codex

Colosseum Codex: Renaissance Hackathon Winners, GameShift x Google Cloud, Arcium Confidential Computing

Explore the winners of the Solana Renaissance Hackathon and the new GameShift x Google Cloud partnership in blockchain gaming.

Mike Hale

May 9, 2024 — 7 min read

🏆 Renaissance Hackathon Winners Announced

Colosseum has announced the winners of the Solana Renaissance Hackathon!

Renaissance was the 9th Solana Foundation hackathon, bringing together more than 8,300 participants from 95+ countries that submitted 1,071 final projects, making Renaissance the largest online Solana hackathon to date.

Grand Champion

Ore, a digital currency that anyone can mine using a novel proof-of-work algorithm on Solana, took home the grand prize of $50,000 USDC, along with passes to attend Breakpoint 2024.

First place winners ($30,000 USDC) of the individual tracks were:

Consumer Apps: Banger.lol, a marketplace for trading tweets and supporting creators.

Crypto Infrastructure: High TPS Solana Client, a new client that utilizes efficient scheduling and pipeline optimizations to improve transaction capacity and increase block reward yields.

Gaming: Meshmap+City Champ, a new 3D mapping network integrated through a game that generates 3D scans incentivized by token rewards.

DeFi & Payments: Urani, an intent-based swap aggregator bringing protection against toxic MEV at the application layer.

DePIN: Blockmesh, an open network that allows you to monetize your excess bandwidth.

DAOs & Communities: DeTask, an AI-enabled product development platform leveraging DAO labor.

There were also a few special category winners as well:

University Award (project led by university students): DeVolt
Public Goods Award (open-source project that benefits developers): Zircon
Climate Award (project focused on climate change and sustainability): AquaSave

Colosseum co-founder Matty Taylor reminded all participants that won a prize or now, teams should be proud of their participation and keep pushing their projects forward.

You all should be proud for pushing crypto forward. For those that won, stay focused. This is just the beginning of your startup journey. For those that didn't win, don't be discouraged. Many top eco projects competed in multiple hackathons before finding the right product, with the right cofounders.

Check out the rest of the winners (2nd to 5th place of each track) and all the honorable mentions:

Announcing the Winners of the Solana Renaissance Hackathon

🤝 Gameshift x Google Cloud

Solana Labs announced a partnership with Google Cloud to bring GameShift to customers of Google Cloud.

GameShift provides tools and APIs to offer an accessible platform for developers to add blockchain elements to their games.

With GameShift, games can now include digital assets, non-custodial wallets for easy sign-ins, scalable creation of in-game assets, NFT marketplaces. and user-generated content that leverage blockchain's benefits such as security, transparency, and interoperability.

"By bringing GameShift into Google Cloud’s ecosystem for living games, we're giving developers a streamlined path to build immersive blockchain experiences without wrestling with the underlying technology."

~ Jack Buser, Director for Games at Google Cloud

By making it easier to integrate web3 elements, Solana and Google Cloud are setting the stage for more use of blockchain technologies in the gaming industry.

Solana Labs teams up with Google Cloud on Web3 games via GameShift

🙈 Arcium Confidential Computing

Arcium is introducing a transformative approach to confidential computing (CC) that enhances privacy and security across blockchain applications.

This was teased a while back when Elusiv Privacy announced it was sunsetting in favor of a more advanced solution.

Their new platform leverages advanced cryptographic technologies to provide a trustless and verifiable framework for executing encrypted computations. This enables enhanced security and privacy for applications by encrypting data not just when it is stored or in transit, but also when it is in use.

Arcium introduces a shift from hardware dependency towards a cryptographic approach for encryption.

It utilizes advanced cryptographic techniques including:

Multiparty Computation (MPC): This allows multiple parties to jointly compute a function over their inputs while keeping those inputs private.

Homomorphic Encryption (HE): Enables operations on encrypted data, producing an encrypted result that, when decrypted, matches the result of operations performed on the plaintext.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs): Allows one party to prove to another that a statement is true, without revealing any information apart from the fact that the statement is indeed true.

