codex

Colosseum Codex: Radar Hackathon, Temporal, zkVM on Solana

Mike Hale

Aug 23, 2024 — 7 min read

📡 Solana Radar Hackathon

Colosseum announced the full details of Solana's upcoming global hackathon, Radar, set to take place from September 2 to October 8, 2024.

Powered by Colosseum's online platform, this hackathon gives developers and builders an opportunity to showcase their skills, compete for prizes, and potentially secure pre-seed funding.

Key Highlights of Radar:

Grand Champion Prize: The top team will be awarded $50,000 in USDC and three passes to Solana Breakpoint 2024. Sponsored by Sphere.
Track Prizes & Sponsors: Each of the following tracks with prizes ranging from $5,000 to $25,000 in USDC:
- Consumer (Dialect)
- DeFi (Drift)
- Payments (Portal)
- DePIN (Solana Mobile)
- Gaming (MagicBlock)
- Infrastructure (Wormhole)
- DAOs & Network States (MetaDAO)
University Award: A $10,000 USDC prize will be given to the best student team.
Public Goods Award: This $10,000 USDC prize will go to the team that creates open-source technology benefiting the entire ecosystem.
Climate Award: Promoting green and climate-friendly projects, this award will provide $5,000 in USDC.

Beyond the cash prizes, all hackathon winners will have the chance to be interviewed and evaluated for Colosseum's accelerator program.

Up to 15 winners will be accepted, each receiving $250,000 in pre-seed funding, access to a unique mentorship network, exclusive platform features, and more.

The program culminates in a Demo Day, where teams will pitch their projects to leading VC firms in the crypto space.

Announcing the Solana Radar Hackathon

⏳ Introducing Temporal

Temporal is a newly launched R&D firm, native to Solana, founded by leading experts from high-frequency trading, traditional finance, and top academic institutions.

Their mission is to optimize decentralized applications (dApps) by eliminating network inefficiencies and setting a new standard for global systems.

One of Temporal’s key initiatives is the design and implementation of a new Quality of Service (QoS) algorithm for the Solana network.

This algorithm aims to significantly boost network efficiency and reliability, ensuring smoother transaction processing and better overall performance, especially during high-demand periods.

This will benefit Solana developers by improving the network's ability to handle increased traffic, leading to enhanced user experience and potentially higher block rewards.

Temporal is also working on boosting the Solana Transport Layer (STL) protocol, which will further strengthen Solana’s performance, security, and resilience.

These innovations, along with Temporal’s hands-on support for web3 ventures, will empower Solana developers with a more reliable and efficient network, making it easier to build and scale successful dApps.

Introducing Temporal

🤫 zkVM on Solana

The integration of zkVM, powered by RISC Zero, on Solana Testnet represents a big step for ZK development on Solana.

zkVM allows complex computations to be performed off-chain in a trustless environment. Developers can run programs within the zkVM that execute extensive calculations, which would be costly or inefficient if done directly on-chain.

Once the off-chain computation is complete, zkVM generates a proof that can be efficiently verified on-chain using Solana Programs using the RISC Zero verifier without requiring the Solana network to re-execute the computation.

zkVM allows developers to integrate it into their existing Solana-based dApps without requiring significant changes to the dApp’s architecture.

Developers can use zkVM to build:

Solana Light Clients that verify transactions and state changes with minimal data, reducing the need for full node participation and enhancing decentralization.
Compressed DePIN Networks with reduced data storage and processing requirements, improving efficiency and scalability.
Secure ZK-Logins for secure, zero-knowledge-based authentication mechanisms within Solana dApps, reducing centralization risks while maintaining privacy.

The integration of zkVM with Solana provides advanced zero-knowledge features while also maintaining the performance and scalability that Solana is known for, unlocking new possibilities for dApp development, better scalability, and enhanced privacy and security.

Introducing ZK on Solana, powered by RISC Zero

👀 New Capabilities for Blinks

Dialect announced new capabilities for blinks that dramatically expand what you can build.

These new features include:

Action Chaining: Now you can create a sequence of actions within a single blink. For example, e-commerce platforms can chain actions like filling in shipping information, making a purchase, and providing a follow-up email address, all in one seamless flow.
Advanced Input Types: Blinks now support customizable fields, select menus, checkboxes, radio buttons, and more advanced input types like numbers, phone numbers, and emails, making interactions richer and more versatile.
Multichain & Blink Version Compatibility: Blinks are now compatible across multiple chains and different versions, ensuring a seamless experience no matter the platform.
Sign Message (Coming Soon): This feature will enable interactions with offchain services and crypto-native applications, opening up new possibilities like storing shipping information or tipping creators on platforms like Drip.

These features are now live on dial.to and will roll out to the five supporting wallets in the coming days.

With these new tools, developers can embed powerful, flexible experiences anywhere a link is shared.

