codex

Colosseum Codex: Superhosts CO_HACK, DePIN Report, Evolution of Hackathons

Superhosts CO_HACK Events, DePIN Report, Evolution of Solana Hackathons, Metaplex Fund Proposal, 1inch on Solana, Solana Permissioned Environments, Breakout Hackathon Workshops

Mike Hale

01 May 2025 — 6 min read

Miss a Breakout Hackathon livestream workshop? Don't worry!

Replays of all livestream workshops hosted by Colosseum are now available in one YouTube playlist! Catch up on insights from top builders in the Solana ecosystem and level up your project.

▶️ Watch here: Breakout Hackathon Workshops

📅 Superhosts CO_HACK Events

Superhosts, a community-driven initiative, focuses on in-person events that bring together Solana builders, founders, and mentors.

For the Breakout Hackathon, Superhosts’ CO_HACK are designed to help developers navigate the hackathon’s challenges with resources like peer feedback, technical guidance, and networking opportunities, with in-person opportunities to connect, troubleshoot, and improve their hackathon submissions.

Scheduled CO_HACK events:

Ilorin, Nigeria, May 1, 2025
Adamawa, Nigeria, May 1, 2025
Maiduguri, Nigeria, May 1, 2025
Benin City, Nigeria, May 2 2025
Enugu, Nigeria, May 2, 2025
Newcastle, UK, May 2, 2025
Vidisha, India, May 2, 2025
Lagos, Nigeria, May 3, 2025
Kumasi, Ghana, May 7, 2025
Plateau, Nigeria, May 8, 2025
Bucharest, Romania, May 9, 2025
Surat, India, May 10, 2025
Bhopal, India, May 10, 2025
Indore, India, May 11, 2025
Melbourne, Australia, May 13, 2025

Find and join a CO_HACK event near you to collaborate!

Superhost CO_HACKs

🔗 DePIN Report

At the Solana Crossroads conference, Dune and Slice Analytics released The Onchain Layer of Solana DePIN report. The 40-page analysis highlights the role Solana is playing in this category of onchain apps that link real-world infrastructure to decentralized incentives.

Key Takeaways:

$5.9M Total Onchain Revenue: DePIN projects on Solana have collectively generated $5.9 million in onchain revenue to date, with over $100K in weekly revenue as of April 2025.
238K+ Registered Nodes: The ecosystem supports over 238,000 contributing nodes across a range of use cases, from wireless coverage to AI inference.
Solana’s Share of the DePIN Market: Solana accounts for 17% of the total DePIN market cap, second only to EVM-compatible chains (70%).

For Solana developers, DePIN offers an opportunity to build infrastructure that integrates the physical and digital worlds.

DePIN on Solana is still early but gaining traction, with use cases spanning telecom, mapping, GPU compute, and AI. Read the full report for even more insights.

(Email required to download the full report)

The Onchain Layer of Solana DePIN

🌱 Evolution of the Hackathon

At Solana Crossroads, Matty, co-founder of Colosseum, presented a vision for evolving hackathons within the Solana ecosystem.

His talk traced the origins of structured innovation competitions, examined the shortcomings of existing hackathon formats, and introduced Colosseum’s approach designed to foster sustainable, on-chain projects.

While most modern hackathons are great for prototyping, they lack mechanisms to transition teams from proof-of-concept to production.

Recognizing this gap, Solana Labs began experimenting in 2020 with an extended, six-week, online hackathon format. The revised approach prioritized iterative development, mentorship, and milestone-driven progress rather than traditional weekend sprints.

By early 2024, Colosseum formalized and launched its hackathons. Drawing on three years of pilot learnings, they had a repeatable blueprint: A six-week duration to prioritize depth over speed with structured mentorship.

At the same time, it introduced its Accelerator and Venture Fund pillars to provide seamless continuity from hackathon participation to seed-stage funding.

Through this process the hackathon model was refined into a scalable program at the heart of Solana’s developer-to-founder pipeline.

The Evolution of the Hackathon

⭐ Highlights of the Week

Metaplex Ecosystem Fund Proposal
Josip Volarević has proposed a 50,000 SOL Metaplex Ecosystem Fund sourced from unclaimed rent after the Token Metadata resize to support builders, creators, and startups in the Solana ecosystem, with key allocations like 2,000 SOL for Colosseum hackathons to fund a Public Goods track promoting open-source development. The proposal seeks community feedback.

1inch expands to Solana
1inch has launched support for Solana to bring MEV-protected token swaps to Solana, with wallet support for Phantom and Trust. Developers can now access Solana through 1inch APIs, including the Swap, Balance, Token, Spot Price, Transaction Gateway, Gas Price, and Web3 RPC, with Cross-chain swaps between Solana and 10 other blockchains coming soon.

Solana Permissioned Environments
This article explores Solana Permissioned Environments (SPEs) built on the SVM that offer high-performance execution with privacy, governance, and compliance features aimed at enterprise and regulated sectors like finance and real-world assets, detailing how SPEs support GDPR compliance, AML/KYC, and includes real-world case studies and future use cases.

