👋🏼Hello you beautiful builder!

Just a quick note that I’m shifting the day this newsletter goes out from Thursdays (sometimes Friday) to Tuesdays (and sometimes Monday).

Here’s this weeks roundup…

🚌 New Solana Developer Education

freeCodeCamp

freeCodeCamp is a popular platform for learning various programming and web development topics, and it's known for its structured curriculum, hands-on projects, and active community.

Now they are offering a complete Solana Curriculum funded by the Solana Foundation.

It offers an interactive way to learn Solana's blockchain protocol and the tool ecosystem by building a series of 15 interactive projects focusing on learning the Solana protocol and its tools.

Through these projects, you’ll learn how to build and deploy smart contracts, develop dApps, and use Solana's command line tools.

Some of the projects included in the curriculum are:

• Building a "Hello World" smart contract

• Working with Solana's token program to mint fungible tokens

• Using the Metaplex SDK to mint NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens)

• Building games like Tic-Tac-Toe and an Anchor leaderboard

• Deploying applications to Devnet.

Introducing the Solana Curriculum: Smart Contracts, dApps, and Command Line Tools

Unboxed Advanced Lessons on SolDev

For more experienced developers looking to level up, Unboxed has added 4 new Advanced Solana Programming lessons to their popular course.

The Program Architecture lesson covers different architectural considerations and optimizations related to memory, storage size, and concurrency.

The Oracles lesson guides you through understanding the use of oracles and oracle networks and utilizing Switchboard feeds in your programs.

The Verifiable Randomness lesson explains why randomness is problematic on the blockchain and how to overcome this challenge, and how to use VRF such as the one offered by Switchboard.

The Compressed NFT lesson provides a comprehensive guide on state compression and compressed NFTs using Metaplex's Bubblegum program and SDK.

Solana Development Course

👛 New Wallet Features

Phantom Shortcuts

Phantom is introducing "Shortcuts", a feature to enhance the utility of NFTs and offers a more interactive and informed experience with digital collectibles.

It acts as a "Linktree" for NFTs for associated links of an NFT collection (like official websites, social media, chat groups) that users can access directly from their wallets.

Shortcuts is currently in beta with five launch partners, but four more projects will be integrated soon.

Introducing Shortcuts

MetaMask Snaps Solana Support

MetaMask, a crypto wallet traditionally associated with EVM-compatible blockchains like Ethereum, has introduced a new feature called "Snaps" that allows for expanded integrations.

Solflare has developed a custom MetaMask Snap, enabling users to link their MetaMask wallet to Solana-based decentralized apps (dApps).

This step-by-step guide from QuickNode walks you though how to integrate the Solflare Solana Wallet Snap into MetaMask, bridge Ethereum assets to Solana, manage a Solana token portfolio, and interact with Solana dApps all within the MetaMask interface.

How to Connect Your MetaMask Wallet in Solana dApps

💎 Solana Developer News

Solana's Past, Present & Future
Hell hath frozen over! This unbiased, FUD-free post from Bankless (Yes, I said Bankless!) digs into some of the challenges Solana has faced, how it’s developer community has remained strong despite multiple setbacks, and what that could mean for the future of Solana.

Buildhive
Buildhive is a Discord for builders to get critical feedback on projects while earning points for posting their own idea, product, or launch, and by giving feedback to other builders.

Solana On-chain Achievements & Rankings
SOAR is a new open-source primitive to track players' identity, leaderboards, progressions, automatize NFT/SPL token rewards for games on Solana. SOAR lets developers aggregate wallets into unique players ID, set up leaderboards and progression systems , trigger automatic payouts, and check players' performance.

Exploring The Design Space Of DePIN Networks
This report covers the challenges and considerations in designing decentralized permissionless infrastructure networks (DePINs), many of which are #OPOS. Helium, who migrated to Solana is mentioned as an example. It also touches on token design implications, the balance between incentivizing contributors and maintaining network maturity, and the decisions involved in scaling DePINs.

⚡Quick Hits

The Solana explorer landscape from the perspective of a dev - Tweet

Shyft launches Solana Brainfood bite-sized video tutorials - YouTube

Triton One launches new high-performance tools and services - Article

Building NFT Onchain from Scratch in Solana - YouTube

Solana v1.17 adds Poseiden Syscall - Tweet

Solana University Accelerator teams showcase - Website

Top 10 countries by registrations for the Hyperdrive Solana Hackathon - Tweet

⚙️ Tools & Resources

IDL Type Generator generates Typescript types from your Anchor IDL.

solana-wallet-adapter-mantine-ui is a wrapper for the Solana Wallet Adapter that works with the latest version of Mantine UI.

Code Micropayments SDK it a Permissionless micropayments service for the web with charges as low as 5 cents. Developers can request early access to try the service.

Saganize is a Kotlin SDK that enables in-app transactions for Solana Mobile dApps, allowing users to interact with transactions within their app, without without having to build an independent wallet. (Early Access)

McSwap is a tool to support trustless cNFT trades ready to be skinned and hosted for your own community.

🎙️ Listen to This

Unlayered

Solarplex has been one of Solana's most successful projects at the intersection of crypto and social. In spite of still being in an invite-only beta, Solarplex's userbase has been on a tear, generating tens of thousands of unique posts each week.

Viksit, the Founder of Solarplex, shares his views on crypto social, Solarplex's unique value proposition to communities, the role of cNFTs in creating novel experiences, and where he sees Solarplex going long-term.

Viksit's Vision to Bond Communities Through Crypto

Thanks for reading ✌️

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