Blinks Action Chaining

⚡ Quick Hits

Solana Virtual Machine: Powering the Future of Web3 Gaming - The Market Periodical

Mastering Anchor Vaults: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Secure Solana Vault Program - Ritik Bhatt

Some of Solana's Most Interesting Experiments - Bankless

Fuzzing Solana Smart Contracts with Trident - 0xJesus

Social for Startups: How to build a social presence from scratch - a16z Crypto

Reviewing Token Extensions on Solana Using Formal Verification - Certora

Agave v2.0 Transition Guide - Anza

LI.FI Expands to Solana - LI.FI

Presenting Blinkathon: The Community-powered Solana Blinks Hackathon - @thesendcoin

Working with Radar and Valid8 [video] - @jacobvcreech

Report: Solana The Modular - @Delphi_Digital

⚙️ Tools & Resources

Event Ticketing is a Core AppData Plugin example for building a ticketing solution that could be used to generate tickets as digital assets and verified by an external source of trust other than the issuer.

Squads Backup Kit is a suite of Open-source UI, CLI, and SDK tools providing multiple options for Squads users to access their assets. This means that even in the unlikely case where the Squads UI is unavailable, users still have a permissionless method to access their assets.

MagicBlock Ephemeral Validator is a containerized version of the Ephemeral SVM Validator with the full SVM, RPC, WebSocket, and Geyser RPC in less than 50 MB. There are plans to make this open source in the future.

chadbuffer is a heavily optimized Solana program that allows you to manage and manipulate permissioned data buffers on the Solana blockchain with parallel broadcast, optimal instruction size, self-healing state, and priority fee support.

solana-smart-contract-security-best-practices is a helpful repo for security best practices in Solana programs.

coal-cli is the CLI for COAL cryptocurrency mining.

💀 RIP

Shutting Down: Armada CLMM

The Armada team has decided to shut down all self-serve products, including their successful Concentrated Liquidity Market Making (CLMM) product, due to regulatory risks for US-based contributors and challenges in marketing the product under current US regulations.

Additionally, they found that many users of similar products were primarily focused on airdrop farming rather than the product's core value, leading the team to conclude that launching a token to incentivize usage was not aligned with their vision.

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

Solana Mobile is hiring a Senior Backend Software Engineer
Bridgesplit is hiring a Frontend Engineer
Wynd Labs (Grass) is hiring a DevOps Engineer
Cega is looking for a Smart Contract Engineer - Solana
IdeaSoft needs a Rust Developer (Solana experience)

📅 Event Calendar

Solana Build Station, Belgrade, Sept 2
Comets of Web3 and Solana Community Event, Bucharest, Sept 4
Solana Nomads, Almaty, Kazakhstan, Oct 17-20

🎧 Listen to This

Solfate

A conversation with Matty, co-founder of Colosseum, the premier Solana ecosystem accelerator and hackathons.

Colosseum recently wrapped up its first accelerator program, which followed its online hackathon. The accelerator program is a six-week online program that helps teams push towards a mainnet release and provides support in technical and non-technical areas.

Colosseum also recently closed a $60 million venture fund and invests $250,000 in each startup that goes through its accelerator program. The teams in the accelerator program have received feedback on various aspects, including legal and entity structure, team composition, and early customer communication. Colosseum aims to evaluate teams based on their ability to ship quickly and efficiently.

Colosseum is focused on supporting the Solana ecosystem by providing funding, mentorship, and resources to early-stage projects.

They run hackathons to identify talented teams and provide them with pre-seed funding and support. The accelerator program helps teams refine their ideas and secure additional funding.

Colosseum also plays a role in educating and convincing later-stage funds to invest in the Solana ecosystem. They are working on building a co-founder matching platform to help teams find the right partners.

The Radar Hackathon is scheduled for September 2nd to October 8th.

Colosseum's Venture Fund: Investing in Solana Startups and Building a Co-Founder Matching Platform

Bonus Episodes

Community and Culture with Solana OG Based Charker - Midcurve

In this episode, Midcurve sits down with Chase to dive into the early days of Solana, surfing, and the importance of community in the crypto space, exploring what it truly takes to make Solana great, with Chase sharing his unique perspective on the journey and the passion that drives the ecosystem forward.

Solana's outperformance and the emergence of secular winners with Ryan Watkins - Logan Jastremski

Ryan Watkins is the Co-Founder of Syncracy Capital: A thesis-driven hedge fund making high conviction, concentrated investments in the secular winners of the crypto economy.

Gamifying fitness: Moonwalk wants to turn user tasks into tokenized rewards - The Scoop

In this episode, Caitlin Cook, Director of growth at Moonwalk Fitness, shares how Moonwalk is attempting to build a consumer crypto app that helps people hit their health goals through daily step competitions. Moonwalk plans to tap into fitness communities, influencers, and corporate wellness programs to attract a broader non-crypto audience.

How Ore Broke Solana - Lightspeed

In this episode, Hardhat Chad from Ore joins Lightspeed to discuss Ore’s origin story, differences between Ore v1 vs Ore v2, and how Ore fits into the Store of Value narrative.

Turning BTC into a Programable Asset on Solana w/ Justin Wang (Zeus Network) - Validated

In this episode of Validated, Justin discusses the intersection of Bitcoin and Solana, particularly focusing on the work his team is doing at Zeus. The discussion includes detailed technical insights on how Zeus manages transactions, secures assets using Taproot addresses, and coordinates through its nodes.

Growing Wallets - Safary Web3 Growth Podcast

Growing Wallets features a discussion moderated by Hannie (Desig) with Abi Dharshan from Zerion. They explore advanced strategies for user retention and monetization within the digital wallet landscape.

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