codex

Colosseum Codex: Cohort V Demo Day, Solana Microscope, Alpenglow Migration

The Cohort V Demo Day recording is out, with 21 teams in about 48 minutes, so it's a quick way to see what people are building on Solana right now. If you're building for the Crypto World's Fair, the next live workshop is September 29 and the resource kit is linked below.

🔥 Cohort V Demo Day Recording

Colosseum published the full recording of its Accelerator Cohort V Demo Day, the first Colosseum Demo Day held in person. It took place August 26 at Colosseum HQ in San Francisco, and the video runs about 48 minutes across 21 pitches at two minutes each.

Every company on stage earned its spot through the Frontier Hackathon, which Colosseum calls its largest startup competition ever, then spent eight weeks building alongside the Colosseum team in San Francisco. Colosseum describes Cohort V as its "largest and highest-velocity batch yet." The live event was invite-only, so the recording is the first look at the pitches for most of the ecosystem.

Stablecoin payments, tokenized assets, AI agents, and trading-card markets each show up more than once in the batch.

Each team, in presenting order:

1:02 Laso Finance
3:05 Traded
5:10 ODL
7:10 Housd
9:00 Stablecorp
11:15 Zoneless
13:27 Mana
15:38 Fantastical Finance Factory
17:48 Nomu
20:23 Peaks
22:06 Flovia
24:29 Crowdbrain
26:34 Clawpump
28:42 Dropset
31:32 One Arena
33:40 WeLikeSports
36:22 The Syndicate
38:32 DashX
40:53 Senthos
43:04 JK Index
44:43 Cesto

Nine of the 21 list a traction number in Colosseum's Demo Day program, including $750K in monthly volume at Laso, $120M+ at Clawpump, and 62% seven-day retention at The Syndicate. If you have ten minutes, jump to the timestamps closest to what you're building and see who you'd want to talk to.

Colosseum Accelerator Cohort V Demo Day

🔬 Solana Microscope

The Solana Foundation open-sourced Microscope, a free, self-hosted monitoring and alerting tool for Solana programs.

Microscope reads confirmed transactions from a Yellowstone gRPC stream or a standard Solana RPC endpoint and decodes them against the program's IDL. It watches two things:

The program's own instructions and event
The Squads multisig that controls it, with support for Squads v3, v4, and v5.

Results land in a Grafana dashboard, and alerts go out to Slack, Telegram, or PagerDuty.

Setup takes one config file with the program ID, the IDL, an optional multisig, and the alert rules. Alerts can fire on any decoded instruction or event and filter on its fields, so a team can flag a deposit over a set amount or any call that changes who controls the program.

It runs locally with Docker Compose or on AWS or Google Cloud, and a bundled Claude Code skill can handle the setup.

The repo includes a walkthrough against Jupiter Lend on mainnet. It decodes deposits and withdrawals, sends critical alerts on the instructions that change the program's authority, and warns whenever the Squads multisig holding its upgrade authority creates a proposal.

Asymmetric Research tested Microscope and said its skills map alerts to the firm's STRIDE security framework, so responders have context to start from during an incident.

Solana Microscope

🏔️ Alpenglow Migration

Anza laid out how Solana will move from TowerBFT to Alpenglow on the live network, with no restart, no new chain, and no token migration.

On each cluster, the migration feature gate activates at an epoch boundary. After another 5,000 slots, blocks stop carrying user transactions and hold only votes, so anything past that point can be rolled back without losing a transaction a user signed.

Validators then sign a BLS vote on an Alpenglow genesis block, and the genesis certificate forms once 82% of stake signs. They roll back everything after genesis, hand consensus to Votor, and reopen user transactions.

The migration runs first on the Alpenglow community cluster (live since May 2026), then testnet, devnet, and mainnet-beta. Anza will announce the mainnet-beta migration after an observation period.

The Alpenglow Migration: How Solana Swaps Consensus on a Live Network

⭐ Highlights

Comprehensive Developer Resources Kit for Crypto World's Fair Builders - Colosseum
All docs, tutorials, and resources needed to integrate with Solana and other chains are listed here.

How to build a Solana program test suite that catches real bugs - Accretion
A practical guide to 9 testing categories every Solana program needs to catch real vulnerabilities before mainnet.

⚡ Quick Hits

Applications for Turbine Q4 Builders are Open - @solanaturbine

Solana Changelog: September 24 - @solana_devs

How to Monitor a Solana Program with Microscope and Quicknode Solana gRPC - Mike Hale (me!)

Enabling SIMD-0376 Would Allow Signing for System Program ID -
hackhack

Solana ecVRF visual guide - Protocol Lab

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

Line and branch coverage for SBPF programs
You can't easily see which lines of your Solana program your tests actually hit. sbpf-cov maps Mollusk register traces onto debug info kept inside the deployable .so and reports line, function, and branch coverage for C and Rust programs as HTML or LCOV for CI.

A Quasar program for bank-issued fiat stablecoins
Your bank-issued stablecoin needs a way for member banks to mint without each of them holding the mint authority. This Quasar program gives a banking authority control of an SPL mint and lets it grant member banks issuance allowances that reset every period.

A Claude skill that writes Solana programs with audit rules built in
Your AI coding agent can write a Solana program that compiles and still skips ownership checks, canonical bumps, or checked math. Frank Castle's Safe Solana Builder loads security rules drawn from real audit findings for Anchor, native Rust, or Pinocchio, and ships every program with a security checklist.

💓 Ecosystem Pulse

💀 Switchboard shuts down - The oracle said more protocols now license or access data directly, pointing to Hyperliquid's S&P partnership and x402, and that users won't pay what decentralized, sub-second feeds cost to run. It also cited recent exploits. Support ends September 25, and Switchboard recommends migrating to Pyth or RedStone.

🚚 ZetaChain plans to move ZETA to Solana and wind down its L1 - Holders approved the SPL token migration with 99.4% of the vote on September 20, and ZetaChain's private AI app Anuma, which has more than 300,000 users, will move with it.

📅 Event Calendar

Colosseum is running live workshops and office hours for builders during its Crypto World's Fair hackathon, from September 29 to October 5.

Dev Day Cafe, Fort Mason, Sep 29, 17:00 UTC
Solana Foundation event in San Francisco.

Solana Privacy Workshop w/ Helius, Discord, Sep 29, 17:00 UTC
World's Fair workshop on privacy on Solana.

Agent Hackathon, San Francisco, Sep 30, 17:00 UTC
Solana Foundation hackathon in San Francisco.

Tokenization Workshop with the Solana Foundation, Discord, Sep 30, 17:00 UTC
World's Fair workshop on tokenization.

Solana Foundation Office Hours, Discord, Oct 5, 17:00 UTC
World's Fair office hours for builders.

🎧 Listen to This

House of Sol

Angus Scott from the Solana Research Institute joins Ben on the latest House of Sol to talk about public blockchain, financial market infrastructure and what happens when the two converge.

They get into MEV, stablecoins, risk and regulation, why these problems look familiar, and how onchain infrastructure could change the dynamics of established financial networks.

How Public Blockchain Could Change Financial Infrastructure, with Angus Scott