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Colosseum runs the world’s largest hackathons. Our most recent saw close to 1,500 projects. These fully online, global startup competitions are how we grow the Solana ecosystem, find talented builders, and support promising ideas.
Our next hackathon, Cypherpunk, goes live on September 25th. And for the first time, we’re open sourcing our internal thinking on some product ideas we’re excited about.
These ideas should be viewed more like a prompt than a blueprint. Choosing to build one of them does not guarantee a prize or investment. In fact, we can’t even guarantee they are good ideas. But either way, we hope they inspire you to start building.
See you in the arena.
P2P Payments for Bordering Countries
By Matty Taylor
Blockchains are excellent at value transfer. Yet most of us in the US still use platforms like Venmo and Cash App instead of crypto to pay each other. The reasons why we don’t switch are obvious to identify but tricky to solve – privacy, key management, and network effects, to name a few.
We believe now is the right time to build a crypto payments app that just… works. The Solana network is ready. Privacy infra is ready. The stablecoin infra is ready. And users are ready.
The key problem to solve is GTM. A wedge into this market could be focusing on specific payments corridors like Brazil<>Argentina, Mexico<>USA, etc. Or perhaps serving a niche community, like digital artists. A hyperlocalized app experience from a regionally-focused founding team could unlock the beachhead market that allows for future growth across the world.
Arm The Groupchats
By Matty Taylor
A shocking amount of crypto discourse happens on Telegram. In many ways, it is the beating heart of our industry. Telegram is where warm intros happen, friends hang out, and alpha gets shared.
We are particularly interested in this last point. Telegram bots were an early example of “turning Telegram into a trading platform” but we think there’s much more to build. Telegram bots are great for single player trading, but have neglected more multiplayer experiences.
You could imagine a degen chat on Telegram contributing to a shared pot of money. The capital is then controlled by several members of the chat who have permission to trade. These permissions are programmatic but adjustable – all from Telegram. This tooling turns a groupchat into a gamified hedge fund.
Onchain Moody’s
By Nate Levine
Everything is a memecoin. This has become a common refrain in our industry. The fundamental problem is there’s no way to differentiate between a memecoin and a legit project, so the legit projects are discounted as if they are memes.
Transparency solves this lemon market problem. The legit projects will opt in to basic transparency while the scammy projects will not. This creates clear differentiation and gives investors more confidence.
The Blockworks Token Transparency Framework is a step in the right direction. It’s a standardized, open source disclosure rubric for token issuers. However, it remains permissioned and offchain, which limits scalability.
We believe there’s an opportunity to leverage new approaches like zkTLS, or crowdsourced analysis, to solve the transparency problem onchain.
Permissionless Predictions
By Nate Levine
One of the most powerful things about interacting with a blockchain is that it’s permissionless. In some ways launchpads like Pump.fun epitomize this. They turned launching a token from something only a ‘dev’ could do, to something everyone can do in just a couple clicks. We believe a similar opportunity exists for prediction markets.
Today, the big prediction markets – Polymarket and Kalshi – are centralized. This means a group of individuals must create each market by hand. This works okay for now, but as prediction markets grow, traders will demand more markets than these finite teams can support.
We believe there is an opportunity to build permissionless prediction markets. The technical challenges are daunting – most notably the resolution process – but we are looking for ambitious builders to solve them.
Creator Coins With Claims
By Clay Robbins
“Creator coins” are the narrative du jour. Unfortunately, they are just memecoins. They may give you access to the trading fees earned by the coin creator, but those trading fees are driven by raw speculation, not fundamentals.
One way to make creator tokens more interesting is to give them claims on real cash flows. You could imagine an artist sharing Spotify royalties with token holders. Or a streamer sharing advertising revenue – unlocking a new form of fandom tied to a creator’s emergence in popular culture.
Integrating a token across all platforms / business lines creators tap to drive monetization of their likeness would unify the ultimate goal of owning a token that represents a creator’s entire business. We believe zkTLS offers an interesting tool to solve some of these technical challenges historically associated with prior implementations.
Plugging Payments Into The Internet
By Clay Robbins
Stablecoins are payments infrastructure for the Internet (for real this time). This might sound odd as most of us already use Venmo, Cash App, and other Internet-native payments apps. But many industries and verticals still use pre-Internet banking solutions like physical checks.
We are looking for teams with specific experience in established industries that suffer from sclerotic payments solutions. There is a massive opportunity to build next generation Internet banking on crypto rails. We believe the right founders will have expertise given their lived experience in a specific vertical and the grit to update the market to the internet era.
Regional Neobanks
By Max Monciardini
Building a regional neobank has historically been a massive tech lift. But we believe that’s changing. Infrastructure like Squads Grid lets you spin up a neobank with minimal effort. This promises to unlock a wave of hyper-local innovation.
You could imagine a neobank built for a small local dialect in Brazil. Or even one associated with a popular regional brand in Zimbabwe. Tech is no longer the blocker; the real work has shifted to regional expertise and operating ability.
Undercollaterized Lending
By Max Monciardini
Crypto lending today is almost entirely overcollateralized. This is great for people with capital, but not so great for everyone else. We believe there’s an opportunity to offer small dollar undercollateralized loans on crypto-rails.
With zkTLS you can verify offchain data to better underwrite risk, which opens up the design space and unlocks a much larger universe of potential users.
We are looking for teams excited about building new, undercollateralized lending products on Solana.
Futarchy Controlled Agent
By Michael Rinko
Onchain agents are still just a narrative. This is partly because AI models remain incapable of true agency. But also because crypto tooling isn’t ready to support them. In last year’s AI meta, we saw a wave of Twitter influencer style AI ‘agents.’ These bots were effectively just an API call to OpenAI + Solana wallet + Twitter account.
Despite being relatively primitive, these ‘agents’ highlighted some interesting problems. Perhaps the biggest is the lack of trust between human token holders and AI token deployers. Unlike a human, an AI cannot be thrown in jail or held accountable for their actions. This breaks our “please don’t rug” trust-based system in crypto.
Futarchy is one solution to this problem. An agent could launch a token on MetaDAO and raise money that sits in a treasury controlled by the market. In order to access its treasury, the agent would need to first convince the market that it is a +EV decision.
We believe this model creates trustless conditions between investors and founders (humans and AI), and equips a model with a powerful tool – futarchy – to help it accrue resources.
If you’re interested in the bleeding edge of crypto, AI, and futarchy – please reach out.
Trading Tools For Whales
By Michael Rinko
Trading in size onchain is painful. There still isn’t a popular onchain OTC platform for people to execute large trades. OTC seems like an obvious trust problem crypto can solve, given it’s just a matter of escrow. Layering in privacy and perhaps even connecting the OTC DEX to the broader DeFi ecosystem could also lead to a more fully featured trading experience.
Another area where onchain tooling has lagged is large order execution. Jupiter’s DCA feature is the only game in town. And while it’s a great product, there are still many ways to improve. We believe there’s an opportunity to build more sophisticated tooling to support large onchain traders.
