#humblebrag

Each week I put this newsletter together just to share the things I found interesting and that I think would be helpful to other Solana developers. It’s my way of trying to give back to the Solana community.

I’m not in it for fame & fortune (would be nice though) so any time I hear a subscriber tell me they got something out of it I want to keep going. It’s great when a biggie in the ecosystem gives it a shoutout too.

Big thanks to Kash (SuperteamDAO) for including my little newsletter among some heavy hitters!

I promised you last week this issue would be jam-packed again, so here’s the rest of the latest Solana news (that isn’t about me)…

🥧 "Grow The Pie": Jupiter Start

One of the biggest challenges faced by new projects is gaining visibility and trust in the crowded and competitive Solana ecosystem. 

Jupiter Start provides these projects with a platform to showcase their ideas, tokenomics, and other project information to foster growth, trust, community engagement, and education within the Solana ecosystem with the community playing a crucial role in proposing and vetting projects.

The five aspects of Jupiter Start are:

1. Jup Community Introductions: A platform for new projects to be introduced to the Jupiter community, where they can share key information about their project, including tokenomics and distribution of ownership.

2. Jup Prelisting: Allows new tokens to be safely traded on Jupiter. This feature includes early token listing on the platform, with necessary user warnings due to potential low liquidity of new tokens.

3. Jup Educate: Focuses on educating traders and users about significant projects in the Solana ecosystem. It includes featuring projects on Jupiter's social media and website, and rewarding users for engaging with educational content.

4. Jup Launchpad: A future initiative to help projects launch their tokens and gain community support. This aspect is more funding-oriented.

5. Jup Atlas: Another future component related to funding, aimed at allowing the community to participate in seed funding for early-stage projects, akin to VC-style investments.

This program not only helps projects overcome the challenges of visibility and trust, but also contributes to the sustainability of the Solana ecosystem.

"Grow The Pie" Update 2: Jupiter Start

💯 Retroactive Public Goods Funding Winners: Round 1

In Issue #27 I shared the announcement of the Solana Retro Public Goods Funding program by OpenBlock Labs where $250,000 of funding was allocated for projects that have already made an impact on the Solana community.

Now the top 10 winners of the winners have been announced:

1. OpenBook has traded nearly $900M in volume as a community-led public good

2. Cubik bolsters the developer ecosystem and has allocated $150K to Solana community projects

3. SOLfees.fyi showcases Solana's cost-efficiency by calculating how much your Solana wallet has spent on transaction fees

4. Anchor is a widely used open-source tool that is vital to Solana developers

5. Código, released just a month ago, simplifies Solana development by generating boilerplate code

6. Marinade is a community-funded DAO and staking automation platform enhancing Solana's decentralization

7. CandyPay revolutionizes payments on Solana serving over 600 businesses & creators

8. Sollinked boosts user experience with its free, effective email gating service

9. Open-clockwork on-chain automation for Solana is a community-driven fork of Clockwork after its original team stepped back

10. Solana Playground makes Solana development easy with an in-browser IDE

Each of these projects are shaping the future of the Solana ecosystem and have proven themselves as valuable resources in the Solana ecosystem.

💎 Solana Developer News

Magic Eden Wallet
Magic Eden is launching a private bets of a new cross-chain wallet to facilitate trading of NFTs and token swaps across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon. Users can download the browser extension and apply for early access.

Secrets of Rapid Growth on Solana 
@ZheSolworks built the Solana Airdrop Checker tool (see the Tools section below for the link) which has 300,000 users and got him 5,000 Twitter followers in less than a week! This is a recap of the 10 key insights from an interview by @SlorgoftheSlugs on how he built and grew his app so rapidly.

Sol Docs Bot
Sol Docs Bot is a custom GPT that provides professional and technical answers based on Solana documentation from multiple sources that’s ready for testing and feedback.

Wormhole Labs
Wormhole Labs, a technology company founded by former engineers and product managers from Jump, announced its launch today after a period of stealth to continue growing the cross-chain Wormhole protocol. Wormhole is open-source and provides developer docs and an SDK.

Riverguard Security Tool
Riverguard, by Neodyme, is a new security tool for Solana program developers that automates testing by using a live transaction fuzzer. Unlike typical fuzzers that randomly flip bits, Riverguard uses specially crafted "Fuzzcases" designed to simulate specific type of attacks.

⚡Quick Hits

Solana ecosystem app dashboard - Hedgehog

Summary of 15 insights from a16z on hiring in Web3 - @namanchordia19

mtndao v5 announced for February 2024 in Salt Lake City - @mtndao

Phantom adds new in-wallet Cross-Chain Swapper - @phantom

Tutorial: How to create an on-chain game in 10 minutes - YouTube

“Solana Night” Community event in Vancouver on Dec 6 - @vibes8760

Solana Creator Tooling, Ecosystem, & Possibilities Reddit AMA - Reddit

Developer interest on Solana is increasing (stats) - @jacobvcreech

A Guide to Solana for Ethereum Analysts - Crypto Data Bytes

What is Firedancer? A Deep Dive into Solana 2.0 - Helius

⚙️ Tools & Resources

Token Metadata docs from Metaplex now include examples in Rust thanks to @0x_febo.

borsh-cpp20 is a C++20 implementation of the Borsh serializer / deserializer for Solana programs written in C++.

Solana Airdrop Checker lets you check address eligibility for different Solana airdrops.

Code Payments micropayments app is now fully open source.

🎧 Listen to This

Lightspeed

Emon Motamedi joins us to discuss how Solana Labs hopes to find the next killer app. Emon leads product at Solana Labs and is the founder of Reddit's Digital Currency team. In this episode, we discuss Solana Labs' new incubator, finding the next killer app, multichain strategies, what crypto teams get wrong and more!

Finding Solana's Next Killer App | Emon Motamedi (Solana Labs)

Thanks for reading ✌️

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