codex

Colosseum Codex: Hackathons and AI, Scale or Die London, mtnDAO X

Hackathons in the Age of AI, Scale or Die London, mtndao X, SDP Provider Onboarding, Hylo Leveraged Tokens, Solana Foundation Retweets and Grants, Superteam Talent Portal

I'm squeezing in the writing of this issue between ⚽World Cup matches (GO USA!) but Solana doesn't take "hydration breaks"!

This issue looks at how AI is impacting Solana hackathons, and two major upcoming in-person events this year, Scale or Die in London this November and mtnDAO X in Salt Lake City, both are gatherings of top Solana builders and teams.

And while we debate what the Solana Foundation should and shouldn't promote, we get direct advice on what helps earn a retweet or devtool grant.

🔥 Hackathons in the Age of AI

The 1880 Volta Prize, the award Napoleon III's namesake competition gave Alexander Graham Bell for inventing the telephone. Bell used the prize money to fund a laboratory for continued research and commercialization.

Colosseum frames its own hackathon the same way, as a starting point.

The hackathon itself has scaled fast. The most recent edition drew almost 2x the submissions of the previous one, with notably higher quality.

The format has shifted from the 48-hour sprint toward an integrated pipeline of hackathon, accelerator, and venture fund working together to generate new crypto startups rather than one-off demos.

That shift tracks a change in how fast founders move. AI has shrunk the gap from idea to working product from months to a week, sometimes days. New business creation is up nearly 2x year over year, and the time to reach $1M in revenue has been cut in half, with small teams running on agent swarms instead of headcount.

Colosseum has built its own AI tooling to keep pace.

Copilot turns AI coding agents into startup analysts, with access to more than 8,000 hackathon submissions and 84,000 curated documents.

A cofounder-matching tool connects builders by skill set, commitment level, timeline, and location.

Underneath it all sits an internal evaluation engine, what the team calls its "Cerebro," that scores submissions on founder-market fit, product velocity, user demand, market timing, automating the first pass of project review before any human looks at it.

Colosseum treats the prize as a beginning, not a finish line, carrying teams that emerge in the arena forward into startups, and the best of those startups into the platforms that will grow the entire ecosystem.

Bottom line: The demo-day finish line isn't the goal. Teams worth funding are the ones who know what to build, not how fast they can build it.

The Volta Prize, Colosseum, and Hackathons in the Age of AI

🛠️ Scale or Die

Solana Accelerate is bringing back Scale or Die, its application-only technical summit, for engineers, validators, protocol developers, infrastructure teams, and researchers working on Solana.

The Solana Foundation explicitly bills it as "not a general crypto event". No marketing decks, no sales pitches, just workshops and sessions on validator performance, consensus mechanics, transaction landing, RPC infrastructure, Firedancer, post-quantum readiness, and high-performance onchain applications.

A DevCave space gives attendees direct access to core infrastructure teams. This edition runs November 14 in London, with admission requiring host approval plus wallet-based token verification or an access code.

The format traces back to Scale or Die's first run at Accelerate 2025 alongside the more public-facing Ship or Die conference, giving Solana's infrastructure builders a dedicated technical track instead of folding them into general conference programming.

The bigger draw than the talks is who's going to be there. This is one of the few places where so many builders gather in one place.

Accelerate Scale or Die

⛰️ mtnDAO X

mtnDAO X marks the program's 10th iteration. What organizers describe as a "world-class startup summit with Solana roots that today gathers top founders from frontier industries around the world" started five years ago out of the small, early Solana ecosystem. It stays invite-only, running August 1-31, 2026, in Salt Lake City.

The attendee base has broadened past Solana alone into AI, deep tech, and robotics, with Y Combinator and Founders, Inc. companies now showing up on the MTN. Organizers say mtnDAO has produced more global hackathon winners and world-class teams than any other event in the community.

Attendees have access to a 24/7 workspace with 120 Autonomous Labs desks, Secretlab chairs, and 4K 32-inch monitors at every seat, backed by 20GB enterprise wifi across seven independent electricity circuits built to handle 400-plus devices at once, plus catered food throughout.

