Solana officially endorsed accelerator Colosseum: raised 60 million USD, which early projects were supported?

Author: Zen, PANews

This week, Colosseum, focused on the Solana ecosystem, announced that it has raised $60 million and launched "Colosseum Fund I." The organization was officially established earlier this year, specifically to host hackathons for Solana and provide guidance, training, and funding support to early projects that stand out in these hackathons through a startup accelerator.

Since the Solana Foundation first held a hackathon in 2021, it has continuously worked to expand its developer community, prioritizing its grassroots developer community even amid the overall downturn in 2023, resulting in an 83% year-on-year increase in new developers for the year. Considering various factors such as participant numbers, project output, and downstream investor interest, the regular hackathons hosted by Solana have become one of the largest hackathons in the tech industry.

To continue and participate in expanding this momentum, former Solana Foundation Growth Director Matty Taylor, former Slow Ventures Head 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 hackathons, the organization is also working on its own accelerator program. This led to the aforementioned "Colosseum Fund I," with the Solana Foundation acting as an LP to support the fund.

Colosseum's accelerator is a six-week online program designed to help its hackathon winners integrate into the Solana ecosystem, rapidly iterate to find product-market fit, and raise seed funding more quickly. Projects participating in this program must first compete in the Colosseum hackathon and be selected as winners. Colosseum plans to hold two to three hackathons each year, with accelerator activities following each one. Founders of shortlisted projects can join an exclusive founders community, enjoying one-on-one mentoring, weekly educational sessions, and a standard early investment of $250,000 from Colosseum.

In the last Solana Renaissance hackathon, participants submitted a total of 1,071 projects, with 34 projects ultimately winning awards. Colosseum selected 10 winning teams to participate in its accelerator. Through SAFE + token warrants, Colosseum has so far provided funding support to 11 early projects, totaling $2.75 million. These early projects include:

Ore

A mining protocol on the Solana chain that allows anyone to mine using the PoW algorithm on Solana, whether at home or on a mobile phone. Ore employs a novel proof-of-work algorithm. After its launch, the project attracted numerous entrants, causing a surge in transaction volume and significant congestion on the Solana network.

Urani

Urani is an intent-based suite on Solana, aiming to provide unique secure trading methods on the Solana blockchain through the application of cutting-edge MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) minimization techniques. By transforming harmful MEV incentives into free market opportunities, it gamifies decentralized finance. Its 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 both affordable and easy by tokenizing and fragmenting DePIN mining. DBunker can be used to create tokens representing shares of mining operation outputs (cloud mining rights) or the mining hardware itself, which can be transferred, traded, or collateralized in various chain-based DeFi applications, significantly enhancing liquidity and utility.

DeCharge

DeCharge is an electric vehicle energy network that combines DePIN architecture, aiming 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. Tokens have not yet been released.

Torque

Torque is an on-chain quoting protocol that helps developers deploy marketing strategies at 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 promotional campaigns that reward multiple participants. All offers are conditional, targeted, and have trustless on-chain proof. Torque uses a combination of derived key pairs to maintain privacy and employs 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 the Web3 game studio Spaceman Gaming. The game mechanics feature an old-school battle system, including click-to-move and auto-attack, inventory and build management, and team battles. The game integrates digital assets with Web3, features a digital asset marketplace, on-chain betting, and a Web3 degen mode.

MeshMap

Meshmap is a new type of 3D map network integrated with games, built through community-submitted 3D scans, and incentivized with tokens and various gameplay rewards. Its created City Champ is a mixed-reality first-person battle and tower defense game developed using Unity and Solana for Meta Quest 2/3/Pro. Players need to protect the city from terror creatures arising from urban social issues. Users can also act as 3D scanners, using their phone's built-in LiDAR scanner to scan grids for 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 excess bandwidth (the amount of data transmitted over a network in a given time), promoting the realization of AI data layers and online privacy. Through BlockMesh, users can act as proxy servers for data-demanding applications (like AI) and privacy-focused applications (like VPNs).

Banger

A creator economy platform that allows users to buy and sell tweets while supporting creators, entertaining, and making money.

Rakurai

The High TPS Solana Client developed by Rakurai improves TPS through proprietary scheduling and pipeline optimization, enhancing transaction capacity while increasing staking rewards 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 uses a system where decisions are made by the market, aiming to bypass many existing governance challenges, such as voter apathy and political control. MetaDAO has not yet been 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 for Colosseum's investment.

Each of the above projects has received a standard investment amount of $250,000; however, according to Colosseum co-founder Robbins, the investment scale for 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 scale, Colosseum will focus on the development, application, and growth of early technologies in the Solana ecosystem. "Solana is the most exciting ecosystem for us because it provides the infrastructure builders need to scale their crypto products."

As one of the most outstanding ecosystems in the past six months, Solana has become a firm "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, it symbolizes that the Solana ETF is officially on the agenda and will become a market focus for the foreseeable future. The popularity of Solana is expected to continue for a long time.