Colosseum’s New Branding, Crypto World's Fair Hackathon, Payment Channels

Happy Hackathon season!

Colosseum shipped a new coat of paint this week!

The glitchy ASCII and all-caps terminal theme that has fronted colosseum.com since the early 2024 launch is gone, replaced by a redesign from Airfoil that pulls from the Renaissance, the Volta Prize, and the World's Fair, and restructures the site around competition and the founders in the arena.

🎡 Crypto World's Fair Hackathon

Colosseum announced Crypto World's Fair, an online hackathon open to all builders across blockchain ecosystems. It is the first Colosseum competition to accept submissions from outside Solana.

Prize tracks are organized around a select group of blockchain ecosystems rather than use cases, bounties, or regions. 

Each track gets a dedicated ecosystem partner supporting it, and every submission, whatever chain it targets, is also eligible for a general prize pool awarding the best products across all chains. The full list of judges, prize tracks, sponsors, and developer resources lands September 14, when the competition kicks off.

Learn more: Expanding the Arena

🎓 Solana Development Crash Course

Bri Migliaccio published a free 10-chapter Solana development crash course on YouTube, running from environment setup through a StableSwap AMM. Migliaccio works in developer relations at the Solana Foundation.

1. Setting up your Solana Development Environment
2. Build & Deploy a Solana App in 5 minutes
3. Solana Transaction Lifecycle Overview
4. CPI Overview
5. PDA Overview
6. Build a CRUD App
7. Build a Voting Program
8. Build an Escrow Program
9. Create a Stablecoin with Token Extensions
10. Create a StableSwap AMM

Chapter 2 uses a premade scaffold to get a program built and deployed onchain in five minutes, so deployment and network clusters land before any Rust does. Chapters 3 through 5 are conceptual with no code at all. 

The build chapters stack on each other from there. CRUD covers the data layer and a first PDA account, the voting program adds a counter and clock queries for dates and times, and escrow brings in token handling and a first CPI.

Bri says that AI has changed what's worth learning, and that knowing every line of Rust and its idiosyncrasies matters less now than core concepts, systems design, and contract architecture.

Bri always delivers quality educational content, and this course knows what to leave out, teaching core concepts to build on rather than trying to cover everything.

Solana Crash Course 2026: Learn Solana Development from Scratch

💳 Payment Channels

The Solana Foundation released payment channels, a primitive that lets an agent authorize a spending limit once, spend against it across many calls, and settle onchain a single time. It works across the x402 and MPP payment protocols.

An agent deposits a ceiling amount into onchain escrow held by the program rather than the operator, then meters spending off chain with signed messages instead of transactions, so individual calls carry no transaction cost. The amount actually consumed is recorded onchain in one transaction, funds go to the recipients, and any unused deposit returns to the primary wallet.

The target is spending that breaks when every request settles onchain, like LLM completions billed per token, jobs billed per second of compute, and bursts of hundreds of cheap calls. 

In testing, the Foundation ran 100,000 wallets through a payment channel proxy and issued more than 1 million payments per second, or 80 billion payments in 24 hours, at an estimated $0.000000000776 per payment.

Alibaba Cloud is live at launch with API endpoints agents can consume without account setup or per-call approvals. The program, spec, benchmark template, and pay-kit toolkit are open source.

Agents can consume a service with no account with, at per-token or per-second prices too small to settle one at a time, with all deposits in onchain escrow owned by the program.

Payment Channels: 1 Million Payments Per Second

⭐ Highlights

How to Reclaim Excess SOL After Rent Reduction - @a_milz
Phase one of Solana's five-phase rent reduction landed today, leaving existing accounts over-funded. P-token's WithdrawExcessLamports instruction pulls the surplus out of token accounts and mints without closing them.

The Design Behind wincode, a Faster Rust Serializer - Anza
The wincode Rust crate passed 5M downloads, and RustSec now recommends it, after it started just as a serialization performance fix in Agave.

So you want to build on Solana? Start here - @joshyote
A roundup of educational content, events, resources, and opportunities to help Solana developers get started.

Frankendancer Support Ends With Alpenglow - Chainflow
Frankendancer will be retired around Alpenglow activation due to the additional engineering, auditing, and security work required. Firedancer will support Alpenglow from day one.

⚡ Quick Hits

Solana Changelog: September 3 - @solana_devs

Solana v1 Transactions Explained: Size Limits and Breaking Changes - Quicknode

▶️ mtndao Demo Day - @SolanaEvents

▶️ Use an Anchor program in your Solana Mobile app - beeman‎.‎dev

Anza is removing floating-point math from Solana's core protocol - @anza_xyz

The token supercycle: everything of value is becoming programmable - Lily Liu

⚙️ Tools & Resources

svmScope - A Rust transaction autopsy tool that decodes a mainnet signature into its full CPI tree and replays it locally in LiteSVM with no validator running. It can mutate accounts, warp the Clock sysvar to other slots and epochs, and freeze a transaction into an offline JSON fixture for deterministic CI.

Shipstern - A Rust framework for building program-aware, real-time Solana data pipelines that turn raw chain events into structured data through pluggable parsers and custom handlers. It is Yellowstone Vixen under a new name, moved from rpcpool/yellowstone-vixen to solana-rpc/shipstern with the framework unchanged.

💓 Ecosystem Pulse

🚨 Avici card balances hit by a contract vulnerability - Card-issuing partner Rain found the flaw in a Solana card contract that Avici and a few other programs shared, and Avici is refunding all 1,685 affected users the full $500,859.22 while self-custodial wallet balances were untouched.

🚨 Switchboard halts four Move based networks - The oracle network stopped its Aptos, Sui, IOTA, and Movement deployments after finding a potential compromise in its Move implementations, reported no similar issue on Solana, and told users to run alternative oracles during the investigation.

🎧 Listen to This

Talking Tokens

Edward Woodford, founder and CEO of zerohash, explores how crypto infrastructure is becoming embedded inside some of the world’s largest banks, brokers, fintechs and payment companies.

Zerohash powers digital asset and stablecoin capabilities for companies including Morgan Stanley, Interactive Brokers, Stripe and Visa, helping traditional financial institutions move from crypto trading toward a broader onchain financial stack.

Edward Woodford explains why he believes banks will enter onchain finance through wealth and crypto before expanding into stablecoins, tokenized deposits, money market funds and tokenized stocks.

They discuss why blockchain usability remains a major obstacle to mass adoption, the importance of abstracting away from chain complexity, how stablecoins could increase the velocity of global money movement, and why Edward has become increasingly bullish on onchain lending and vaults as financial markets move toward faster and more atomic settlement.

Crypto Grew Despite Bad UX | What Happens When We Fix It?

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

• Rain is hiring a Software Engineer - Wallets
• Perena is hiring a Frontend Engineer
• Jito Labs is hiring a Senior Software Engineer - JTX
• Ondo Finance is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer (Trading Infrastructure)
• Reflect is hiring a Head of Product Engineering

Do you think competing against builders on other chains will result in better apps, and have you already stopped putting the chain in front of your own users?

Thanks for reading ✌️

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