Colosseum Codex: Mithril Alpha, Blueshift SVM Research, Oro GRAIL Gold API

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

• Overclock announces Alpha version of Mithril Solana validator client
• Blueshift publishes two research articles on SVM performance improvements
• Oro launches GRAIL Gold API
• Nansen makes Solana analytics available to free users

🗡️ Mithril Alpha

Mithril is an alternative Solana validator client written in Go and developed by Overclock. It is in alpha and designed to be lightweight enough to run on inexpensive consumer hardware.

The alpha still has important limitations like depending on the getBlock RPC method for block data and confirmation, and occasional bugs or mismatches can halt the node. Overclock is working on shred-based data fetching, fork choice, richer RPC features, and is undergoing an external audit. 

For Solana, Mithril’s progress advances client diversity and lowers the cost of running validators, which supports greater resilience and decentralization.

Mithril Alpha

🧬 Blueshift SVM Research Articles

Blueshift announced two research articles that describe how they are pushing the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) to higher performance by going beneath Rust and sBPF assembly and optimizing the runtime itself. 

The first article, Accelerating the SVM with JIT Intrinsics, treats the SVM like a CPU based on the BPF ISA that is JIT compiled to x86. Instead of extending BPF with new opcodes, the team introduces JIT intrinsics which are  special call patterns that the JIT recognizes and lowers directly to optimal x86 instruction sequences. 

Unlike syscalls, these execute inline without leaving JITed code, so they avoid context switch overhead while preserving full BPF compatibility. A key example is u64 wide multiplication, where a single x86 multiply replaces a long BPF sequence, saving many compute units.

The second article, Accelerating u128 Math with Libcalls and JIT Intrinsics, explains how Solana can significantly speed up 128 bit math by combining Rust’s existing libcall system with SVM JIT intrinsics. Instead of letting the compiler expand large number operations into slow, generic instruction sequences, Solana provides its own optimized implementations that the runtime can execute directly using native CPU capabilities. 

 The result is much lower compute usage and roughly double the performance for common u128 workloads, all while keeping the toolchain and developer experience unchanged.

⚒️ Oro GRAIL Gold API

GRAIL is a digital gold infrastructure platform built on Solana that lets fintechs, exchanges, and Web3 apps offer gold based financial products through simple APIs. 

Developed by Oro, GRAIL abstracts away the hardest parts of offering gold, including physical custody, regulatory compliance, settlement, and onchain execution. Partners integrate once and can support savings, yield, credit, rewards, and physical gold redemption inside their own products.

GRAIL supports two integration models using the same API. 

• Custodial Model: Partners manage user balances on their behalf, which is well suited for neobanks and traditional fintech apps where users never touch wallets. 
• Self custody: Users hold gold directly in their own wallets, which fits exchanges and DeFi platforms. 

Both models are KYC gated and whitelist only to ensure compliance.

The platform is already live with core gold functionality and plans to expand into additional metals, yield bearing gold, gold backed credit, rewards infrastructure, physical delivery, and multi chain support.

GRAIL: Gold Rails for the Internet

📊 Solana on Nansen Free

Nansen announced that its Solana analytics stack is now available to all users for free. Users can now analyze the profit and loss performance of any Solana wallet, research token holders and their behavior, and identify wallet types using Nansen’s premium labeling system. 

This includes visibility into funds, whales, ecosystem participants, and other high signal accounts. Users can also track Smart Money movements in real time through leaderboards and profitable address discovery, helping surface trading patterns before they become widely visible.

Alongside analytics, Nansen is expanding execution on Solana. Users can trade directly from the Nansen interface on web and mobile, using optimized routing through leading aggregators such as Jupiter Exchange. 

This release coincides with the launch of Nansen Points Season 03, which introduces new partners, perks, and incentives tied to onchain activity.

Solana on Nansen

⚡ Quick Hits

Crypto’s Product Era: What to Build on Solana in 2026 - @SuperteamPOL

Introducing Gauntlet, benchmarking Solana AI agents for safety - @shrinathx

FairScale Developer Ecosystem Initiative for Solana developers - @fairscalexyz

Presenting the Solana Network School Outpost - @superteam

Cooking with MagicBlock: How to schedule onchain actions without offchain infra - @magicblock

Rust Undead Is Live on Mainnet - @rust_undead

⚙️ Tools & Resources

awesome-solana-ai is a curated list of AI-powered tools, skills, and resources for Solana development. Developers are encouraged to add PRs with their own tools.

solana-claude-config is a production-ready Claude Code configuration for full-stack Solana development with best practices from multiple sources into an agent-optimized, token-efficient config you can copy over and adapt to your specific project.

seedless is a passkey wallet for Solana integrated with LazorKit that uses a fingerprint instead of a seedphrase.

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

• Quicknode is hiring a Support Engineer II
• Anchorage Digital is hiring a Member of Product, Core Experience
• Raiku is hiring an AI Engineer
• Kuzco is hiring a Senior Software Engineer - Model Performance

📅 Event Calendar

Colosseum SF Office Opening, San Francisco, CA, Jan 29
​Colosseum just moved into a new, permanent office in San Francisco and welcomed its 4th accelerator batch earlier this month. Join our team, portfolio startups, and friends from around the crypto ecosystem for our first event. ​Invite only, pizza and drinks will be served.

🎧 Listen to This

Podcast Title

In this episode of the TLD Podcast, host Dirtsits down with Nicky Scanz, founder of Layer33, a new coalition of independent Solana validators aimed at preserving and strengthening Solana’s decentralization.

Fresh off their indie SOL pool launch and a standout presence at Breakpoint, Nicky shares his journey into Solana from minting Degen Ape Academy NFTs on the legendary Sollet mobile web app in 2021, to becoming CEO of DAA, working at Marinade, and now founding Layer33.

Layer33: Decentralizing Solana from the Ground Up w/ Nicky Scanz, Founder

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