What a wild week for Solana!

I’m guessing your $JUP drop wasn’t enough to retire on if you’re still here, but I hope you got some free money!

If not, you should still be happy because Solana held up under the pressure of a massive amount of transactions and activity.

There were a few hiccups with wallets, and some RPC providers, but the network kept working as expected.

The extensive work done by core developers over the last year really made this OPOS!

And the most important thing to remember is you could do something totally unrelated to the $JUP drop and pay the same in “gas” as you normally would. If this was Ethereum, global gas fees would have spiked for the entire network.

🏟️ Colosseum Hackathon and Accelerator

Colosseum is a new Accelerator for Solana developers and founders that is hosting the next big Solana Hackathon.

Colosseum was founded by significant figures like @mattytay, formerly of Solana Foundation where he oversaw the prior Solana Foundation hackathons that had more than 60k participants and 4k projects launched.

Colosseum has three main pillars:

1. Hackathons

By hosting 2-3 events annually, Colosseum offers developers a stage to showcase their skills and contribute to Solana's growth, with a promise of continued support through an accelerator program for winners.

2. Accelerator

Winners of the hackathons receive $250,000 in pre-seed investment and gain entry to a 5-week accelerator program where they’ll get mentorship and access to an experienced network.

This approach aims to advance the success of startups in the competitive web3 landscape.

3. Community and Collaboration

At its core, Colosseum is building an engaged community where developers can find teammates based on skills and interests, critique ideas, and collaborate on groundbreaking projects.

Join the Arena!

The upcoming Colosseum Hackathon on March 4, 2024 offers an opportunity for developers to showcase their skills, connect with like-minded individuals, and build the future of the Solana ecosystem.

From Hackathon to Startup: Colosseum’s Impact on Solana Projects

🌵 Anza’s Agave Validator Client

Anza, a a next-gen Solana focused development shop formed by ex-Solana Labs executives and engineers, is developing Agave, a validator client forked from the original Solana Labs client.

This initiative will boost client diversity with the expanding array of new clients under development such as Jito, Tinydancer, Sig, and Firedancer.

Anza will fork the current Labs client and continue development under the name Agave with a target release date of July 2024. The current Solana Labs client will no longer be maintained after the release of Agave 1.1.

Led by Jeff Washington, a 3 year vet of Solana Labs engineer, members of the Anza founding team include Stephen Akridge, Jed Halfon, Amber Christiansen, Pankaj Garg, and Jon Cinque as well as a number of core engineers from Solana Labs.

Meet Anza, a New Solana-Focused Dev Shop

💎 Solana Developer News

Metaplex Startup Program
The Metaplex Startup Program provides essential resources like infrastructure support, security audit assistance, and $MPLX grants to NFT-centric startups. The program connects builders with experts for insights into Metaplex Tools and support from experienced founders to achieve product market fit.

Magic Eden Wallet
Magic Eden has introduced the Magic Eden Wallet, a Solana Wallet Adapter compatible multi-chain wallet for NFT collectors with cross-chain swaps, NFT portfolio management, and exclusive perks for users.

Smart Contract Development - Move vs. Rust
A technical deep-dive into Move, a smart contract programming language currently used on Sui and Aptos (and someday Solana), and how it compares to the existing Rust-based model used on Solana.

⚡Quick Hits

Onboarding to GameShift Docs - GameShift

Building your first ZK program on Solana - Zeref

A Developer's Guide to Solana Wallet Adapter with Next 13 - andrewisworking

Solana Scribes Tracks List and Bounties Announced - Superteam

Solflare’s $JUP Airdrop Post Mortem - @vidor_solflare

Token Extensions and Verifiable Builds now supported on Solana.fm - @solanafm

An Introduction to Anchor: A Beginner’s Guide to Building Solana Programs - Helius

$WEN Post Launch Analysis - @weremeow

Breezepay payment gateway adds support for Solana - @paywithbreeze

Where Pyth is Now and Looking Towards 2024 - Pyth

Everstake’s Solana in 2023 Report - Everstake

⚙️ Tools & Resources

Wen New Standard (WNS) is an extremely lightweight NFT standard built on top of Token Extensions. It initializes the Name, Symbol, and Uri as a part of the token itself, with no external metadata accounts or programs needed.

Security-Roadmap-for-Solana-applications is a a special cybersecurity Systematization of Knowledge for Solana applications and protocols for anyone who wants to secure their product and learn security from the best-collected resources.

solana-scripts is a collection of miscellaneous scripts by @WilfredAlmeida_ to help speed up your Solana development. NFT snapshot scripts are already shared and more examples will be added in the future.

galleria is an open source comprehensive portfolio viewer that is built on top of Helius's DAS API. It is designed to provide a seamless experience for viewing all your digital assets.

gfx-perps-python-sdk is an updated Python SDK with examples for Perps trading on GooseFX. This SDK contains 3 classes to interact with the GooseFX on-chain perpetual futures including Perp, Product, and Trader.

🎧 Listen to This

Bankless

Tensor co-founder and CEO Ilja Moisejevs and CTO Richard Wu join Bankless to cover how the different properties and foundation of Solana impact the product decisions that Richard and Ilja have made at Tensor.

What are the first things that someone would notice that's different about Tensor, versus the NFT marketplaces on Ethereum?

How did the $JITO airdrop impact the Tensor ecosystem?

What about the Tensorians, the native PFP NFT of Tensor… who rocks a Tensorian, and why?

Tensor - Solana's NFT Marketplace | Ilja & Richard Wu

Thanks for reading ✌️

I hope you found something useful here! If you have any suggestions or feedback just let me know what you think.