Colosseum Codex: Success Fees, North Star, x402 Report

This week is about incentives finally catching up to reality, whether that's validators getting paid to actually land transactions, autonomous agents paying their own way per request, or a DAO governance model that let 7 wallets drain $20M because nobody else showed up!

🔥 Success Fees

A new proposal would add an optional success fee only when a transaction actually executes successfully, on top of the existing priority fee.

Under the current fee model, users pay priority fees whether or not their transaction succeeds. Validators get paid for including a transaction in a block regardless of outcome, which means there's no direct economic reason for them to prioritize execution success over simple inclusion. 

The proposal targets that mismatch: it ties part of validator compensation to the actual job they need to do, packing transactions into blocks in a way that lets them land.

The mechanism works as a stacked fee. The base fee and priority fee still get charged on failure, same as today. The success fee is only debited after execution. If the account can't cover it, the transaction gets marked with an InsufficientFundsForSuccessFee error. 

It would be implemented as a new Compute Budget instruction or a TxV1 field, defaulting to zero so it's fully opt-in. The idea is to bring tipping that already happens out-of-protocol, through Jito bundles and similar side channels, into the protocol itself.

The discussion has surfaced one central, unresolved technical tension: if the success fee doesn't influence transaction ordering, it doesn't solve the landing-rate problem it's meant to solve. But if it does influence ordering, it needs to be reserved or escrowed at pack time, not just declared, because otherwise leaders are scheduling based on a fee they haven't actually secured. 

There's been a handful of fee-related SIMDs proposed lately to address fee structure and inflation, and it's easy to lose track of which ones matter. This one will, once the remaining questions have been answered.

Success Fees

🌠 Sonic SVM North Star

Sonic SVM launched North Star, a private execution layer that gives Solana agents and dApps their own dedicated, temporary runtime for high-frequency workloads.

An app opens a session with one SDK call, delegates its accounts into a private runtime, then runs its existing Solana program unchanged, same binary, same compute units, at over 1 million TPS with near-zero per-transaction cost. 

When the session ends, all state settles atomically back to Solana, with correctness enforced by delegated accounts locking on L1 while the session runs rather than by trusting a sequencer.

The target workloads are ones that can't tolerate shared blockspace:

• Trading agents that reprice continuously and settle only the final result
• Pricing agents pushing orderbook updates every 20ms
• Multi-agent systems that need to coordinate reads and writes at speed before settling together.

EvaDotFun, an on-chain agent arena where autonomous agents compete and build reputation through execution, is the first app built on North Star.

Agents making decisions every block need throughput that shared blockspace can't guarantee. North Star is a bet that on-demand runtimes are how that gets solved.

North Star

🤖 x402 on Solana

June was a breakout month for agent-to-agent payments on Solana via the x402 protocol. AWS opened a monetization pipeline letting content publishers charge AI crawlers and get paid instantly in stablecoins, routed over x402 on Solana rather than blocking bots outright.

On the trading side, ClawPump crossed $100M in combined spot and perpetuals volume, driven by more than 5,000 autonomous agents trading around the clock, and went on to win the Colosseum Frontier Hackathon. 

Quicknode began offering free service up to 1M requests a month per agent using x402, lowering the barrier for agents to access infrastructure without prepaid API keys.

Metaplex shipped Agent Profiles and an onchain Agent Registry, giving agents verifiable identity and action history, a piece OpenCovenant picked up immediately for its own agent reputation system.

Beyond those, the month saw a wave of smaller integrations across identity, inference marketplaces, and agent tooling, all converging on the same pattern: agents paying per request instead of relying on human-managed accounts or fiat rails.

x402 is turning from a demo into infrastructure that major platforms like AWS are building on top of, and Solana is becoming the platform for agentic payments.

x402 on Solana June Roundup

⭐ Highlights

Solana's Marshmallow Test - @mattytay
This article argues that Solana's real opportunity, both cultural and financial, is tipping the balance toward patient holders rather than extraction-driven trading.

SNS Endorses the Solana Foundation’s .sol gTLD Application - SNS
Solana Foundation is formally applying to ICANN (with SNS supporting) to get .sol recognized as an official internet gTLD.

Rent on Solana: The deposit that's about to get 10X cheaper - @soldotref
Explains how Solana "rent" works, and how SIMD-0437 could make it 10x cheaper.

Limit Order v2: The Any-Any Problem - Jupiter Developer Platform
How Jupiter built Limit Order v2 from the ground up (part 4).

⚡ Quick Hits

▶️ Introducing Solana Snacks: A bite-sized video series on complex topics - @solflare

How Superteam Georgia member CrowdBrain became Colosseum's Grand Champion - @SuperteamGEO

What is Open USD? Open Standard's Stablecoin Explained - Quicknode

Your Guide to Seeker Summer: Complete Quests, Earn Badges, and Explore Apps All Summer Long - @solanamobile

▶️ Solana Async Vault Tutorial: Build Tokenized Funds with NAV Strikes - Jonas Hahn

Phoenix Perpetuals: Market Maker Splines - xShitTrader

How to Build a Live Solana Inspector in Rust. No Backend. Zero JavaScript - @rust_undead

⚙️ Tools & Resources

paysh-agent-recipes - A collection of AI agent workflows built on pay.sh, covering use cases like whale watching, depeg monitoring, and lead enrichment.

seashell - A Rust testing framework for Solana programs that fetches and caches real mainnet account data, letting teams run deterministic tests against identical onchain snapshots without repeated RPC calls.

solana-subscriptions-example - A full-stack Next.js demo of the Solana Subscriptions Program, showing recurring billing plans with subscriber and merchant dashboards.

💓 Ecosystem Pulse

🚨 BonkDAO Drained $20M - A malicious governance proposal drained an estimated $20M in BONK from BonkDAO's treasury after the proposer bought roughly $4.4M in BONK just to clear the 1% quorum threshold and voted yes alone, with only 7 of 18,000+ wallets participating.

💀 Jito Ending ShredStream - DoubleZero Edge is positioning itself as the replacement for Jito ShredStream. Existing ShredStream users get a free 90-day trial, after which pricing runs $30-$100 per epoch.

💀 Exchange Art is shutting down - A prolonged bear market for onchain art made the business economically unviable. Escrowed artwork and funds will be released to owners before the shutdown on Aug 1, 2026.

🎧 Listen to This

On The Road with Nick Ducoff

In this episode, Nick talks with Theo from Baillie Gifford about the future of tokenization, regulation, and innovation in digital assets, with insights into Baggy, Solana's role in London, and regulatory environments.

Solana in London: The Future of Crypto Innovation with Theo from Baillie Gifford

👩‍🔧 Get Hired

• Kast is hiring a Database Engineering Lead
• Sphere is hiring a Sr. Backend Engineer
• Moonshot is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer
• Solana Foundation is hiring a GM, AI Ecosystem

BonkDAO got drained for $20M simply because no one was paying attention. Do you still believe in the DAO token voting model or something else, like Futarchy or Sowellian governance?

Thanks for reading ✌️

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