Colosseum Codex: Solana Tour, MagicBlock Real-Time Hackathon, Raiku

This issue marks a major milestone for me as this newsletter turns 2 years old. 🎂 

I sent my first issue on Mar 31, 2023 and it was read by a whopping 27 people. Fast-forward one year and I teamed up with Colosseum and it became the Codex, which now reaches ~45k builders each week. 

What I started as just a small way to give something back to the Solana community has grown into a key resource for all the developers, builders, and founders pushing Solana forward. 

I don't have any plans to ever stop, and I love bringing you a roundup of all the gems and highlights each week!

And on that note, here's the latest news for Solana developers…

🎫 Solana On Tour

There's been a problem with Solana events at major blockchain conferences being

hidden behind private invites, closed Telegram groups, and exclusive event lists. As a result, many in the community miss out.

Solana on Tour was created to tackle this very issue.

Solana on Tour is a public calendar and event hub designed to coordinate events, promote collaboration, and make Solana events at conferences like ETH Denver and TOKEN2049 accessible to more people.

Even if an event has limited capacity, sharing it publicly helps boost transparency and invites more collaboration across the Solana ecosystem. Solana on Tour encourages event organizers to share their events to get more people involved in the community.

Solana Tour

⏱️ MagicBlock Real-Time Hackathon

MagicBlock's Real-Time Hackathon is now open, inviting Solana developers to build fully on-chain, real-time applications and games using MagicBlock’s ephemeral rollup technology. 

This event is an opportunity to explore possibilities and prepare your project for the Solana Breakout Hackathon hosted by Colosseum.

Key highlights:

• Exclusive Challenges: Develop pioneering apps in DeFi, gaming, and social media, pushing the limits of real-time blockchain technology.
• Significant Prizes: Compete to win up to $10,000 in funding
• Full MagicBlock Tech Access: Advanced ephemeral rollup technology to build decentralized and serverless applications with unprecedented speed and scalability.

Suggested projects include creating a real-time central limit order book (CLOB), intuitive options trading platforms, real-time trading news apps, and fully on-chain PvP games. 

Real-time offers developers a platform for visibility to gather feedback and refine their projects ahead of the upcoming Breakout Hackathon.

Introducing the Real-Time Hackathon

🚅 Raiku

Solana’s known for its high performance, but developers still face issues of failed transactions, MEV issues, and congestion when demand spikes. 

Raiku is stepping in to solve these challenges head-on with a new layer of infrastructure that’s designed specifically to help apps perform at an institutional-grade level.

At its core, Raiku introduces three new transaction types that go beyond the current system: 

1. Guaranteed execution
2. Ahead-of-time inclusion signals
3. Data/proof streaming

All of this is powered by the Raiku validator network, which works in sync with Solana to deliver faster, more reliable, and more predictable outcomes.

Beyond transaction handling, Raiku is building a suite of core features designed for high-performance, next-gen apps with global accounts for unified state management, bandwidth markets to help optimize transaction flow, and RFQ-style liquidity infrastructure. 

It also introduces mechanisms for MEV protection by eliminating private mempools and improving transparency in transaction ordering, both key improvements that benefit developers and users.

One of the most interesting things about Raiku is how it decouples execution and consensus to give developers more flexibility, while giving validators new ways to earn.

Raiku is still in the early stages, early, but is trying to push the limits of what’s possible onchain.

Raiku: Solana’s Coordination Layer

⭐ Highlights of the Week

Solana Governance: A Comprehensive Analysis
This deep dive into governance on Solana from Helius explores how decisions get made on Solana, who actually holds the power, and what recent high-stakes votes reveal about the strengths and growing pains of its governance model. Whether you’re a validator, developer, or staker trying to understand your role in shaping Solana's future, this comprehensive analysis breaks it all down.

A Deep Dive into Onchain Stablecoin Data
Stablecoin activity on Solana is booming, and it’s not just a side effect of the memecoin frenzy. With over $1.2 billion in stablecoins minted in March and total supply hitting its highest point since early 2021, new onchain data shows growth across the board. This deep dive breaks down where that supply is going, who’s using it, how trading volume is shifting, and why stablecoins are a foundational layer of Solana’s DeFi ecosystem.

