codex

Colosseum Codex: 100k TPS, State of Solana Q2, Cyfrin Rust Programming Basics

100k TPS, State of Solana Q2, Cyfrin Rust Programming Basics Course, Breakpoint 2025 Giveaway, Epoch Town Discord

Mike Hale

21 Aug 2025 — 5 min read

Here's what's featured in this week's issue:

Solana hits 100k TPS on mainnet... sort of.
Messari's State of Solana Q2 Report
Solana Foundation sponsors Rust Programming Basics course on Cyfrin Updraft
Helius and Blueshift are giving away 2 trips to Solana Breakpoint
Epoch Town Discord server for Solana developers opens

💥 100k TPS

On August 17, Solana (sort of) briefly crossed 100k TPS on mainnet.

Validator “Dr. Cavey" filled blocks with votes, a few normal transactions, and a large number of lightweight “no-op” calls, reaching a block high of 107,540 TPS. The network absorbed the spike smoothly, with subsequent leaders producing blocks without delay.

Most of the transactions processed were no-ops, which stress the system but don’t perform meaningful operations. Actual economic throughput is far lower. Once validator votes are excluded, Solana averages 1,000 to 1,400 TPS.

Others also pointed out that slots during the test took longer than the 400ms ideal, with median delivery times above 800ms.

This means the milestone should be viewed as a stress test, not as evidence of sustained, user-driven activity at 100k TPS, but shows that the core transaction pipeline is capable of processing at that level.

The gap between burst tests and real usage will come through major upgrades like the p-token standard, Alpenglow, Firedancer, and other network improvements.

While this wasn't Solana’s true 100k TPS moment, it's a peek at what the network is designed to do: improve throughput, reduce latency, and ensure high TPS can be sustained without congestion.

Solana smashes 107,000 TPS milestone sparking questions about real world use

📃 State of Solana Q2

Q2 2025 was a transitional quarter for Solana, with a decline in speculative activity but steady growth in DeFi, RWAs, and staking, alongside infrastructure upgrades that aim to deliver sub-second finality and 100k+ TPS capacity.

Key Highlights:

DeFi TVL rose by 30% quarter-over-quarter, reaching $8.6 billion.
Application Revenue Capture Ratio climbed significantly from 126.5% to 211%.
Real-world asset (RWA) value on Solana increased 23.9% to $390.6 million.
Liquid staking penetration improved from 10.4% to 12.2% of circulating SOL supply.
SOL’s market cap grew 29.8% quarter-over-quarter to $82.8 billion

Network upgrades were a central focus.

Anza introduced Alpenglow, a new consensus protocol projected to cut finality latency from 12.8 seconds to 100–150 milliseconds while reducing costs and ledger size.

Firedancer, Jump Crypto’s validator client, continued development with Frankendancer already live on mainnet securing about 11% of stake.

Block capacity also expanded through new SIMDs, raising limits to 60 million compute units, with proposals under review to push this to 100 million.

Overall, Q2 marked slower speculative activity but steady growth in DeFi, real-world assets, and staking, alongside major infrastructure upgrades that aim to deliver sub-second finality and higher TPS capacity.

To dive deeper into the data you can read the full report from Messari.

State of Solana Q2 2025

🏫 Rust Programming Basics

The Solana Foundation has teamed up with Cyfrin Updraft to sponsor a new Rust Programming Basics course.

Cyfrin, known for its blockchain developer education, has built a 91-lesson program covering the essentials of Rust, including variables, functions, traits, error handling, and Rust’s unique ownership model, all core skills for building on Solana.

The four-hour course is designed for beginners and is available in more than 20 languages, giving developers a clear path into Solana development.

With clear explanations and hands-on examples, the course is intended for beginner developers who may be new to Rust but want to quickly gain the skills needed to work on Solana.

Cyfrin has already teased more Solana-specific courses in the future to give developers the tools they need to grow in the ecosystem.