Designed for developers building in DeFi, AI, and beyond, Arcium uses a parallelized network architecture to provide encrypted computation without relying on hardware solutions or trusted third parties.

Arcium's network comprises two main components:

Multiparty Computation Execution Environments (MXEs)

These are configurable environments where developers can set specific parameters for secure multiparty computations, including who initiates the executions, which nodes participate, and what MPC protocol is used. MXEs support a variety of operations on encrypted data, ensuring that data remains confidential even during computation.

The Arx Network

This decentralized network consists of nodes, known as Arx, which collaborate to process encrypted data using MPC. Nodes can form clusters to perform joint computations, ensuring that encrypted data is processed securely without exposing individual data elements.

Developers can configure MXEs according to their application needs using Arcium’s user-friendly API, which includes both a web-based interface and an SDK.

Arcium has opened applications for an incentivized private testnet. This opportunity allows developers to run nodes or build applications using Arcium's infrastructure.

Arcium: The first parallelized confidential computing network

📣 Breakpoint 2024 Speakers

The Solana Foundation has announced the first wave of speakers for Solana Breakpoint 2024.

Last year, Breakpoint attracted over 3,000 participants for a series of keynote speeches, workshops, panel debates, and fireside chats featuring prominent figures from the Solana community.

This year, the two-day gathering in Singapore from September 20-21 will host developers, government bodies, institutions, and creative talents from across the globe to share knowledge and interact with leading authorities.

The initial speaker lineup for Breakpoint 2024 includes:

Hany Rashwan, CEO of 21.co
Bin Chen, co-founder and CTO of Boba Guys
Luke Truitt, CEO of Bridgesplit
Ben Zhou, CEO of Bybit
Jeremy Allaire, Chairman and CEO of Circle
Mike Cahill, co-founder & CEO of Douro Labs
Cindy Leow, co-founder of Drift
Vibhu Norby, CEO of DRiP
Emily Meyers, General Counsel at Electric Capital
Larisa Barbu, co-founder and CEO of Exchange Art
Ran Goldi, SVP Payments & Network at Fireblocks
Stijn Paumen, co-founder and CEO of Helio
Abhay Kumar, CEO of the Helium Foundation
Corey Wright, CEO of Honeyland
Marius Ciubotariu, co-founder of Kamino
Andrea Fortugno, co-founder and CEO of MagicBlock Labs
Jason Lau, Chief Innovation Officer at OKX
Paul Bohm, founder of Teleport.xyz
Ilja Moisejevs, CEO of Tensor
Cuy Sheffield, VP, Head of Crypto at Visa
Tristan Frizza, co-founder of Zeta Markets

The Solana Foundation Unveils First Wave of Speakers for Breakpoint 2024: Visa, Bybit, Circle, Helium, Fireblocks and More

💎 Developer News

Solana Professional Developer Training in NYC
The Solana Foundation is hosting a free, 4-day training session (starting May 28) aimed at web developers with TypeScript knowledge that are interested in blockchain technology. The bootcamp covers cryptography fundamentals and introduces participants to Solana with hands-on labs. Prior experience in cryptography or blockchain is not required.

Solfate Snapshot
My friends Nick and James over at SolfateHQ have just launched the "Solfate Snapshot". Penned by @TeagueSOL, the snapshot is a byte-sized email newsletter with updates from the Solana ecosystem teams and builders that is sent out bi-weekly.

Matty on the Logan Jastremski Podcast
Matty Taylor, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Colosseum, had a chat with Logan Jastremski to discuss the genesis of Solana Hackathons and a deep dive into the Colosseum Accelerator

💸 Funding

Baxus, a Web3 marketplace for buying, selling and vaulting collectible wine and spirits, has secured $5 million in funding led by Multicoin Capital with participation from Solana Ventures and others.

