in transaction volume will also help address congestion issues the Solana network is facing due to high demand.

What To Build for Solana DeFi?
In 2024, Solana's DeFi landscape experienced a resurgence, marked by growth in TVL ($3.8B), daily volumes ($2.5B), a diverse ecosystem of over 100 quality projects. In this in-depth post, Yash Agarwal highlights the top 10 DeFi themes for developers to build on with relevant examples to explore.

web3.js Technology Preview 2
The second Technology Preview of solana/web3.js introduces a lot of new enhancements, bug fixes, and features since it was announced at Breakpoint in Nov 2023. This update integrates a new JavaScript client generator for on-chain programs, which allows instruction creators and account decoders to be autogenerated for any program, including custom programs.

⚙️ Tools & Resources

extrnode is a RPC gateway powered by Everstake that now includes full support for the Metaplex DAS API Standard.

Alerts Stack from Dialect is a way to engage users by sending notifications via telegram, email, sms, in app and more. It is made up of a frontend SDK for a Notification Bell and an SDK for sending alerts.

Nifty Asset is an open-source, lightweight and composable Full-featured non-fungible standard, including royalty enforcement, delegates, lock/unlock, inscriptions and groups (collections) that uses a single account to represent a digital asset.

godot-solana-sdk provides the possibility to create Solana transactions in your Godot Engine game including Wallet Auth, reading and sending SPL tokens, fetching NFTs, and calling Anchor programs.

GetNfTEditions API from Helius provides high performance APIs for managing Solana NFT editions. This API enables developers to get details indicating the number of editions minted and the maximum supply, and list of all edition NFTs with their respective mint addresses, edition addresses and edition numbers.

⚡ Quick Hits

Build a cNFT Minter Mobile App in Under 5 Minutes - Helius

How Solana teams can diversify their stablecoin treasury - @SquadsProtocol

List of Solana ecosystem funding programs - @drebaglioni

Subsquid (data indexer) launches Solana Private Beta - Subsquid

An interview with Backpack co-founder Tristan Yver - Incrypted

Solana Leads With 49% of Interest in Blockchain Ecosystems in 2024 - CoinGecko

QuickNode adds Solana Priority Fee API to marketplace - @QuickNode

Primitives Protocol: Onchain Social Graph Storage with Concurrent Merkle Trees - @primitives_xyz

Spotlight: How the Gossip protocol works on Solana - YouTube

🎧 Listen to This

Chewing Glass

In this episode, Chase Barker chats with Matty Taylor, Clay Robbins, and Nate Levine, co-founders of Colosseum, an organization for Solana builders that integrates three pillars: Hackathon, Accelerator, and Venture Fund.

Colosseum