codex

Colosseum Codex: 100M CU Blocks, Staking Economy Report, RPC Data

100M CU Blocks, Blockworks Staking Economy Report, Solana RPC Data

Solana just made itself measurably faster, and Colosseum just made it easier to get in the arena without having to wait for the next hackathon! The 100M CU block upgrade is just one of several planned upgrades to make Solana even more performant.

Colosseum's Eternal hackathon is live again. Unlike the other flagship hackathons, Eternal is a perpetual, on-demand competition that fills the gap between them. Any crypto founder can kick off a 4-week product sprint whenever they're ready.

The prizes are the same caliber as the hackathon with an opportunity for $250k in funding, a seat in Colosseum's next accelerator batch, and the $25k Eternal Award for the top submission.

Builders are shipping high-potential startups all year round, and Colosseum feels they deserve an ongoing shot at capital and support rather than having to time their launch around a competition window.

If you've participated in a previous hackathon you don't need to resubmit your existing product to enter Eternal, unless you've made significant progress or pivoted to something new in the last 6 months.

🔥 100M CU Blocks

Solana raised maximum block capacity from 60 million to 100 million compute units (CUs), and it landed on mainnet with no issues or breaking changes for applications, wallets, or indexers.

Compute units are how Solana meters the work a transaction performs. Every block has a budget, and once a leader fills it, the rest of the queue waits for the next slot. Raising the ceiling to 100M CUs means a leader can pack roughly two thirds more work into the same 400 milliseconds.

The effect showed up within minutes. Jupiter's validator produced the first block to break the old 60M limit. About a minute later, Staking Facilities filled the new 100M budget almost completely. Block CU usage can be viewed at ultrasoundsol, which showed blocks running in the 75M to 80M CU range shortly after activation.

The case for the increase rested on a number the network had already generated on its own. Between July 2025, when SIMD-0256 took the limit from 50M to 60M, and this week, 11.2% of blocks used 56M compute units or more, meaning roughly one block in nine was running inside 7% of the cap.

The gating factor was networking, not demand. Bigger blocks mean more data to push across the validator set in the same 400ms window, and the upgrade waited on XDP, a kernel-bypass mode that lets a node process packets without routing them through the normal Linux network stack. More than 70% of mainnet stake had XDP enabled before activation, and Anza's Agave v4.2 turns it on by default going forward.

Only the block-wide limit moved. The max writable account compute units stayed at 12M, max vote compute units stayed at 36M, and the 100MB block accounts data size delta was untouched. That means a single hot account, a busy AMM pool, a widely read oracle, still caps out at 12M CUs of writes per block.

The new 40M CUs of headroom is parallel capacity for transactions touching different accounts, not more room for contention on one. SIMD-0306, which would raise the per-account cap to 40M CUs, is the proposal aimed at that gap.

Nothing is required of developers. The block capacity increase is a validator-side parameter, and existing programs inherit the headroom automatically. What changes is the shape of congestion. Priority fees are a function of how far demand outstrips supply in a given slot, so the same burst of demand now clears at a lower price point.

This was an under the hood upgrade, but block capacity is a direct lever on Solana throughput. More CUs per block means more TPS and keeps pushing the network toward more parallel workloads, giving high-frequency trading and payments apps a way to grow without competing for the same blockspace.

Raising Solana's block limit from 60M to 100M compute units

📊 Staking Economy Report

Blockworks Research published a breakdown of Solana's staking economy showing priority fees now make up roughly 73% of validator operator revenue, even though stakers still get 98% of their tracked revenue from declining SOL issuance.

Aggregate staking APY has fallen from 7.13% to 5.43% over the past year, making the gap between validators matter more than it used to.

Marinade's Stake Auction Marketplace (SAM) is built to capture that gap. Validators bid competitively for Marinade's stake using revenue that can include priority fees, with bids backed by onchain bonds and paid straight to stakers. SAM has paid out $27.5M since launch, and Marinade Native has beaten the network staking baseline by an average of 58 basis points, posting a positive premium on 84% of days.

SIMD-123, which would standardize how validators share fee revenue with stakers onchain, looks likely to complement SAM rather than replace it, leaving SAM as the competitive layer that sets how much of that revenue validators are willing to share.

Issuance keeps shrinking, so the choice of validator to stake with is a real yield decision, favoring staking products built to pass through fee revenue.

Solana’s Staking Economy: From Issuance to Fees

📡 RPC Data

Solana launched a live RPC performance dashboard at solana.com/data, benchmarking Alchemy, Helius, Quicknode, and Triton One side by side in near real time.

