Author: Zen, PANews

This week, Colosseum, which focuses on the Solana ecosystem, announced that it has raised $60 million and launched "Colosseum Fund I." The organization was officially established at the beginning of this year to hold hackathons specifically for Solana, and through the startup accelerator, it provides guidance, training and financial support to early projects that stand out in hackathons.

Since the Solana Foundation held its first hackathon in 2021, it has continued to work hard to expand the developer community, and even in the face of an overall downturn in 2023, it still prioritized its grassroots developer community, resulting in an 83% year-on-year increase in the number of new developers that year. Taking into account factors such as the number of participants, project output, and downstream investor interest, Solana's regular hackathons have become one of the largest hackathons in the technology industry.

To continue and expand this momentum, Matty Taylor, former head of growth at the Solana Foundation, Clay Robbins, former head of Slow Ventures, and Nate Levine, former Stripe software engineer, co-founded Colosseum. In addition to working with the Solana Foundation to manage and promote the Solana official hackathon, the organization is also working on its own accelerator program. So there was the "Colosseum Fund I" mentioned at the beginning, and the Solana Foundation, as the LP of the fund, also provided support for it.

Colosseum's accelerator is a six-week online program designed to integrate its hackathon winners into the Solana ecosystem, iterate quickly to find product-market fit, and raise seed funding faster. That is, projects participating in the program must first participate in the Colosseum hackathon and be selected as winners. Colosseum plans to hold two or three hackathons each year, each followed by an accelerator event. Founders of shortlisted projects can join an exclusive founder community and enjoy one-on-one guidance, weekly educational courses, and Colosseum's fixed standard of $250,000 in early-stage investments.

In the last Solana Renaissance hackathon, participants submitted 1,071 projects, and 34 projects were awarded. Colosseum selected 10 winning teams to participate in its accelerator. Through the SAFE + token warrants, Colosseum has provided financial support to 11 early-stage projects so far, with a total investment of US$2.75 million. These early-stage projects include:

Ore

Solana's on-chain mining protocol allows anyone to mine on Solana using the PoW algorithm, either at home or on a mobile phone. Ore uses a novel proof-of-work algorithm. After the project went online, it attracted many users to enter the market, causing a surge in transaction volume in a short period of time, resulting in a large congestion on the Solana network.

My career

Urani is an intent-based suite on Solana, whose goal is to provide a unique way to trade safely on the Solana blockchain through the most advanced MEV (maximum extractable value) minimization technology at the application level. It realizes the gamification of decentralized finance by transforming harmful MEV incentives into free market opportunities. Its Urani Swap uses an order flow auction mechanism. Users submit an offline signed message containing transaction information, and the Urani protocol executes the transaction on behalf of the user.

DBunker

DBunker is a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) financial derivatives platform developed by Ebunker, an Ethereum node verification service provider. DBunker aims to make it affordable and easy for individuals to participate in DePIN mining by tokenizing and sharding DePIN mining. DBunker can be used to create tokens that represent a share of the output of a mining operation (cloud mining rights) or the mining hardware itself. These tokens will be able to be transferred, traded, or staked in various on-chain DeFi applications, significantly enhancing liquidity. sex and practicality.

DeCharge

DeCharge is an electric vehicle energy network that combines the DePIN architecture. Its goal is to operate a wide network of electric vehicle charging stations, electric vehicles, drones, and autonomous robots, and to establish protocols and operating systems for global electric vehicle energy infrastructure by leveraging blockchain technology, DeFi, and RWA. DeCharge claims that the tokens in its ecosystem have multiple functions, including incentivizing network participation, facilitating transactions, and rewarding stakeholders. No tokens have been released yet.

Torque

Torque is an on-chain offer protocol that helps developers deploy marketing strategies at scale. Torque developed a protocol, an SDK, and an offer publishing platform during the Renaissance hackathon. Torque allows developers to use cryptographic primitives to launch and manage offers that reward multiple parties. All offers are conditional, targeted, and have trustless on-chain proofs. Torque uses a combination of derived key pairs to maintain privacy and cNFTs (conditional non-fungible tokens) to track and distribute rewards.

Runepunk Legends

Legend of the Sun is an old-school arena battle game, now officially renamed Runepunk Legends, developed by Web3 game studio Spaceman Gaming. The game mechanics are old-school combat systems, including click-to-move and auto-attack, inventory and build management, team battles, etc. The game features Web3 integration of digital assets, digital asset markets, on-chain betting, and Web3 degen modes.

MeshMap

Meshmap is a new 3D map network integrated with games, built through 3D scans submitted by the community, and rewarded with token incentives and multiple gameplay. City Champ, created by it, is a mixed reality first-person combat and tower defense game developed for Meta Quest 2/3/Pro using Unity and Solana. In the game, players need to protect the city from the invasion of terrifying creatures caused by urban social problems. Users can also act as 3D scanners, using the built-in LiDAR scanner in their phones to scan the grid to find new game areas and submit them to MeshMap to add game levels.

BlockMesh

BlockMesh is an innovative, open network that enables users to monetize their surplus bandwidth (bandwidth refers to the amount of data transferred over a network in a certain period of time), driving the AI ​​data layer and online privacy. Through BlockMesh, users can act as proxy servers for data-hungry applications (such as AI) and privacy-conscious applications (such as VPNs).

Banger

A creator economy platform that allows users to buy and sell Tweets while supporting creators, having fun, and making money.

Autumn

The High TPS Solana Client developed by Rakurai increases TPS through proprietary scheduling and pipeline optimization, improves transaction capacity, and increases staking returns by 30% through shared block rewards. These high TPS nodes will be provided through liquid staking pools.

MetaDAO

A new type of organization that provides a platform for creating, managing, and participating in futarchy. Futarchy is a system that uses market-based decision-making to circumvent many existing governance challenges, such as voter apathy and political control. MetaDAO is not currently selected by Colosseum, but according to the 11 projects listed in the "Demo Day Preview" released by the latter on June 27, it should be the 11th project invested by Colosseum.

Each of the above projects received a standard investment amount of $250,000, but according to Colosseum co-founder Robbins, the investment size of subsequent rounds may vary. He also said that the full deployment of the fund may take three to four years, depending on the size of future batches and subsequent investments. However, regardless of the scale, Colosseum will focus on the development, application and growth of early technologies in the Solana ecosystem. "Solana is the ecosystem that we are most excited about because it provides builders with the infrastructure they need to scale their crypto products."

As the most outstanding ecosystem in the past six months, Solana has become the "crypto future" that many industry practitioners are confident of after its comeback. After the US asset management agency VanEck submitted the application documents for Solana Trust (VANECK SOLANA TRUST) last night, it means that Solana ETF is officially on the agenda and will become the market focus for some time to come. Solana's popularity will continue for a long time.