Cyfrin Updraft Rust Programming Basics

🛫 Breakpoint 2025 Giveaway

Helius is celebrating the open-source contributors driving Solana forward with a fully sponsored trip to Breakpoint 2025 in Abu Dhabi (Dec 11–13). One developer who has made a meaningful impact on Solana will receive:

An event ticket
Round-trip airfare
Four nights at a nearby hotel

Applications will be judged on the impact of your contributions, financial need, and motivations for attending. The deadline to apply is September 18, 2025, with winners announced October 31.

And Blueshift has stepped up to match Helius’ offer, offering a second all expenses paid trip available for Solana OSS builders.

If you’ve been contributing to Solana and want to make it to Breakpoint, this is your chance!

Solana Breakpoint 2025 Giveaway

👥 Epoch Town Discord

Epoch Town is a new Discord server hub for Solana developers, artists, entrepreneurs, and builders of all kinds.

The goal is to make it easier for newcomers to connect, ask questions, and find collaborators for projects or hackathons. It’s designed as a welcoming, beginner-friendly space for learning and building together.

Come on down, to epochtown

⚡ Quick Hits

Deep Dive of the State of Developer Tooling on Solana - Superteam

Inside Heaven’s Flywheel: How a New Solana Launchpad is Rewiring the Meme Economy - SolanaFloor

Liminal Collective's Bi-Weekly Thought Dump #1 - @Liminal_HQ

Triton One introduces beta access for Old-Faithfull gRPC streams and Fumarole - @triton_one

Tearing Down the Gates of Learning - @blueshift_gg

Xitadel Officially Joins Chainlink Build and Build on Solana - @xitadel_fi

Milliseconds Matter: The Fastest Solana RPC Provider, Verified - QuickNode

Case Study: xStocks - Tokenizing Equities on Solana - Solana Foundation

DeCharge Joins Colosseum while Powering Up the US (video) - DeCharge

An incomplete map of the Solana ecosystem - @MessariCrypto

⚙️ Tools & Resources

kora eliminates the SOL requirement for Solana transactions, letting users pay fees in any token while you handle the SOL behind the scenes.

alpamayo is a lightweight drop-in replacement for the Solana RPC stack, designed for frozen data (blocks, transactions, etc.).

Solana Merkle Airdrop Distributor is a create-solana-dapp template that distributes SOL to many recipients efficiently using a Merkle tree with only the 32‑byte Merkle root stored on-chain using Anchor, Codama, and Gill.

💸 Funding

Galaxy Ventures invested in DoubleZero, a decentralized fiber network aimed at solving bandwidth and latency bottlenecks that limit blockchain scaling. DoubleZero will use the investment to build a fiber-based routing layer leveraging dark fiber and high-frequency trading infrastructure, providing low-latency, high-bandwidth connectivity for validators and other latency-sensitive applications.

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

Skytrade is hiring a Blockchain and Full Stack Engineer Intern
Figment is hiring a Engineering Manager, Protocol Indexing
Phantom is hiring a Backend Engineer, Blockchain Data Team
Helius is hiring a Rust Engineer and a Senior Rust Engineer

📅 Event Calendar

Ship or Sink, Warsaw, Poland, Sept 5
Superteam Poland is hosting a Solana-powered boat party limited to 250 attendees on a first-come, first-served basis. Guests will also receive a Solana onboarding package with merchandise and resources, making the evening both a community gathering and a celebration of web3 culture.

🎧 Listen to This

The Latest Development

In this episode of Latest Development, Dirt talks to Chase Barker, former Solana Foundation dev advocate and now part of the Solana Mobile team, about Seeker, the new crypto-native phone.

They dive deep into why mobile is the next frontier for Web3, what makes Seeker different, and how the DApp Store could open up new distribution paths for developers.

From hackathons and hardware to mentorship and Solana’s future, this is a wide-ranging convo on zero-to-one building, product design, crypto UX, and why crypto is finally breaking into your pocket.

The Future of Crypto is Mobile w/ Chase Barker of Solana Mobile

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