⚙️ Tools & Resources

Raffle is an example script that fetches all NFTs in the collection and their respective owners (excluding yourself) and then randomly selects one built with Shyft's NFT API.

nitrate is a custom lightweight entrypoint for Solana programs that makes asset transfers using ~1k CU. Nitrate is based on based on solana-nostd-entrypoint with a few enhancements.

lighthouse-assertion-builder is a Proof of Concept Lighthouse assertion builder that takes a Solana transaction, resolves/parses writeable account state, and outputs a new Transaction injected with Lighthouse assertion instructions based on end state of the transaction.

Verus is a verification tool designed for Rust. Developers outline specifications detailing the intended behavior of their code, and Verus performs static checks to ensure that the Rust code adheres to these specifications under all possible code executions. Instead of implementing run-time checks, Verus uses advanced solvers to confirm the correctness of the code.

⚡ Quick Hits

How to Build a CRUD dApp on Solana - YouTube

I11N: Instruction Introspection made easy - LEO

100 free SolanaFM APIs to Bonkathon developers - @solanafm

SolanaFM's ExplorerKit v1.10 adds for reading 0.3.0 Anchor IDLs - SolanaFM

Solflare's 'Explore Solana' Campaign Pays Onboards 500k MetaMask Users - SolanaFloor

List NFT Projects Like a Pro with Tensor's Creator Portal - Tensor

Case Study: Integrating Payments on Solana using Sphere - @SevenLabs_

Jupiter launches Welcome to Solana ecosystem landing page - Jupiter

🎧 Listen to This

Cryptonews

Armani Ferrante is the founder and CEO of Backpack. The Backpack ecosystem of companies, creators of the Backpack wallet, the Mad Lads NFT collection, the xNFT standard, and Backpack Exchange.

Before founding Backpack in April 2022, he was the creator of Anchor, a groundbreaking developer tool that revolutionized programming on Solana. Anchor has become an integral part of numerous Solana projects and protocols, and bonding its commitments to simplifying the developer experience.

Armani graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Computer Science and before dedicating all his effort into crypto and web3, he used to work for Apple as a software engineer.

Armani Ferrante, CEO of Backpack, on Solana and Web3 Super Apps

Bonus Episodes

Luzid validator: Solana Test Validator on Steroids with Thorsten (w/ Thorsten, creator of Luzid) - Solfate

Thorsten, the creator of the Luzid validator, shares his unique journey getting into software development and into Solana. The conversation explores the features and capabilities of Luzid, a tool for testing Solana programs.

Everything Solana - the Buzz Before Crossroads - The Next Billion

This episode breaks down all the recent developments on Solana, from token launches to platform integrations and everything in between, and how projects like Sanctum, Camino, Zeta, and more are shaping the future of DeFi.

Seg: Solana's Jito Validator Client, Jito's Bundle Creator + Processor, MEV, 1.18 Scheduler - Scraping Bits

Scraping Bits dives into Solana's Jito Validator and Jito Bundle Processor within the blockchain ecosystem, MEV and its impact on validators, the Scheduler component of Jito-Solana, and the mechanics of bundle processing and its role in streamlining transaction execution.

Why Drift Is Betting Big on Solana - Cindy Leow & Chris Heaney - Blockcrunch

Drift Co-Founder Cindy Leow & Developer Chris Healey discuss the founding story of Drift, why there was a gap in the market for Drift, why the Solana ecosystem made sense, and Drift’s 2024 roadmap.

Why Stripe Is Building On Solana | Weekly Roundup - Lightspeed

In this weekly Solana roundup, Lightspeed takes a deep dive into Stripe's crypto announcement, Solana MEV, EigenLayer's token launch, Kamino + Drift Airdrops & more.

Making Fitness Accountable Using Crypto I Marbius (Moonwalk Fitness) - Unlayered

Marbius, head of product at Moonwalk Fitness, discusses the most hyped game on Solana at the moment, Moonwalk, that leverages crypto payments to enforce accountability into users' exercise routines.

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