Colosseum Codex: Rust Foundation, Blueshift ecVRF, BAM Preconfirmations

Solana joining the Rust Foundation is a big move, because the board seat gives it a say in how the Rust ecosystem it runs on gets funded, secured, and maintained. Blueshift's solana-ecvrf is the other big one this week, since a program can verify its own randomness without an oracle or extra infrastructure.

🦀 Rust Foundation

The Solana Foundation is now a Platinum member of the Rust Foundation, the independent nonprofit that stewards the Rust programming language. 

We’re thrilled to welcome Solana Foundation and NVIDIA as Platinum members of the Rust Foundation. Solana is one of the most active, fastest-growing developer ecosystems built natively on Rust, and its investment, including years of support as a RustConf sponsor, reflects how deeply Rust is woven into its business. - Dr. Rebecca Rumbu, Executive Director and CEO Rust Foundation

Platinum is the Rust Foundation's highest membership tier and comes with a dedicated seat on the foundation's Board of Directors. The seat gives the Solana Foundation a vote on how the Rust Foundation runs and spends its money. 

Decisions about the language itself stay with the Rust Project's own teams, which operate separately from the foundation.

The Rust Foundation funds Rust's maintainers, runs security work through its Security Initiative, and pays for the infrastructure the language depends on. That includes crates.io, the registry where crates like anchor-lang, pinocchio, and solana-program are published.

Solana Foundation VP of Technology Jacob Creech said, "Rust has been foundational to Solana from the beginning, giving developers the performance, safety, and reliability needed to build a high-throughput network and the many applications running on it." 

Solana's usage of Rust continues to expand across payments, decentralized finance, consumer applications, and emerging areas like AI.

This is Solana betting on Rust for the long haul. The board seat doesn't give it a direct vote on the language itself, but it does give it a say in what the foundation pays for, like maintainers, security work, and crates.io, all things Solana developers depend on.

Rust Foundation Announces Solana Foundation and NVIDIA as Platinum Members

🎲 Blueshift's Solana ecVRF

Blueshift released solana-ecvrf, an open-source Rust crate and TypeScript SDK that lets a Solana program check a verifiable random function (VRF) proof itself. The existing VRF options, Switchboard VRF and MagicBlock's Ephemeral VRF, rely on their own off-chain oracles to produce proofs.

Gachas, raffles, and loot boxes only work if nobody, including the operator, can predict or pick the result. Without a VRF, a bot can simulate a pull and submit it only when it lands something rare, which was a flaw in early Metaplex Candy Machine mints. 

The prover's key is a regular Solana keypair from solana-keygen. Offchain, the prover generates an 80-byte proof for an input the program can rebuild from its own state. The program checks that proof against the stored public key and gets back a 64-byte random value. 

Only one output verifies for a given key and input, so the prover can't reroll for a better result. The verifying instruction needs no signer and no accounts beyond the program's own.

Until now, a program had to compute SHA-512 in software, which cost close to 200,000 CU per verification. The sol_sha512 syscall cuts each digest to under 100 CU. It activates on mainnet with Agave 4.3, and the crate can't deploy anywhere the syscall is inactive.

Verify your own randomness on Solana

🏪 BAM Preconfirmations

Jito's Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM) launched Preconfirmations, a stream of the transactions a BAM-enabled leader has committed to executing, sent out before those transactions are shredded. 

When a BAM validator is leader, the BAM Node receives orderflow, schedules it, and sends the batch to the leader. The leader commits to executing it in that order and confirms back to the BAM Node, which streams the preconfirmation to co-located distributors that serve subscribers. 

The BAM Verifier checks the resulting blocks against those commitments, and a validator that deviates can be disconnected. A preconfirmation isn't finality. The leader can still skip its slot or land on a fork.

Searchers, traders, and apps subscribe through RPC providers acting as distributors, using their existing billing. The distributors set pricing. Validators are opted in by default, and their share is paid slot by slot through priority fees on a market-tick program transaction, so payouts track stake. 

Payouts start in October 2026. Opting out currently means asking in the Jito Developers Discord, and a self-serve option is planned for a future client release.

