Colosseum Codex: Solana Protocol Spec, Asset Registry, MetaDAO Apps

Colosseum has reopened Eternal, its perpetual competition for founders who missed the last submission window. Founders start a four-week sprint whenever they're ready, post a one-minute progress video each week, and submit a pitch, demo, and GitHub repo at the end. Winners are evaluated for Colosseum's next accelerator batch and a $250,000 pre-seed investment, and the most innovative submission each cycle wins the $25,000 Eternal Award.

🔥 Solana Protocol Spec

Anza's Brennan Watt has proposed replacing standalone SIMDs with one living Solana protocol specification. He opened the Move to Protocol Spec discussion in the SIMD repository on October 30 and posted an 18-chapter draft alongside it. It's a proposal for feedback, and nothing has been adopted or scheduled.

Solana's rules currently live across years of SIMDs and the code of its two validator clients, Agave and Firedancer. Watt wrote that a proposal changing existing behavior can only reference it by "linking to a client implementation or defining the current behavior inline," so the same behavior gets defined again and again. 

He also said it's "often difficult to determine whether a proposal has addressed every affected part of the protocol," and that implementers have to reverse engineer Mainnet behavior from existing clients.

Under the proposal, ideas would still start in SIMD Discussions. When an idea is ready, its author would open a pull request against the spec describing the change, including byte layouts, state transitions, error behavior, and limits. The PR number would become the SIMD identifier, and the same technical review and governance approval would still apply.

A spec PR would merge only when its change activates on Mainnet, so the spec always describes the live protocol and is versioned by Mainnet epoch. Meta and process proposals would stay standalone documents, and SIMDs not yet live on Mainnet would migrate to spec PRs while keeping their identifiers.

The draft is pinned to Mainnet epoch 1072 and covers account state, transactions, Proof of History, shreds, the SVM, consensus and voting, fees and rewards, and feature activation.

Solana Protocol Specification

🗂️ Asset Registry

The Solana Foundation launched the Solana Asset Registry on tokens.xyz, describing it as "a canonical search engine for every Solana asset, classified." Every entry draws on data from Allium, CoinGecko, and RWA.xyz, and the Foundation pitches it as a way to fact-check a Solana token.

The "Real World Assets Registry" launched with about 3,300 classified assets, all stablecoins or tokenized RWAs. Each entry lists the token, mint address, category, and class, with value from Allium and RWA.xyz side by side and market cap from CoinGecko.

Registered assets are also available through the Tokens API, with endpoints for asset search, mint resolution, market snapshots, OHLCV, and risk summaries. Requests need an API key created in the Tokens dashboard, and curated lists cover majors, currencies, LSTs, RWAs, ETFs, metals, and stocks.

Solana Asset Registry

🌱 MetaDAO Apps Program

MetaDAO, a Colosseum portfolio company, launched the Apps Program, a fundraising track for consumer app founders.

Compared with MetaDAO's usual raises, apps raise smaller amounts and sell a smaller share of their token supply to backers. Founders can also start selling earned tokens sooner, subject to performance milestones and sales limits.

The first raise is 1609SAT, an AI SAT prep app with 400+ paying students and about $5k in monthly revenue in its first three months. Its $100k raise went live November 5, with MetaDAO contributing $50k and the rest open to the public.

MetaDAO Apps

🦀 RustRover Solana Plugin

JetBrains is building Solana (Experimental), a free plugin that adds Anchor and Quasar support to its RustRover IDE, and Solana Developers spotlighted it this week. It recognizes Anchor projects automatically and installs the Solana toolchain (Solana CLI, AVM, Anchor, and Surfpool) in one click on Linux and macOS. Recent releases added Windows support through WSL.

Check out this video review from Solana Foundation DevRel Jonas Hahn:

The plugin adds run configurations for Anchor Build, Anchor Test, and Surfpool Start, plus Anchor.toml completion and validation. A Solana tool window manages wallets and includes an explorer that streams transactions with decoded instructions, logs, and compute units.

With an IDL, the explorer also decodes program accounts into named, typed fields. New Anchor projects can start from RustRover's New Project wizard, with a choice of package manager, test template, and program template.

JetBrains labels the plugin experimental and says its interface and behavior may change.

Solana (Experimental) plugin

⭐ Highlights

One of Solana's busiest programs could use 81% less compute - Solana Compass
SIMD-0567, merged Nov 1, proposes p-ATA, a Pinocchio rewrite of the Associated Token Account program that keeps its program ID and interface while cutting the common create-if-missing call from about 22,940 CU to 4,171.