A Data-Driven Analysis of Frankendancer
Frankendancer, the first iteration of Jump Crypto’s Firedancer validator client, is showing real performance gains on-chain. This data-driven analysis from Chorus One explores how Frankendancer handles more transactions per block than Agave, achieves higher throughput with lower median priority fees, and uses smarter scheduling to resolve transaction conflicts more efficiently, breaking down the numbers behind Firedancer’s promise to push Solana to the limits of what’s possible.

⚡ Quick Hits

How to Create a Crypto DeFAI Discord Bot with SendAI's Solana Agent Kit - CoinGecko

What are Solana Smart Wallets? Comparison & Implementation Guide - Helius

How the Rust Compiler Works, a Deep Dive [Video] - RareSkills

Introducing the Arcium Roadmap: The Road to Encrypting Everything - @ArciumHQ

Solana’s Parallel Transaction Processing: Technical Innovation and Economic Impact - dvrsimi

⚙️ Tools & Resources

solana-yellowstone-blocklist is a Solana program and associated CLI for maintaining allow and blocklists on chain that contains a set of PubKeys and the associated action (allow/deny).

awesome-solana-security is an updated set of resources to help you build better and more secure Solana programs.

solana-tower-defense is an example Tower Defense game built with Bevy and integrated with Solana blockchain where you defend base while interacting with Solana for in-game transactions, rewards, and wallet-based mechanics.

Verxio Protocol is a Reward Protocol for creating and managing loyalty programs on Solana and SVM.

awesome-svm is a curated list of projects and resources utilizing the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM).

💸 Funding

Uranium Digital has closed a $6.1M seed funding round led by hiFramework, with participation from Karatage, Mirana, and notable angel investors to accelerate Uranium Digital’s mission to create an institutional-grade spot market for trading uranium

Fragmetric, a Solana-based restaking platform, raised a $5M strategic round led by RockawayX with participation from Robot Ventures, Amber Group, and others to expand integrations with Jito’s TipRouter and Switchboard’s NCN.

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

• Wormhole is hiring a Security Engineer to design and implement security and defense controls.
• Orca is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead a team of talented engineers.
• Based is hiring a Lead Backend Engineer (Web3 and API) to design, develop, and maintain robust and scalable backend services.

🎧 Listen to This

Lightspeed

In this episode of Lightspeed, host Jack Kubinec talks with Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, and Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital, about the future of Solana and the broader landscape of blockchain technologies.

The discussion covers innovations in market structures, the importance of tokenization, the vision for Internet capital markets, and the implications of potential Solana ETFs.

The conversation included a future vision for Solana involving multiple concurrent leaders to improve market efficiency. Anatoly also addressed concerns surrounding meme coins, suggesting they serve as a benign entry into crypto markets, while stressing the need for better launch tools to promote fairness and reliability.

Both speakers expressed optimism regarding the upcoming Solana ETFs and the potential for staking yields to attract investors, emphasizing that the market's evolution is likely to overshadow current meme coin trends.

Both Anatoly and Kyle reflected on Solana’s growth over five years and how the ecosystem is continuously growing and diversifying.

The Solana End Game With Anatoly Yakovenko & Kyle Samani

Bonus Episodes

Yannik Schrade: Arcium, Private Computing, Privacy 2.0 and Network Launch - The Y-Axis Podcast

Yannick Schrade, CEO of Arcium, shares their approach to privacy in computing through the use of secure MPC, Privacy 2.0, the role of nodes in the Arcium network, and future developments as they transition to public testnet.

Seek Protocol – AR On Solana - Crypto Conversation

In this podcast, Don Reijke (Founder and CTO) and Lukas Novotny (COO) of Seek Protocol discuss how their project integrates AR, AI, geofencing, and Solana blockchain technologies to create innovative, gamified user experiences.

JitoSOL, Staked ETFs, and the Future of Solana Governance | Lucas Bruder - 0xResearch

Jito Labs CEO Lucas Bruder discusses crypto’s growing dialogue with regulators, the potential for staked ETFs, Solana governance, SIMD-228 and SIMD-123, and the evolving validator landscape.

How Step Finance tracks the firehose of Solana DeFi data - Solfate

Dana, Lead Developer at Step Finance, discusses the engineering challenges faced in data aggregation, and the innovations being implemented by Step Finance for real-time Solana data processing, and valuable advice for those looking to enter the field.

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.