The page covers 11 standard JSON-RPC methods across seven regions, run on infrastructure from GCP, AWS, and bare-metal providers, so the comparison reflects real network conditions rather than a single vendor's home turf.

On the RPC tab, you can set the time frame, region, infra, and method to test each provider under the exact conditions that match your own setup. Every methodology is published alongside the results, so you can see exactly how a number was produced instead of taking a ranking on faith.

It's worth actually playing with the variables since results by provider can shift a lot depending on the region, infra, and method you pick. What matters is the one that matches your own use case.

Solana RPC Data

⭐ Highlights

▶️ Set Up Your Solana Mobile Development Environment - beeman‎.‎dev
A video tutorial walking through setting up the local Android toolchain for Solana Mobile development.

Colosseum: The Turning Point for Credible - @crediblefin
Despite three earlier rejections, Credible's acceptance into Colosseum's Accelerator was the turning point that opened the doors to MetaDAO, a raise, and the growth it's seeing today.

Introducing MagicBlock BUILD - @magicblock
BUILD is a developer hub where builders can join hackathons, networking programs, and IRL events for rewards.

⚡ Quick Hits

The UX debt holding Solana back from the next billion users - @PauluneMoon

How to Build a Solana Trading Bot with the Tokens API and Metis Swap API - Mike Hale (me!)

▶️ 3 Ways to Upload Your Programs IDL - @WhiteMoonDev

▶️ Solana Escrow Architecture Explained: Make, Take, Refund - 100xSOL

Solana Visual Hands-on - @yuki_web3_jp

▶️ How to build a PolyMarket/Kalshi style betting market on Solana - Quicknode

Raydium Permissioned AMMs: KYC-Gated Pools for Regulated Assets on Solana - Stacksmith

Solana Changelog: July 30 - @solana_devs

Want early access to the latest products launching from Colosseum?

We're looking for alpha testers to be among the first to try what we're building!

Apply Now

⚙️ Tools & Resources

Slate - A Rust tool that answers what an account looked like at a past slot, not just its current state. It streams live account writes from Yellowstone gRPC into ClickHouse indexed by pubkey and slot, then serves historical lookups over a standard Solana JSON-RPC interface with an asOfSlot parameter.

Parallax - A fixture-based testing harness for LiteSVM that lets you write on-chain program tests as install fixtures, execute instructions, assert outcomes. It runs with identical semantics across Rust, Kit, and Web3.js, enforces real runtime behavior like rent and ownership, and supports spoofed signers, mainnet state capture and replay, and time control for adversarial testing.

Solana Paymaster - A paymaster that lets accounts with zero SOL send USDT without needing a native gas token. Built on Kora and Tether's Wallet Development Kit, it cosigns each transaction as fee payer, fronts the SOL for fees and rent, and collects the equivalent in USDT in the same transaction.

xark - A Rust toolkit for writing, compiling, proving, and verifying zero-knowledge circuits without a separate circuit language. Circuits are written as ordinary Rust, type-checked and compiled through rustc, then carried through a pipeline from MIR to xark-IR to R1CS to Groth16 proofs over BN254 that verify on Solana.

💓 Ecosystem Pulse

🛑 Typhoon Framework Discontinued - Aursen will contribute to Quasar, Blueshift's Solana program framework, going forward, folding some of Typhoon's improvements into Quasar before its first release.

⏸️ Solflare Card Paused - Card issuer Kulipa is winding down over solvency issues, not a Solflare Wallet issue. Because the card was built self-custodial from the start no user funds were at risk, and a rebuilt card program with the same self-custodial model is set to launch within weeks.

🎧 Listen to This

Latency

Latency with Taylor Fox is a new podcast covering the consumer crypto products being built on Solana, with Fox sitting down each episode with the founders shipping them to talk distribution, why they chose to build onchain, and what it actually takes to get people to care.

This episode features Reid Moncada, CEO of Fitted, the fashion app that rewards users with its FITCOIN token for daily tasks and style quests and gives every user an embedded Solana wallet.

Moncada traces his path from running a college laundry service to building Fitted, and gets into obsession as a founder trait, his distribution strategy, and how he thinks about weaving crypto into a consumer product instead of bolting it on.

How Crypto and NFTs Supercharge Consumer Apps - Reid Moncada

📅 Event Calendar

Colosseum Demo Day: Accelerator Cohort V, San Francisco, CA, Aug 26
Colosseum hosts its first in-person demo day, where 21 teams from the Frontier Hackathon pitch after eight weeks building in San Francisco. Doors open at 10:00 AM with pitches starting at 11:00 AM, followed by a founder mixer lunch. Registration requires host approval and is aimed at investors, operators, and builders in the Solana ecosystem.