Decoupling cargo-build-sbf from the Solana CLI - @anza_xyz
cargo-build-sbf no longer ships with the Solana CLI, so developers now install and update it with cargo install cargo-build-sbf, and v4.5.0 warns when a stale copy on the PATH shadows the new one.

Agave v4.4.0 is recommended for general adoption - @anza_xyz
Beyond the validator flag changes, v4.4.0 adds minContextSlot to getTransaction and getSignatureStatuses and makes accountSubscribe and programSubscribe honor dataSlice.

⚡ Quick Hits

Stablecoin Account Goes Live in Samsung Wallet, Bringing USDC on Solana to Galaxy Users - Solana

We're opening up the Blockworks MCP to everyone - @Blockworks

How to Add Seeker Connect to a Solana Mobile App - Mike Hale (me!)

SKR buy and burns are now live - @solanamobile

⚙️ Tools & Resources

The Solana leader schedule in your macOS menu bar
Sonata counts down to your validator's next leader slots and breaks down what each tenure earned, including Jito tips, skipped slots, and the operator and staker split. It also plays the epoch's song on piano, one note per leader change.

Chainlink's CCIP programs for Solana, with a local devenv
Chainlink's new CCIP repo for Solana has 15 Anchor v1 programs, including the router, offramp, and token pools. Its local devenv lets you test cross-chain messages between Solana chains, and optionally EVM chains, on your own machine.

Open-source security monitor for Solana programs
Watchtower grades your program's upgrade authority and multisig setup, then watches for authority changes and vault outflows using Helius Parsed Events. It sends one critical alert to Discord, Slack, Telegram, or a webhook when control, risk, and drain stages line up within 24 hours.

A CLI that flags access-control changes between two Anchor IDLs
Run anchor-surface before a program upgrade or in CI to see every removed signer, changed PDA seed, dropped has_one, and new instruction. It's a zero-dependency Rust binary with a --fail-on flag that fails your build on danger-level findings.

A validator dashboard for Solana under Alpenglow
The open-source app behind vx.tools, vortex-dashbaord tracks each validator's voting, block production, block income, and skipped-slot cost, plus Nakamoto coefficients by provider, country, and client. It also shows governance proposals with per-validator votes.

An Anchor and Token-2022 starter with a transfer hook
The free MIT edition pairs an Anchor 0.30+ transfer-hook program with a TypeScript SDK and React wallet-adapter hooks, so you can start a Token-2022 project from a template.

💓 Ecosystem Pulse

💸 Unruggable raises $500K - Colosseum led the strategic round for the self-described "full-stack wallet for Internet Capital Markets," which won Grand Champion at a Colosseum hackathon.

💸 Rip Cars closes a $1.5M strategic round - Colosseum, DBA, and Kyle Samani are among the backers of the Hot Wheels gacha platform, which launched its $CARS token on MetaDAO.

💸 Uranium Digital raises a $16.5M Series A - Blockchain Capital led the round for the platform, which lets institutions trade physical uranium held in storage using blockchain-based ownership records.

🚚 ZetaChain proposes moving ZETA to Solana on Dec 9 - If the vote closing Nov 7 passes, the ZetaChain L1 halts at a snapshot and ZETA becomes a native 1:1 SPL token, with ZetaLabs, a private AI app for markets, launching the same day.

🚚 Sentinel prepares to migrate from Cosmos to Solana - The dVPN network logged a record 8.5 million encrypted sessions and 111,747 unique users in October, and said its Solana devnet would arrive the week of Nov 2.

📅 Event Calendar

Colosseum Builder Zone at Breakpoint, London, November 16-17
Colosseum is again hosting the Builder Zone inside Breakpoint's Olympia London venue, with desks, monitors, and high-speed WiFi for attendees who want to meet the Colosseum team and get some work done during the conference.

🎧 Listen to This

The Stack

Leonardo Donatacci from Blueshift shares his journey building in the Solana ecosystem and explores how new tools could improve payments, subscriptions, permissions, and user experience.

The New Solana Program That Could Replace Subscriptions and Payments

• Anza is hiring a Software Engineer, Storage
• Rain is hiring a Senior Security Engineer
• Sphere is hiring a Senior Software Engineer (Customer Success)
• FBYT is hiring a Full-Stack Solana Developer

The Solana Protocol Specification draft is open for feedback in the SIMD repo. What's one thing you'd want it to cover before it replaces standalone SIMDs?

Thanks for reading ✌️

Follow me on X!