codex

Colosseum Codex: Cypherpunk Hackathon, Project RFPs, Prediction Markets

Cypherpunk Hackathon, Project RFPs, Prediction Markets, Asynchronous Market Queues, Solana dApp Revenue Dominance

Mike Hale

26 Sep 2025 — 6 min read

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

Cypherpunk Hackathon kicks off
Colosseum shares RFPs for hackathon project ideas
Deep dive into the typology of Prediction & Forecasting Projects
Application Controlled Execution through Asynchronous Market Queues
Report on Solana's dApp revenue dominance

🏆 Cypherpunk Hackathon

The Solana Cypherpunk Hackathon will take place from September 25 through October 30, 2025.

The event offers developers the opportunity to compete for prizes, pre-seed funding, and potential entry into Colosseum’s accelerator program. More than 2.5 million dollars in capital will be deployed to selected winners.

The Grand Champion, presented by Phantom, will receive 30,000 USDC.

Additional prizes between 5,000 and 25,000 USDC will be awarded in the following tracks:

Consumer Apps (Raydium)
DeFi (Arcium)
Stablecoins (Reflect)
RWAs (Forward Industries)
Infrastructure (Triton)
Undefined, for the long-tail of ideas (Solana Foundation)

Two special awards will also be presented: a 10,000 USDC University Award for the best student team and a 10,000 USDC Public Goods Award for the team that creates open-source technology with broad ecosystem benefits.

Announcing the Solana Cypherpunk Hackathon

📃 Hackathon RFPs

Colosseum has outlined project ideas it would like to see explored in the upcoming Cypherpunk Hackathon.

Highlighted suggestions include:

P2P payments for bordering countries focused on specific payment corridors or niche communities.
Groupchat trading tools that allow pooled capital and collective trading on platforms like Telegram.
Onchain transparency ratings to differentiate legitimate projects from scams using zkTLS or crowdsourced analysis.
Permissionless prediction markets where anyone can create and trade predictions without centralized oversight.

These ideas are meant as inspiration and do not guarantee prizes, funding, or entry into Colosseum’s accelerator program.

Colosseum has published additional areas of interest beyond those listed here, and developers are encouraged to review the full post for more suggestions and details.

Request For Products

🔮Prediction Markets

A new guide on prediction markets maps out how these products work and the trade-offs builders face.

The TLDR is simple: prediction markets are no longer niche, with more than 450 projects now tracked and volumes hitting record highs.

At their core, every forecasting product must answer two questions: how to price beliefs today and who decides the truth tomorrow.

The guide covers the mechanics of prediction markets, the design choices available, and real-world examples.

It is organized around three main axes:

Resolution: Who determines outcomes, from optimistic oracles to human editors, courts, rulebooks, or automated feeds.
Market design: How prices form, whether through AMMs, pools, orderbooks, or scoring-rule tournaments.
Infrastructure: Where the system runs, including on-chain setups, hybrid regulated venues, or off-chain tournaments.

This research provides a practical framework for evaluating trade-offs and design models.

Builders in this emerging space are advised to choose resolution methods they trust, pricing engines their liquidity can support, and infrastructure that will not fail at settlement time.

The Technical Typology of Prediction/Forecasting Projects

🔄 Asynchronous Market Queues (AMQs)

Asynchronous Market Queues (AMQs) introduce a new way for Solana applications to control how trades are executed. Instead of strict first-come-first-serve ordering, AMQs let apps batch transactions and decide their own execution rules.

This model, called Application Controlled Execution (ACE), can give market makers more flexibility, reduce losses from sudden price jumps, and enable tighter spreads and better liquidity.

AMQs divide program instructions into two types.

Synchronous instructions (such as deposits or withdrawals) that execute immediately.
Asynchronous instructions (such as cancels or limit orders) that are added to a priority queue.

Each instruction is tagged with its slot and sequence number, then sorted according to application-defined rules. The queue is later processed after a short delay or when full, ensuring execution happens in priority order rather than simply by arrival time.

Solana is uniquely positioned to support AMQs because programs can already queue and sort asynchronous instructions without requiring any protocol changes.

This allows builders to experiment with new market models that would not be possible in traditional finance or on most other blockchains.

For DeFi builders, AMQs open the door to policy-aware sequencing, application-specific auctions, and more innovative execution mechanisms.

Application Controlled Execution (ACE) through Asynchronous Market Queues (AMQs)

🤑 dApp Revenue Dominance

Solana’s dApp ecosystem continues to show strong revenue momentum with record highs and steady growth across categories.

