What a week for Solana!

Solana has notched some big wins recently, and coming off the recent announcement Shopify’s integration of Solana Pay are two more for Solana.

The biggest news was that payments giant Visa is scaling their USDC settlement pilot to include the Solana blockchain where its partners can choose to send or receive USDC settlement payments.

This makes Visa one of the first major payments companies to directly utilize Solana for live settlement payments between its clients at scale.

And then there is MakerDAO, Ethereum’s second largest DeFi app, which is in the process of implementing “Endgame”, a governance and tokenomics upgrade to a new blockchain, codenamed cleverly enough “NewChain”.

You’d expect an announcement that this will be yet another Layer-2 App chain that settles back to Ethereum, right?

Nope!

Maker co-founder Rune Christensen has proposed a fork of the Solana codebase that will “allow the ecosystem to use hard forks to gracefully recover from the most severe form of governance attacks or technical failures.”

The three major reasons noted in the proposal were:

1. The technical quality of the Solana codebase, as it is highly optimized for the purpose of operating a singular, highly efficient blockchain.

2. The Solana ecosystem has proven its resilience. Despite issues and hardships, the project still has a thriving developer community.

3. Existsing examples of the Solana codebase being forked and adapted to act as appchains like Pyth which runs its own adapted version of Solana to act as its backend.

While this move wouldn’t directly benefit Solana (and it may not even happen at all), a project this size choosing Solana for it’s core product is a signal to other project to seriously consider what Solana has to offer.

Solana may also benefit from changes and enhancements made to the code base by the Maker team.

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said Maker’s consideration was a win for open-source technology and had “nothing to do with Solana’s mainnet or sol vs. eth”

But not everyone is on-board with the idea…

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin dumped $580,000 worth of MakerDAO’s MKR tokens on the news, stating that Maker is “torpedoing itself in weird directions” 🤷

The good news kept rolling in too. Some other notable wins are:

• Solana DeFi continues its comeback.

• CNBC drops Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin coverage for $SOL

• Maple Finance returns to Solana

💫Hyperdrive Hackathon

The next online Solana Hackathon kicks off… yesterday!

The Hyperdrive Hackathon is an online, global Solana hackathon that runs from Sept. 6 to Oct. 15 with $1 million in prizes and seed funding up for grabs.

Tracks and sponsors include:

• Mobile Payments (Magic Eden)

• Finance/Payments (Helio)

• AI (UXD)

• DePIN (io.net)

• Crypto Infrastructure (Ironforge)

• Gaming (Phantom)

• DAOs & Network States (Balaji & The Network State)

Solana Hyperdrive Online Hackathon

💎 Solana Developer News

Ackee Autumn School of Solana 2023
Ackee is offering a free 9 week course to take your development skills to the next level and get a certification in the Rust language and Solana blockchain.

Note: I was a part of the Winter School of Solana 2023 cohort, and this is a hands-on dive into Solana development where you’ll learn real-world programs. I highly recommend being a part of this program.

Rust + Solana Advanced Development Course
IdeaSoft Career Booster is offering a free Solana Advanced Development course for devs with a strong grasp of blockchain tech looking to level up their Solana development skills.

Metaplex August Roundup
The Metaplex Foundation shipped a major update to their Developer Hub with new documentation and examples, an updated version of Bubblegum for compressed NFTs, and a Token Metadata Rust SDK.

Gum Shuts Down
Another Solana project is shutting down. The Gum team is stepping away from all development blaming adoption that will eventually come, but “in the long term instead of the next six months.” All the software for Gum Protocol, Session Keys, and Wordcel is fully open source for the community to fork and continue development.

⚡Quick Hits

Mobile focused resources for Solana builders - Tweet

Superteam Build idea bank of 200+ project ideas - Article

Creating Solana webhooks with Helius, TypeScript and Rust - Article

Network States on Solana - Tweet

Making real-world blockchain solutions possible (Interview with Raj Gokal) - Article

More Breakpoint 2023 featured speakers announced - Tweet

Portal cross-chain gaming ecosystem integrates Solana - Tweet

Sig Validator's engineering updates Part 1: Solana's Gossip Protocol - Article

⚙️ Tools & Resources

trdelnik is a Rust based testing framework providing several convenient developer tools for testing Solana programs written in Anchor including property-based and stateful fuzz-testing, a developer client and console, and a ledger explorer to view changes.

borsh-schema-utils provide additional utility for serializing and deserializing from borsh to JSON and vice versa in Rust without needing to manage generated code.

🎙️ Listen to This

Web3 with a16z

This all-new deep-dive, hallway-style chat features a16z crypto general partner Ali Yahya and deal team partner Guy Wuollet, in a conversation with Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.

The first half of the episode is a discussion/debate blockchain architectures including of course Solana & Ethereum, and the second half of the episode covers company, community, and ecosystem building.

Debating Blockchain Architectures (with Anatoly Yakovenko)

And this…

Solfate

You get a twofer this week because I had to feature this one too. I was a part of cohort 2 of the WBA program, and I’m now a part of the Artisan Guild so I want you hear all the details from my friend Jeff!

Jeff (@japarjam), Co-founder of the Web3 Builders Alliance, shares his background of not only coming from outside the tech industry as a traditional educator, but also his experience with cancer.

He talks about how the cadets in each WBA cohort have to prove themselves in a few different ways: from simply showing up every day, to their initial screening process. Jeff and WBA are also cooking up a few new opportunities for their graduates.

The new “Artisan group” is a small group of WBA graduates that are teaming together for employment by the WBA. These select individuals are going to continue to work together after completing their cohort to continue to build projects for the rest of the Solana ecosystem as part of the new WBA dev shop.

The Artisan group already have a few very cool products they are working on.

What does it take to run a blockchain school? (Jeff from Web3 Builders Alliance)

Thanks for reading ✌️

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