BAM Preconfirmations are Live

🎨 SuperteamNG AI Design Bootcamp 2.0

Superteam Nigeria announced the second edition of its AI Design Bootcamp, a four-week program that teaches participants to take a product from idea to design to working code with AI tools. It starts September 12.

The curriculum covers:

• AI foundations and research
• Figma-to-code with MCP
• Fullstack product building
• Solana integration
• Building in public

Live sessions run Monday, Tuesday, and Friday at 8 PM WAT, with Spaces on Saturdays.

SuperteamNG AI Design Bootcamp 2.0

⭐ Highlights

Transaction V1 activation pushed to Epoch 1035 - @anza_xyz
Teams across the ecosystem asked for more time to test and integrate V1 support.

The State of the Solana Real-World Asset Ecosystem - Allium
Solana is emerging as a leader for RWA activity with 32% of volume and 47% of trades.

What happens to a shred before your validator sees it? - @jkdotsol
The journey a Solana shred takes through Linux before Agave can use it.

Solana Is Positioning Itself as the Venue Where Tokenized Assets Settle - Stacksmith
Solana Foundation's Lucy Liu on the Token Supercycle, where everything of value is becoming programmable

⚡ Quick Hits

▶️ We asked Colosseum founders what would you tell someone considering applying? - @solana

▶️ The Road to Solana Becoming Traditional Finance with Anatoly Yakovenko - bri

x402 on Solana August Roundup - @x402

Full list of official Solana X accounts, or ones directly tied to Foundation and Labs - @solana_stream

Solana Changelog: September 10 - @solana_devs

The first five Arcium powered apps live on Mainnet - @Arcium

⚙️ Tools & Resources

GraphQL indexer for Solana's 8004 agent registry
You want to query agents and feedback in the 8004 Agent Registry, the Solana port of ERC-8004, without parsing program events. This TypeScript indexer handles ingestion and reorgs and serves it all over GraphQL on PostgreSQL, Supabase, or SQLite.

Quicknode's CI-tested Solana program examples
The Solana examples you find online often target an old Anchor version and may not even build. Quicknode's collection builds in CI on Anchor 1.2.0, Anchor 2, and Quasar, and its ten finance programs, including a new options venue, ship with Kani proofs.

A Pinocchio multisig for up to 4,096 owners
Multisigs that store each vote as a full address get expensive as you add owners. This unaudited Pinocchio multisig stores votes as bits, keeping a proposal under 700 bytes even at a thousand owners.

A GPT that trains itself on Solana
You can't fit a neural network's training step in one Solana transaction. p-gpt splits Karpathy's 4,192-parameter microGPT into micro-instructions and trains it nonstop on a MagicBlock Ephemeral Rollup, with weights checkpointed back to Solana.

🎧 Listen to This

Chainsanity Show

Tuom Holmberg, co-founder and CEO of Collector Crypt, joins the Chinsanity Show Podcast to talk about how the Pokemon card platform started in 2021 and why he built it on Solana. 

He argues crypto should go after everyday problems like eBay fraud and payouts that take weeks, and says a $75,000 card sold from Los Angeles to a buyer in Belgium can only settle in seconds because of crypto.

His pitch to other founders is blunt: "if you're building something onchain that's going to hit retail, you should definitely be doing it on Solana." 

Worth it if you're building a consumer app for people who don't use crypto, since he makes the case for hiding it behind a web2-style product and says a project launching in October is how Collector Crypt plans to reach those users.

How He Built a $1 Billion Company Selling Pokemon Cards | Tuom Holmberg of Collector Crypt

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

• Arcade is hiring a Founding Platform Engineer
• Ondo Finance is hiring a Blockchain Engineer
• Rain is hiring a Software Engineer - Wallets
• Temporal is hiring a Platform Engineer, Core Systems

BAM preconfirmations give subscribers a 5-10ms head start on about a third of the network's blocks. If you run a searcher or market maker, are you paying for it, or waiting to see if the edge holds up?

Thanks for reading ✌️

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