August numbers show both record highs and steady growth across categories.

Key highlights include:

DePIN projects posted an all-time high of $1.6M in revenue, up 60% month-over-month, led by Helium, GEODNET, UpRock, and Hivemapper.
DeFiTuna reached $422K, distributing 100% of revenue to stakers.
Hylo set a new record with $238K in revenue, driven by its dual-token model and adaptive mint/redeem fees.
Squads Protocol marked its eighth consecutive month of growth, reaching $35K from rising business subscriptions and multisig activity.
Helium now routes subscription and usage revenue directly to onchain burns, boosting DePIN revenue sustainability.

These results highlight the depth and diversification of revenue across Solana’s ecosystem. Check out the full report for a complete breakdown.

Deep Dive: Solana DApps Revenue - August 2025

⚡ Quick Hits

Demo day recording for Colosseum's 3rd Accelerator batch - @colosseum

Solana Mobile Builder Grants Program - @solanamobile

How to Build Anything You Want on Solana (video) - QuickNode

Rust 1.90.0 just dropped with game-changing improvements for Solana Developers - @TridentSolana

We are building Stockfish for Solana: The First Realtime Fully On-Chain Chess Engine - @semi_infiknight

Create a Mobile dApp with Wallet Login & Token Transfers using React Native Expo - abkGami

Solana Collective fALL OUT Contentathon - Solana Collective

Introducing Trepa Academy on Discord - @trepa_io

The New Faces of Solana: DecenSpace - @BulgarianDegen

ZK Compression docs updated with new guides, cheat sheets, AI search, and more - @LightProtocol

⚙️ Tools & Resources

solana-transaction-optimizer is a comprehensive TypeScript project demonstrating the efficiency benefits of using Solana Address Lookup Tables (ALTs) for transaction optimization.

x402-ai-Solana is a template built with Next.js, AI SDK, AI Elements, AI Gateway and Solana blockchain that demonstrates how to implement x402 with Solana payments and a modern AI stack.

Hash Locked Fund Escrow shows how a Bonsol SHA-256 hash locked escrow works on Solana, where funds are locked in escrow and can only be released when the claimant provides the correct pre-image that matches the stored hash.

💸 Funding

Honeycomb has acquired GameShift from Solana Labs to build a combined Web3 gaming stack that targets both developers and mainstream consumers.

Melee has raised $3.5 million from Variant, DBA, and a group of angel investors to launch its “Viral Markets” platform and support the rollout of a system that allows creators and traders to build markets on any topic.

Raiku has raised $13.5 million across seed and pre-seed rounds to advance Raiku’s block-building and scheduling infrastructure, which offers guaranteed transaction inclusion.

BULK, a Solana-based perpetuals DEX, has raised $8 million in seed funding to build a high-performance, censorship-resistant trading platform.

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

Unboxed is hiring a Solana Backend Engineer
CHOMP is hiring a Chief Technology Officer
Raiku is hiring a DevRel
Based is hiring a Backend Engineer, Data & Web3

📅 Event Calendar

Hackaroo, Online, Sept 5 - Oct 29
Hackaroo, hosted by Solana ANZ, runs alongside the Cypherpunk Hackathon with a mix of online sessions and workshops to help builders in Australia, New Zealand, and beyond sharpen their skills and support the region’s brightest developers, builders, and founders.

How to Win a Hackathon - Workshop, Online, Oct 2
This free live workshop hosted on Superteam Poland’s Discord with Código will teach builders how to win hackathons by validating ideas, learning from real case studies, and focusing on clarity and execution and will also feature a live demo showing how to go from idea to deploy in record time.

Startup Village VietNam 2025, Hanoi, Viet Nam, Oct 6-12
Solana Startup Camp is a one-week program where builders go from idea to launch-ready product through mentorship, workshops, and real building experience for those preparing for the Colosseum Hackathon or launching a new project.

🎧 Listen to This

Open Intelligence

Open Intelligence is a new podcast that covers the intersection of Crypto and AI.

In this conversation, Rishin Sharma and Lincoln Murr from Coinbase discuss the concept of agentic payments through the x402 standard, which recently integrated Solana, and allows AI agents to autonomously make payments for services.

They explore the challenges of existing payment systems, the rise of AI agents, and the need for seamless transactions in the digital economy.

The discussion also covers the importance of web publishers, pricing models, and the future roadmap for x402, emphasizing the potential impact on consumer experiences and the necessity of identity solutions for widespread adoption.

Agentic Payments with Coinbase's Lincoln Murr

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