Colosseum Codex: Request for Startups, SFDP Changes, Breakpoint Schedule

Colosseum named Conta the newest winner of Eternal, its ongoing competition that runs between its two main hackathons each year. Conta is a payment account in Brazilian reais (BRL). Thedonkey and the Conta team will join Colosseum's upcoming accelerator cohort in San Francisco.

🔥 Request for Startups

The Solana Foundation published a new Request for Startups, listing 11 ideas from people across the ecosystem, including Matty Taylor of Colosseum, Toly, and Jacob Creech and Vibhu Norby of the Solana Foundation. 

Solana asked "What would you build now?", and the page points founders to the Solana Builder Program, which offers grants, go-to-market support, builder tools, hiring help, and credits.

The 11 requests include:

• Onchain housing futures (Matty Taylor, Colosseum): homeowners hedge against local price drops while first-home savers get exposure to the same index, "starting with one city and licensed price data."
• An open marketplace for AI inference (Jacob Creech, Solana Foundation)
• Entertainment finance for everyone (Pedro Miranda, Solana Foundation)
• Security for the agentic age (Robert Chen, OtterSec): "continuous transaction monitoring, onchain firewalls and tools to trace stolen funds" to counter AI-enabled attackers.
• Bring exotic collectibles onchain (Vibhu Norby, Solana Foundation): art, watches, cars, coins, and stamps, which Norby says "are a great way to onboard people into crypto."
• Attention tokens for startup distribution (Farhaj Mayan, Forma): tokens tied to a startup's attention rather than its equity, with trading revenue flowing "into a wallet that can only pay for marketing."
• Perps and onchain trading (Toly): grow Solana's share of perps and expand into other markets, starting by measuring "repeat usage and market share over time."
• An AI financial advisor in your wallet (Rishin Sharma, Solana Foundation)
• Build the future of stablecoins (Nemil Dalal, Y Combinator)
• Discovery and trading for onchain startup fundraising (Adam Bergeman, Star.fun)
• Game-day mode for prediction markets (Kyle Samani, Forward Industries): "a single live screen showing a football fan's open prediction-market positions across several games, built on top of existing trading and settlement layers."

This is the Foundation's second Request for Startups. The first, last updated in August 2024 and still online under the title "Free Ideas," listed ideas for energy DePIN, staking-yield subscriptions, creator tokens, onchain games, onchain identity, and a faster RPC node that needs less hardware. DePIN, games, identity, and the RPC node don't appear in the new version. Markets account for three of its 11 ideas and AI for two, with consumer apps, security, payments, tokenization, and startup distribution making up the rest.

Builders are told to apply to the Builder Program once they have something to show. Grant sizes, eligibility rules, and deadlines aren't published. A build challenge is listed as coming next, with no dates, prizes, or rules yet.

Request for Startups

⚖️ SFDP Changes

The Solana Foundation changed the rules for the Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP) on Nov 6, capping membership at 12 months and limiting the program to 100 validators. 

Members now graduate once their outside stake passes 300,000 SOL. About 337 validators were in the program when the rules took effect, and existing members outside the new limits retire in weekly tranches.

The SFDP was built for three reasons: 

• bootstrapping new validators
• keeping testnet healthy
• getting validators to test changes early. 

Jacob Creech, VP of Technology at Solana Foundation, stated that "SFDP has done its job" and that the Foundation had heard feedback that the program "is no longer reactive enough nor provides enough criteria given the ever-changing landscape of Solana." 

SFDP stays open to newer validators, and the Foundation will also stake directly with validators that contribute to network health, as it already did for validators that ran Frankendancer early.

Creech said the 100 cap is above the number of SFDP validators that remain, which leaves room to grow. He added that shrinking the validator set isn't the intent, though it "may be a side effect" if the Foundation can't find enough good contributors.

Layer33, a group of independent validators, published an open letter arguing the changes work against decentralization. It asks the Foundation to pause the weekly retirements and publish the analysis behind the 100-validator cap.

Delegation Program

🎤 Breakpoint 2026 Agenda

If you're going to Breakpoint in London, Colosseum is hosting a Builder Zone on the first floor of Olympia on Nov 16 and 17, with desks, monitors, and high-speed WiFi. Stop by to meet the team and get some work done during the conference.

