Colosseum Codex: Cohort 4 Demo Day, Token Holder Report, Blazar

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

• Colosseum hosted its Demo Day for Accelerator Cohort 4
• Blockworks releases its Q1 2026 Solana Token Holder Report
• Quicknode launches Blazar WebSocket engine
• Solana hits $1.1T in Q1 Economic Activity

🎓 Colosseum Cohort 4 Demo Day

Colosseum published the recording of its Cohort 4 virtual demo day, featuring 11 startups that built through the accelerator program. Each team either won the Solana Cypherpunk Hackathon or emerged from Colosseum's ongoing Eternal sprint.

The presenting teams were Kormos, Unruggable, Vistadex, Credible, Frames, Archer, Superfan, Rekt, Yumi Finance, Synthesis, and Cloak.

📊 Solana Token Holder Report: Q1 2026

Blockworks Research published its Q1 2026 Solana Token Holder Report, covering network financials, sector performance, and ecosystem developments. Solana remained the leading chain for onchain spot trading, capturing 41% of DEX volume market share and surpassing Ethereum and its L2s combined.

On the application side, Solana apps generated $292M in revenue during the quarter, led by Pumpfun ($123M, 42%), Axiom ($58M, 20%), Phantom ($33M, 11%), and Jupiter ($14M, 5%).

Network performance hit new all-time highs across the board. Solana processed 10.1B non-vote transactions at roughly 1.3K TPS while maintaining median fees around $0.0005. Fee stability under stress was a standout result. During the February 5 drawdown, which triggered over $2B in liquidations and a 15% drop in SOL price, Solana median fees held near $0.0007. Over the same event, Ethereum fees spiked 500x to $8.67 and Base fees rose 100x to $0.61.

Two protocol upgrades are expected to reshape validator economics and transaction quality:

• SIMD-123: One of Solana's key expected upgrades in 2026, will introduce an in-protocol mechanism for validators to share priority fees with stakers, addressing a gap that has pushed token holder net margins to all-time lows
• Constellation: a Multiple Concurrent Proposers (MCP) protocol proposal from Anza that aims to constrain the single leader's monopoly over transaction inclusion, improving censorship resistance and execution quality for market makers.

On the enterprise front, the Solana Developer Platform (SDP) launched on March 24 with partners including Mastercard, Western Union, Worldpay, Worldcoin, and Alibaba Cloud, representing the most significant enterprise partnership suite in Solana's history.

Solana Mobile's Seeker ecosystem also accelerated, with developer count rising 116% QoQ to 443 and 476 new dApps launching during the quarter, bringing the total to 784.

The full report covers additional areas including stablecoin growth, RWA lending, tokenized assets, and staking economics. Read it here (pdf).

Solana Token Holder Report Q1 2026

🌟 Blazar WebSocket Engine

Quicknode released Blazar, a WebSocket engine for Solana built from scratch to address reliability issues with Agave's native PubSub.

Blazar delivers data 200-250ms faster than standard Turbine sources with under 1ms of processing overhead. Under high concurrency, it maintains consistent message delivery where the native implementation degrades and drops subscriptions. It also uses significantly less CPU and memory compared to existing open-source WebSocket proxies.

On the subscription side, Blazar stabilizes three methods previously marked unstable:voteSubscribe, slotsUpdatesSubscribe, and blockSubscribe, and adds support for transactionSubscribe for granular transaction filtering.

The engine is included on all Quicknode Solana endpoints with no SDK changes or migration required.

Introducing Blazar: Quicknode's Purpose-Built Solana WebSocket Solution

💰 $1.1T in Q1 Economic Activity

Solana recorded $1.1T in economic activity during Q1 2026, a new all-time high, according to data from Artemis Analytics and Dune.

The milestone was driven largely by stablecoin adoption rather than speculative trading, with stablecoin swaps now representing over 27% of all Solana DEX volume.

Tokenized assets also contributed meaningfully. Tokenized stock swaps exceeded $155M in weekly volume, capturing 98% market share across rival chains. PreStocks posted $95M in trading volume during its best week since launch.

Despite the activity growth, both network REV and application revenue remain well below early 2025 peaks. For comparison, Ethereum recorded $1.5T in economic activity over the same period, though Solana reclaimed the lead in network fees and revenue generation.

Solana Records $1.1T in Q1 Economic Activity, A New All-Time High

⚡ Quick Hits

97% Smaller Solana Programs?! Meet Quasar (video) - Jonas Hahn

The new Jupiter Developer Platform is live - @JupDevRel

Proof of Work on Solana: The Fastest Way to Stand Out With Zero Experience - @EveyNFT

Using Colosseum Copilot to Pressure Test Your Idea - @alexfavour

Every Agent Needs a Passport. Metaplex Just Built One - @notemxem

x402 on Solana in March - @x402

Solana DeFi Monitor: Real-Time Dashboard Tracking Stress Signals and Utilization Spikes - Top Ledger

Announcing RPC 2.0: Rethinking Solana's read layer from the ground up - Triton

⚙️ Tools & Resources

frozen-wUSDC is an Anchor program for for issuing time-locked, non-transferable USDC wrappers. Designed for post-hack scenarios where attackers typically move funds quickly, giving operators a response window to intervene.

solana-new is an open-source CLI that guides developers through building Solana apps from ideation to deployment. It integrates with Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, and includes 515+ curated project ideas, 77 skills, and 36 MCP servers.

vector is a Solana primitive for offline transaction signing without durable nonces. It verifies Ed25519 signatures on-chain against a SHA-256 digest of the transaction, keeping contents private until submission and limiting relayer authority.

fema-priorityfee-scanner is a TypeScript SDK for calculating optimal Solana priority fees in real-time. It scans recent blocks, builds fee distributions by percentile, and supports protocol-aware estimation for Jupiter, Raydium, Orca, Pump.fun, and others.

💸 Funding

SOL Strategies acquired Darklake Labs for $1.2M. Darklake developed a ZK proof system native to Solana that enables private transactions while preventing front-running and sandwich attacks. The Darklake team, which placed second in the Colosseum Radar Hackathon's DeFi track, joins SOL Strategies' engineering team.

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

• Alchemy is hiring a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
• Jito Labs is hiring a Security Engineer
• Range is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer
• Sphere is hiring a Senior Software Engineer (Customer Success)
• Phantom is hiring a Senior Application Engineer, IT Engineering

🎧 Listen to This

Frictionless Podcast by Logan Jastremski

Anza researcher Max Resnick joins the Frictionless Podcast with Logan Jastremski to discuss the engineering required to turn Solana into a credibly neutral, high-performance financial infrastructure. 

The conversation unpacks the shift from single-leader to Multi-Concurrent Leader (MCL) designs and why this change could fundamentally redefine global market structure. Resnick walks through the Constellation proposal, 50ms protocol-enforced economic ticks, and T+0 settlement, as well as why mitigating bad MEV and eliminating colocation advantages are necessary steps toward bringing all of finance onchain. 

The episode also covers market making dynamics, dual-flow batch auctions, and the tradeoffs between FCFS and priority ordering.

Engineering the Global Financial Infrastructure with Max Resnick

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