To enhance its appeal to developers and entrepreneurs, the Solana Foundation intends to delegate the management of hackathons and an accelerator program to Colosseum, an internet-based platform.
The Solana Foundation and the Colosseum Accelerator, a five-week program that expedites the entry of hackathon champions into the Solana ecosystem, will each receive two to three online hackathons organized by the organization each year. Colosseum will supplement approved accelerator projects with a pre-seed investment of $250,000.
Matty Taylor, co-founder of Colosseum and former chief of growth for the Solana Foundation, remarked that the ecosystem has made substantial progress since Solana’s inception in making its technology stack more developer-friendly. Taylor led the organization’s hackathons.
“At the time, it was not, which led to the Internet meme “chewing glass.” Taylor explains, “However, documentation, developer tools, and the abstraction of complexity have significantly improved the ease of deploying an application on Solana over the past two years, including during a Colosseum hackathon that lasted five to six weeks.”
In addition to receiving ongoing developer support, teams participating in the accelerator program will gain access to educational content, mentorship, and a client base within the Solana ecosystem.
Demo day is the culmination of the Colosseum accelerator program, during which founders present their ventures to funding and support-seeking venture funds.
Taylor affirmed that the non-dilutive prize pool for Colosseum hackathons will be approximately $600,000. In the interim, the accelerator program grants an additional $250,000 seed investment to the successful founding teams of the hackathon.
Over sixty thousand individuals have participated in Solana’s eight hackathon initiatives since 2020. Reports indicate that Hackathon participants have successfully funded the development of more than $600 million in venture capital and introduced 4,000 products.
Recent reports indicate that the Solana ecosystem maintained between 2,500 and 3,000 monthly developers as of 2023. Based on data provided by Electric Capital on October 1, 2023, Ethereum’s estimated monthly active developer count was 5,769.
Additionally, Taylor clarified that the foundation-highlighted figures pertain to open-source developers monitored on GitHub, representing a negligible proportion of the developer community.
“Most developers building on Solana are closed source, for example, all the devs at Phantom, which is a closed source product.”
The founder of Colosseum further states that the organization’s principal objective is to augment the pool of technical founders and developers capable of constructing products that function on blockchain technology. Taylor, former principal of Slow Ventures Clay Robbins, and former Stripe software engineer Nate Levine were all co-founders of Colosseum.
Recently, the Solana Foundation reported that developer retention was increasing toward the end of 2023. This coincided with a rise in network activity and a substantial appreciation of Solana’s token in tandem with Bitcoin.