The Breakpoint 2026 agenda is live, with two days of keynotes, firesides, debates, and panels on Nov 16 and 17 in London.

Sessions run on the Main Stage and at the Royal Exchange, organized by asset class and listed in London time. The website is the only place to find the agenda, venue map, and side events, since there's no conference app.

Solana Foundation President Lily Liu opens the event. The first block covers stablecoins and payments, with sessions on MoneyGram Ramps, Zelle going global, "Bringing Africa's 41 Currencies Onchain," and "Why Should I Use Your Stablecoin?"

Other sessions include:

• A debate on whether "Crypto Is Key to the UK's Economic Future," featuring Boris Johnson and Ross Kempsell
• Keynotes from Bullish (Tom Farley), Backpack (Armani Ferrante), and Allfunds
• Former White House crypto chief Patrick Witt on the future of digital assets

Attendees also get the BP Badge, an ESP32-C5 hardware kit running Solana's custom firmware that they can program to build apps, complete quests, and earn rewards on site.

Breakpoint agenda

⭐ Highlights

How much FMI revenue survives on public blockchains - @Solana_SRI
The Solana Research Institute estimates exchanges, clearing houses, settlement systems, and depositories earn about $31.5bn a year, and that if regulation stops protecting them, incumbents keep about $11.2bn while $20.3bn goes to users as lower costs or to new competitors.

Deployment assets - Solana
A new production readiness page covers the program ELF and program keypair you need before a mainnet deployment, plus what to rebuild and update if you change your program address.

Direct mapping will come to mainnet soon - @SolPlay_jonas
Direct mapping, already live on testnet and devnet, makes the runtime check each memory access instead of copying account data, so programs that read past account data or write to read-only accounts can break.

⚡ Quick Hits

How to Replace Durable Nonces on Solana with Offline Signer Programs - Mike Hale (me!)

Introducing Solana Privacy Rings - @Helius

How to Build an Escrow Program on Solana with Anchor - Mike MacCana

Agave v4.5 Release Schedule - Anza

Introducing The First Solana Mobile Guardians - Solana Mobile

Solana Changelog: November 12 - @solana_devs

⚙️ Tools & Resources

A compiler that turns TypeScript into native Solana programs
TypeSOL typechecks a TypeScript subset, lowers it to C, and builds it with the same LLVM toolchain as cargo-build-sbf, writing an Anchor-compatible IDL on every build. TypeSOL programs use 5–32% of Anchor's compute units in the project's LiteSVM benchmarks.

A permissionless router that lists any AMM you write 
Pipeline lets you write any AMM or market mechanism as a strategy program, register it once, and have every market built from it quoted and traded through one router swap instruction. It's live on devnet with a TypeScript SDK, and Rust crates for quoting and indexing.

A read-only, Alpenglow-aware validator health CLI
Vigil is a single static Go binary you run on each validator server to check VAT runway, BLS registration, delinquency, and missed leader slots, with Prometheus metrics and Slack, Telegram, or PagerDuty alerts.

💓 Ecosystem Pulse

💸 Index Industries raises $50M - Its first product, USHP, is a liquid index tracking U.S. home prices that launches on Ethereum with Solana planned for 2027.

💀 Galxe shuts down its core services - The quest and airdrop platform is winding down its Quest, ID, and Passport as the team folds into Gravity L1.

🎧 Listen to This

The Crypto Conversation

Chan Ahn, Founder of Tessera, which issues Solana tokens that track late-stage private companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Kalshi, explains that the shares sit in bankruptcy-remote Cayman Islands entities, and token holders get economic exposure through loan participation rights, with no ownership or voting rights.

Anyone outside the US, China, and sanctioned countries can trade the tokens on Meteora or Jupiter from a Solana wallet without KYC.

He also covers the model's first live test, SpaceX's June IPO, where the holding entity is selling the stock and returning USDC to token holders pro rata.

Tessera – SpaceX Exposure From a One-Dollar Solana Wallet

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

• Phantom is hiring a UX Researcher
• Syndica is hiring a Senior Software Engineer (Zig/Rust)
• Asymmetric Research is hiring a Project Manager

The Solana Foundation is capping SFDP at 100 validators with a 12-month limit. Are you worried that means fewer independent validators and more stake concentrated with the biggest operators, or do you think the network can absorb it?

Thanks for reading ✌️

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