⚡ Quick Hits

3 Pitfalls to Avoid While You Build for the Breakout Hackathon ft. Kash Dhanda - @solana

The most effective way to learn Solana auditing - @0xjuaan

Breaking the Sound Barrier: How Ephemeral Rollups Shatter Blockchain’s Performance Ceiling - Harkness Institute

How to use Twitter in Web3 to Level Up Your Project - @KumekaTeam

Bonding Curve Mathematics: From Theory to Pump Fun - The Accelerated Curve

Reject Marketing, Return to Lorebuilding - @DeFiDave22

The Arcium Public Testnet is LIVE - @ArciumHQ

Introducing Lana Roads LIVE on Solana Mainnet - @sendarcadefun

⚙️ Tools & Resources

Awesome Vibe Coding is a curated list of vibe coding references for collaborating with AI to write code.

solana-tx-log-parser is a tool to easily parse Solana transactions logs.

Precompile Alignment Bug is a root cause analysis report of a bug in Agave’s implementation of the ed25519 and secp256r1 precompile programs that were exposed in validators running with the new --transaction-structure view option introduced in v2.2.

💸 Funding

MagicBlock announced a $7.5M seed round led by Lightspeed Faction, with participation from investors like Mert Mumtaz, Tristan Yver, and Anatoly Yakovenko, to advance real-time, app-specific extensions on Solana using Ephemeral Rollups.

Nous Research has raised $50 million in a Series A round led by Paradigm to to develop decentralized, open-source AI models that are trained and operated using a distributed network of global computing resources

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

Solana Labs is hiring a Product Manager, Solana Mobile to define, execute, and deliver product initiatives for Solana Mobile.
Raiku is hiring a Lead Rust Engineer (Core) to drive the implementation of high-performance distributed systems.
Ondo is hiring a Data Scientist to spearhead data and analytics initiatives.
DoubleZero is hiring a Solana Validator & Stake Pool Operator to operate and monitor Solana validator nodes across testnet and mainnet environments.

📅 Event Calendar

Breakout Hackathon - Perfecting Your Hackathon Submission, May 5, 4pm UTC, Virtual
Join Colosseum cofounders Matty, Nate, and Clay as they give you the blueprint for a complete, high-quality submission. You’ll learn about all of the details about what to submit, how to pitch your product, how to communicate your vision, and how you can standout from the pack.

Breakout Hackathon - Lessons Learned: How Not to Die, May 6, 8pm UTC, Virtual
Arnold Lee of Sphere shares how Sphere went full circle from a hackathon winner to sponsor, and lessons learned along the way with a collection of stories and tips that will hopefully help you and your startup not die.

Breakout Hackathon - Build AI Tasks With Cost-Saving Decentralized Compute, May 7, 8pm UTC, Virtual
Nate Solomon, Render Network Foundation, and Danny Newman & Paul Roales from RenderLabs will walk through use cases, with real examples, of AI and agentic app developers tapping into distributed consumer-grade GPUs to save 90% of compute costs for tasks like inferencing.

Breakout Hackathon - From Localnet to Mainnet with Surfpool, May 8, 3pm UTC, Virtual
Arnold Lee of Sphere shares how Sphere went full circle from a hackathon winner to sponsor, and lessons learned along the way with a collection of stories and tips that will hopefully help you and your startup not die.

Accelerate Bootcamp, May 12, NYC
Accelerate Bootcamp is a two day developer bootcamp to help you level up your Solana dev skills, where passing gets you access to Scale or Die for Solana developers in NYC in May as part of the Accelerate conference.

🎧 Listen to This

The Y-Axis Podcast

In this conversation, Mert, co-founder and CEO of Helius, shares his journey from working at Coinbase to founding a developer platform for the Solana ecosystem.

He discusses the challenges of building a startup, the importance of hiring passionate individuals, and the unique culture at Helius that fosters remote work and team dynamics.

Mert emphasizes the significance of risk-taking in entrepreneurship and the need for a strong written culture in a remote-first company.

He shares insights on integrating AI into workflows, the importance of building a company culture from the ground up, and his approach to writing that fosters engagement. Mert also digs into the technicalities of Solana, explaining why he believes in its potential and addressing the incentive problems prevalent in the crypto space.

Mert Mumtaz: Solana, Company Building, Culture, Incentives, and Risk Taking

Bonus Episodes

Everything You Need To Know About Solana Gaming With Jorge - Solana Weekly

In this episode, Thomas and Jorge dive into why Web3 gaming is finally delivering, how Solana’s speed and low fees enable on-chain gameplay and fairer economies, introduce the new Gaming on Solana initiative and Game Pass, and address gamer skepticism by emphasizing fun-first, ownership-optional design.

The Future Of Solana, DoubleZero & The Firedancer Impact | Austin Federa - Lightspeed

Austin Federa discusses the latest happenings with Solana and DoubleZero, the importance of speed for capital markets, the rise of alt L1s, and how to remain competitive as a blockchain.

A Hardware-Accelerated Sidechain for Scaling Solana w/ Chaofan Shou (Solayer) - Validated

Chaofan Shou discusses Solayer, a high-performance Solana sidechain, Solayer's hybrid L1/L2 model, its technical architecture, their DeFi and gaming ecosystem development plans, and addressing the scalability/decentralization balance.

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