I went to mtnDAO v6, and rubbed shoulders with folks from Anza, Colosseum, Hylo, MagicBlock, and Solana Foundation. Definitely recommend going. Get there early to find a seat!

mtnDAO X

🗂️ SDP Provider Onboarding

Solana Platform opened public provider onboarding for the Solana Developer Platform (SDP), its infrastructure integration program, covering three categories:

RPC providers
Custodial enterprise wallets
On/off-ramps.

Each category has its own published criteria and a form intake to apply, plus a defined evaluation path. The program checks for Solana compatibility, stable sandbox access, documentation quality, error handling, and the regulatory or security posture each category requires.

Onboarded providers show up as available integrations, not endorsed partners, so the due-diligence responsibility stays with whoever uses them.

The criteria have been public for about a month, and the underlying project is moving fast, with more than 30 merges a week. A fourth category covering compliance and transaction analysis is in the works.

Infrastructure Provider Onboarding

⭐ Highlights

Leveraged Tokens: The $180B market crypto missed - @hylo_so
Hylo's V2 xAsset Engine capture is an attempt to capture a slice of the $180B leveraged-ETF market.

Earning the Solana Retweet: A Guide - @lagunacarta
With all the recent talk about "kingmaking" by the Solana Foundation, this is a look at what they will and won't amplify.

How to get a devtool Grant - @ludo_txtx
Just like the retweet post above, here's advice straight from the source on the types of projects more likely to get a grant.

Opening the Superteam Talent Portal - @SuperteamTalent
Superteam has always been a great resource for cultivating and showcasing talented developers.

Want early access to the latest products launching from Colosseum?

We're looking for alpha testers to be among the first to try what we're building!

Apply Now

⚡ Quick Hits

Ride Markets and the Emergence of Governance Frameworks - @deanmachine

The new B-2 Token Transparency Framework - @Blockworks

Updates to Solana Subscriptions & Allowances are coming - @dev_jodee

A direct look at low-level SVM development - @solanaturbine

Solana Changelog: June 18 - @solana_devs

Umbra Integrates Onramper to Power Private Crypto Access and Payroll - @GetOnramper

Trade in the Shade: Why Solana needs an open dark order book - @tradedotshade

⚙️ Tools & Resources

qn - Quicknode's official CLI for managing endpoints, Streams, webhooks, the Key-Value Store, usage, billing, and teams entirely from the terminal. Includes a qn agent context command that prints a self-contained usage doc for dropping into Claude or other agents.

solfig - A terminal UI built in Rust for managing the Solana CLI configuration file, letting you edit the RPC URL, keypair, commitment level, and websocket settings without hand-editing YAML.

Solscribe - A dashboard for the Subscriptions primitive, letting you view each plan's onchain details, plans and subscriptions created over time, top plans and merchants, billing-period and price mix, and monthly run rate.

Zero to Rust - A companion site for a 12-episode Rust video series (6 episodes live now), pairing each video with a printable guide, the matching Rust Book chapter, and linked Rustlings exercises.

GeyserBridge - An open-source gRPC server that replicates the Yellowstone Geyser protocol over free Solana RPC WebSockets instead of dedicated validator hardware, using the same geyser protobuf service.

💓 Solana Ecosystem Pulse

💸 Range raised $8.3M Series A from TX Ventures, SixThirty, Maven 11 Capital, and Onigiri Capital, among others to grow its Unify and Protect products.

🤝 Blockworks acquires Messari to bring Messari's eight years of data on 40,000-plus assets and the APIs investors, exchanges, and AI agents use to underwrite them onto the same platform as Blockworks' disclosure and investor-relations tools.

🚨 ORE protocol's stake program was exploited via a missing account check, letting an attacker inflate their stake balance and unfairly claim about 25.5 ORE in yield. No user deposits were at risk. Maintainers are migrating stakers to a new contract, with one-click migration.

💀 Pyra is shutting down after the Drift exploit hit its business too hard to recover from. User balances stay withdrawable through a web portal until September 15, 2026, and Drift recovery tokens will be distributed there once available.

🎧 Listen to This

The Stack

Ilan Gitter hosts ReadyLayerOne, walking through the team's path into the Solana ecosystem and the work behind their changelog tooling.

The conversation moves into recent technical updates and the engineering decisions currently shaping where Solana is headed next, and a builder's view of what's changing under the hood rather than the usual roadmap talking points.

Solana Engineering Deep Dive with ReadyLayerOne