Colosseum Codex: Cypherpunk Winners, STAMP, Light Token

Hey! Just wanted to give you a heads up that I'll be taking a couple weeks off for the holidays! 🎄🎉

I'll be back in action in the new year to keep bringing you the most useful news, tools, and resources to build on Solana.

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

• Colosseum Announces Cypherpunk Hackathon Winners
• STAMP Released as Alternative to SAFEs and SAFTs
• Light Protocol Introduces Rent-Free Light Token
• Firedancer goes live on Mainnet
• Phantom Launches Phantom Connect SDK

🏆 Cypherpunk Winners

Colosseum has announced the results of the Solana Cypherpunk Hackathon, the 12th Solana Foundation hackathon and the fourth hosted by Colosseum.

This global online competition brought together more than 9,000 participants from over 150 countries who submitted 1,576 final projects, making Cypherpunk the largest crypto hackathon to date.

Here are the winners:

Grand Champion: Unruggable
Consumer: Capitola
DeFi: Yumi Finance
Infrastructure: Seer
RWA: Autonom
Stablecoin: MCPay
Undefined: attn.markets
University Award: Pythia
Public Good Award: Samui Wallet

Be sure to check out the rest of the winners and honorable mentions across all tracks.

Announcing the Winners of the Solana Cypherpunk Hackathon

📑 STAMP

Colosseum STAMP is a new investment agreement for crypto startups that makes the token the primary economic unit of a project.

STAMP was developed with law firm Orrick as a crypto-native successor to existing startup instruments like SAFEs and SAFTs. It standardizes how founders raise private capital while keeping token economics clear and aligned with tokenholders.

STAMP is designed specifically to work with MetaDAO, which uses decision markets to give tokenholders real control over project treasuries and intellectual property. 

The agreement bridges the period between an offchain fundraising round and an onchain MetaDAO ICO, giving investors a contractually defined claim on future tokens and governance, while ensuring that a meaningful share of the supply is reserved for public participants.

Founders can also use STAMP to migrate from legacy equity structures into a MetaDAO compatible entity, simplifying their cap table and aligning all stakeholders around token-based ownership.

Introducing the Colosseum STAMP

🔦 Light-token

Light Protocol has introduced the Light-token program, a new token standard on Solana aimed at making rent-free DeFi more practical at scale. 

Instead of requiring users and protocols to pay full rent exemption upfront for every token account, Light sponsors that cost and manages accounts in a way that keeps frequently used ones readily available while compressing inactive accounts in the background.

The goal is to make token accounts much cheaper to create while keeping core actions like transfers and associated account creation efficient on Solana’s compute budget.

Light-token accounts work with existing Solana token standards and can hold tokens from Light, SPL, or Token 2022 mints, so projects do not need to rethink their entire token model to benefit.

The program is live for developers on devnet today, with mainnet support on the way.

The Light-Token Program

🔥 Firedancer on Mainnet

Jump Crypto’s Firedancer validator client is now live on the Solana mainnet after about three years of development, marking a big step forward in Solana’s plans to boost throughput and resilience. 

Firedancer is a high performance validator client written in C/C++ and built as a full alternative to Anza's Agave client. Before launch, it ran for over 100 days on a small set of validators and produced more than 50,000 blocks on mainnet without major issues.

Ahead of this launch, a hybrid client nicknamed “Frankendancer” that combines parts of Agave and Firedancer entered beta and has already seen meaningful validator adoption. 

Moving from that hybrid phase to a fully live alternative client is a sign that client diversity is a core piece of Solana’s strategy.

Jump Crypto’s Firedancer Goes Live on Solana Mainnet

👻 Phantom Connect SDK

Phantom has released Phantom Connect, a wallet and authentication solution that lets apps onboard users with embedded wallets using familiar logins like Google and Apple, or connect to the existing Phantom extension.

Instead of asking users to install a wallet or manage seed phrases up front, apps integrate the Phantom Connect SDK and receive a ready to use wallet as soon as a user signs in. 

Phantom Connect is free for developers and is built to stay fully non custodial. Signing happens inside secure environments with additional safeguards like spending limits, domain binding, transaction simulation, and threat detection before transactions are sent onchain.

Developers can choose among React, browser, and React Native SDKs to support web or mobile apps. Solana is supported today, with additional chains planned in the future.

Phantom Connect

⚡ Quick Hits

Metaplex announces Genesis Launchpad SDK - @metaplex

Jupiter releases Portfolio API - @Geninsus

Solana Breakpoint 2025 AI-generated summaries - North Island

Phantom ships MCP server for Phantom docs - Phantom

⚙️ Tools & Resources

wincode v0.2.3 adds comprehensive zero-copy support, including support for user-defined types with the SchemaRead derive macro.

x402-starter-kit is a starter kit for building paid APIs using the x402 v2 payment protocol that now supports Solana.

💸 Funding

Prediction market project Space has raised $3 million across seed and strategic funding rounds led by Morningstar Ventures to build out its leveraged prediction market on Solana, which is designed to support up to 10x leverage.

Moto has raised a $1.8 million pre seed round led by Eterna Capital and cyberFund to build what it describes as the first true onchain credit card powered by Solana

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

• Reflect is hiring a Backend Engineer
• DeFi Tuna is hiring a Frontend Senior/Lead Developer
• Rain is hiring a Backend Engineer - Blockchain
• Everstake is hiring a Principal Technical PM

🎧 Listen to This

Talking Tokens

Founder and CEO of DFlow, Nitesh Nath, joins Talking Tokens to discuss building trading infrastructure on Solana and enabling native access to prediction markets like Kalshi through DFlow’s new API.

The episode explores how turning prediction positions into SPL tokens can unlock new DeFi composability, allowing these markets to plug into lending, trading, and liquidity protocols on Solana.

Nitesh also covers DFlow’s concurrent liquidity programs, its integration with Phantom, and how bridging off chain liquidity onchain can power new financial primitives and local prediction use cases.

The conversation looks ahead to expected 2026 milestones, what Solana still needs to improve for high frequency traders and liquidity providers, and why DFlow is betting on Solana as the most efficient place to build financial rails.

Bringing Kalshi Onchain for Solana Traders | Nitesh Nath

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