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 earlier this year to host hackathons for Solana and provide guidance, training, and funding support to early-stage projects that stand out in the hackathons.
Since the Solana Foundation first hosted a hackathon in 2021, it has continuously worked to expand its developer community. Even in the context of overall stagnation in 2023, it has prioritized its grassroots developer community, resulting in an 83% year-on-year increase in new developers. Considering factors such as the number of participants, project output, and downstream investor interest, Solana's regular hackathons have become one of the largest in the tech industry.
To continue and participate in this momentum, former Solana Foundation Growth Director Matty Taylor, former Slow Ventures executive Clay Robbins, and former Stripe software engineer Nate Levine co-founded Colosseum. In addition to collaborating with the Solana Foundation to manage and promote the official Solana hackathon, the organization is also launching its own accelerator program. This led to the introduction of "Colosseum Fund I" mentioned earlier, with the Solana Foundation supporting it as the fund's LP.
Colosseum's accelerator is a six-week online program designed to integrate hackathon winners into the Solana ecosystem, iterate quickly to find product-market fit, and raise seed funding faster. Projects participating in this program must first participate in the Colosseum hackathon and be selected as winners. Colosseum plans to hold two to three hackathons annually, each followed by accelerator activities. Founders of selected projects can join an exclusive founder community, receive one-on-one guidance, weekly educational courses, and a standard $250,000 early investment from Colosseum.
In the previous Solana Renaissance hackathon, participants submitted a total of 1071 projects, with 34 projects ultimately winning awards. Colosseum selected 10 winning teams to participate in its accelerator. Through SAFE + token warrants, Colosseum has provided funding support to 11 early-stage projects, with a total investment of $2.75 million. These early-stage projects include:
Ore
Ore is a Solana-based mining protocol that allows anyone to mine using the PoW algorithm on Solana, from home or on a mobile device. Ore uses a novel proof-of-work algorithm. After its launch, it attracted many users to enter, causing a rapid increase in trading volume and congestion on the Solana network.
Urani
Urani is an intent-based suite on Solana, aiming to minimize MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) using the most advanced MEV minimization technology at the application layer on the Solana blockchain, providing a unique secure trading method. By converting harmful MEV incentives into free market opportunities, it gamifies decentralized finance. Urani Swap uses an order flow auction mechanism, where 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 Ethereum node validation service provider Ebunker. DBunker aims to make individual participation in DePIN mining affordable and easy by tokenizing and fragmenting DePIN mining. DBunker can be used to create tokens representing mining operation output shares (cloud mining rights) or mining hardware itself, which can be transferred, traded, or pledged in various DeFi applications on different chains, significantly enhancing liquidity and utility.
DeCharge
DeCharge is an electric vehicle energy network combined with the DePIN architecture, aiming to operate a wide-ranging network of electric vehicle charging stations, electric vehicles, drones, and automated robots, and establish protocols and operating systems for global electric vehicle energy infrastructure using blockchain technology, DeFi, and RWA. DeCharge claims that tokens in its ecosystem have various functions, including incentivizing network participation, facilitating transactions, and rewarding stakeholders. Tokens have not been released yet.
Torque
Torque is an on-chain quoting protocol that helps developers deploy marketing strategies on a large scale. During the Renaissance hackathon, Torque developed a protocol, an SDK, and a quote publishing platform. Torque allows developers to use cryptographic primitives to launch and manage promotions involving multiple participants. All promotions are conditional, targeted, and have trustless on-chain proofs. Torque maintains privacy using a combination of derived key pairs and tracks and distributes rewards using cNFTs (conditional non-fungible tokens).
Runepunk Legends
Runepunk Legends is a classic arena combat game, now officially renamed Runepunk Legends, developed by Web3 game studio Spaceman Gaming. The game features classic combat systems, including click-to-move and automatic attacks, inventory and build management, and team battles. The game integrates digital assets, a digital asset marketplace, on-chain betting, and Web3 degen mode.
MeshMap
Meshmap is a new 3D map network integrated with games, built from community-submitted 3D scans and rewarded with tokens and various gameplay. Its creation, City Champ, is a mixed reality first-person combat and tower defense game developed for Meta Quest 2/3/Pro using Unity and Solana. Players need to protect the city from terror creatures caused by urban social issues. Users can also act as 3D scanners, using the LiDAR scanner built into their phones to scan grids to find new game areas and submit them to MeshMap to add game levels.
BlockMesh
BlockMesh is an innovative, open network that allows users to monetize their excess bandwidth (bandwidth refers to the amount of data transmitted over a network within a certain period of time), driving the implementation of AI data layers and online privacy. Through BlockMesh, users can act as proxy servers for data-demanding applications (such as AI) and privacy-focused applications (such as VPN).
Banger
A creator economy platform that allows users to buy and sell tweets while supporting creators, entertainment, and earning money.
Rakurai
The High TPS Solana Client developed by Rakurai increases TPS and transaction capacity through proprietary scheduling and pipeline optimization, while also increasing staking rewards by 30% through shared block rewards. These high TPS nodes will be provided through a liquid staking pool.
MetaDAO
A new type of organization that provides a platform for creating, managing, and participating in futarchy. Futarchy is a system that uses a market to make decisions, aiming to bypass many existing governance challenges, such as voter apathy and political control. MetaDAO is not currently selected by Colosseum, but based on the 11 projects listed in the "Demo Day Preview" released by Colosseum on June 27, it should be the 11th project invested by Colosseum.
Each of the above projects has received the standard investment amount of $250,000, but according to Clay Robbins, co-founder of Colosseum, the investment size in subsequent rounds may vary. He also stated that the full deployment of the fund may take three to four years, depending on the scale of future batches and subsequent investments. However, regardless of the scale, Colosseum will focus on the early development, application, and growth of technology in the Solana ecosystem. "Solana is the most exciting ecosystem for us because it provides the infrastructure needed for builders to expand their crypto products."
As one of the most prominent ecosystems in the past six months, Solana has become the confident "crypto future" for many industry practitioners after its resurgence. After the U.S. asset management firm VanEck submitted an application for the Solana Trust (VANECK SOLANA TRUST) last night, symbolizing the formal scheduling of a Solana ETF, it will become a market focus in the near future. The hot trend of Solana will continue for a long time.
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