Hello you beautiful builder -

I’m thrilled to announce that my Encode Hackathon project Vanward won the grand prize, and swept every sponsor track, even the ones I didn’t submit it to because it was just that good! 😛

Sadly, it didn’t win any prizes, and I wasn’t even a finalist.

Of course I’m a bit bummed, but there were some crazy good projects submitted and I never enter a hackathon expecting (or even hoping really) to win.

Instead I use it as a deadline to get my project off localhost and out into the world. I think of it as a development sprint to get as much as you can into your project during the duration of the hackathon.

Don’t look at not winning a prize as a setback, but take pride in everything you accomplished and learned just by taking part in it.

Here are the projects that did actually win a prize…

🥇 Encode Summer Hackathon Winners

The Encode Summer Hackathon has come to an end and the winners have been announced! The big winners were dPublisher and HushPay.

dPublisher is a platform for discovering, trading, collecting, and reading digital comics, and a way for publishers to engage with their fans in real-time.

HushPay is a privacy-focused donation platform, built with the Elusiv SDK. It permits users to donate anonymously to a variety of causes while ensuring their personal information remains secure and confidential.

Other sponsor track and bounty winners include:

• Solanoid (Best AI <> Solana Integration)

• Gatelinks (Helius)

• NFT Sketcher (Helius)

• Nonce Wallet Adapter (Phantom)

• Ultra (Wormhole)

• MusicMart (Shyft)

Congrats to all the winners, runners-up, and everyone that submitted a project!

Encode Summer Hackathon Prizewinners and Summary

🧱 The Hidden Costs of Modular Systems

Every day on CT there’s more in the on-going debate on how Ethereum can scale with L2s and a modular architecture vs. Solana, which is an monolithic integrated blockchain.

Both of these approaches have their own benefits and drawbacks. As with everything, the “right” approach depends on your specific needs. Blockchains must abstract infrastructure-level complexity to let developers focus on building real-world apps.

This article from Multicoin Capital addresses the risks of a modular architecture, like increased complexity, and issues like congestion and monetization it does not provide a solution for.

The Hidden Costs of Modular Systems

💎 Solana Developer News

Bankrun for NodeJS
Back in Issue #9 I mentioned Bankrun, a Python wrapper around solana-program-test, and now there is a version for NodeJS. Bankrun lets you test without a local validator, runs ~40 times faster than regular anchor test workflows, automatically loads Anchor programs, and lets you do things that aren’t possible otherwise like jumping back and forth in time or dynamically setting account data.

Solana Apps on Ottr
Ottr has announced the first list of curated and verified dApps integrated in the mobile-native experience of the Ottr app. The first round of apps include Jupiter, Drift, Marinade, Jito, Magic Eden, Tensor, DRiP, and Meteora.

Burner Codes
Burner Codes is a simple burner wallets for the Solana (currently on Devnet) that lets you send and receive SOL in the browser without having to download or install anything. It will generate a random Solana keypair in your browser's "local storage" and a QR code anyone can scan and to receive SOL tokens. (How it works)

⚡Quick Hits

Solana Pay: All You Need To Know - Article

Roundup of tools to track Solana stats, data, and transactions - Tweet

Solana Ecosystem Engineering Interview with Jon Wong - Article

How Cypher Protocol was exploited for over $1 Million - Tweet

How to use Solana transaction requests to control a RaspberryPi - Tweet

⚙️ Tools & Resources

OPOS Outliers is a sample app to showcase the power of compressed NFTs and TipLink to onboard at scale.

Solana Devnet SOL is a collection of the different ways for developers to acquire SOL on Solana devnet.

sol-arc is a proposed framework is to provide a unified interface for on-chain game data using the Entity-Component pattern found in traditional game development.

ledger-solana-sdk is a NodeJS SDK to sign Solana transactions with Ledger.

🎙️ Listen to This

Lighstpeed

Anatoly joins the Lighstpeed podcast to discuss why Solana is uniquely designed to utilize ever-increasing bandwidth and compute, Solana's core thesis, how blockchains benefit from hardware improvements, the fundamental flaws of L2s, Anatoly's favorite applications, decentralization and more!

Anatoly is a legend, you don't want to miss this one!

Solana’s Ultimate Vision | Anatoly Yakovenko

Thanks for reading ✌️

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