Expanding the Arena

We started Colosseum with a set of objectives: grow Solana’s builder ecosystem, construct a platform where the most talented crypto founders compete, and support them as they turn their ambitious ideas into startups that bring the world’s markets onchain.

In just 2.5 years, we’ve made significant progress. Our hackathons have become the largest in the technology industry, attracting more than 60,000 builders and over 9,000 product submissions. As of today, roughly 85% of all venture-backed startups in the Solana ecosystem have emerged from our competitions, with many already finding product-market fit and contributing meaningfully to Solana’s network activity. The data gives us confidence that Colosseum has developed into a repeatable engine for discovering and accelerating exceptional crypto founders globally.

One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned from scaling Colosseum is that competition compounds. Every hackathon we’ve run has led to not just an increase in quantity, but in the quality of founders we see as well. Better founders attract better founders. Better products raise the standard for everyone else, and users benefit downstream as a result.

As we’ve thought about how to continue growing Solana, we’ve come to believe the answer is to also grow crypto’s broader startup ecosystem. Colosseum’s next chapter will continue expanding the arena, ensuring increased competition drives stronger founders and products.

So today, we’re excited to announce our next hackathon, Crypto World’s Fair, which will be the first Colosseum competition open to all builders across blockchain ecosystems.

The inspiration comes from the World’s Fairs of the 19th and 20th centuries, where inventors, engineers, and entrepreneurs from around the world gathered to exhibit their latest achievements. While many important technologies were showcased at these historical events, their greatest contribution was to create an environment where builders learned from one another and collectively accelerated the pace of innovation.

Crypto deserves its own World’s Fair.

Novel products and protocols are being developed across blockchains, each enabled by unique strengths stemming from the design of the underlying infrastructure. Crypto World's Fair will bring builders together, not to determine which blockchain "wins”, but to increase product competition, learn from each other, and help crypto’s grassroots startup ecosystem win as a whole.

Colosseum’s accelerator and venture fund will continue focusing on investing in Solana founders. We firmly believe Solana is one of the strongest startup ecosystems in tech. It has a deep builder community, many compelling use cases, and one of the best environments for ambitious founders to build breakout crypto companies.

However, if Solana startups aspire to build products that reach hundreds of millions of users and billions in onchain volume, they shouldn’t simply compete against other Solana startups. They need to compete against the best founders building anywhere in crypto, and ultimately against the best startups in tech. We believe raising that bar will make everyone better.

It’s also increasingly clear that many of crypto’s best products already use multiple technologies under the hood, abstracting complexity away from users. We expect that trend to continue as infrastructure matures and founders choose the right tool for each part of their product.

These observations shaped how we designed Crypto World’s Fair. Rather than structuring prize tracks around specific use cases, bounties, or geographic regions, we are organizing them around a select group of blockchain ecosystems where we also believe startups can flourish. A key partner within each ecosystem will support their respective track, and every submission will also be eligible for a general prize pool awarding the best products across all chains. We will announce the judges, dedicated prize pools, and the full details in the coming days as the competition kicks off.

In many ways, this evolution reflects how the three cofounders of Colosseum entered this space. I was introduced through Bitcoin during college. Clay came in through Ethereum and the early days of DeFi. Nate later made the jump directly into Solana. Likewise, many of the founders we’ve backed first entered crypto through different ecosystems than the ones they’re building in today.

Determined builders gravitate toward the technology they believe gives them the best chance to execute their vision, regardless of where they started. Our own journeys, and the journeys of many of our portfolio founders, all point to the same conclusion: crypto’s long-term adoption is determined less by tribal circles around specific infrastructure, and more by the founders building on top of them.

Exceptional founders are one of the world’s scarcest resources. Our mission is to attract many more of them into crypto, enable them to compete, and provide a platform to forge enduring companies/networks. Expanding the hackathon arena is simply the next step in our mission.

Registration for Crypto World’s Fair is now open. The competition commences on September 14, 2026, and product submissions are due by October 12, 2026. Hundreds of thousands in prizes and millions in venture funding will be on the line. Again, all of the information about the competition will be released soon.

See you in the arena.