Colosseum runs the world’s largest hackathons. Our most recent saw close to 1,500 projects. These fully online, global startup competitions are how we grow the Solana ecosystem, find talented builders, and support promising ideas.
These ideas should be viewed more like a prompt than a blueprint. Choosing to build one of them does not guarantee a prize or investment. In fact, we can’t even guarantee they are good ideas. But either way, we hope they inspire you to start building.
By Matty Taylor
Blockchains are excellent at value transfer. Yet most of us in the US still use platforms like Venmo and Cash App instead of crypto to pay each other. The reasons why we don’t switch are obvious to identify but tricky to solve – privacy, key management, and network effects, to name a few.
We believe now is the right time to build a crypto payments app that just… works. The Solana network is ready. Privacy infra is ready. The stablecoin infra is ready. And users are ready.
The key problem to solve is GTM. A wedge into this market could be focusing on specific payments corridors like Brazil<>Argentina, Mexico<>USA, etc. Or perhaps serving a niche community, like digital artists. A hyperlocalized app experience from a regionally-focused founding team could unlock the beachhead market that allows for future growth across the world.
By Matty Taylor
A shocking amount of crypto discourse happens on Telegram. In many ways, it is the beating heart of our industry. Telegram is where warm intros happen, friends hang out, and alpha gets shared.
We are particularly interested in this last point. Telegram bots were an early example of “turning Telegram into a trading platform” but we think there’s much more to build. Telegram bots are great for single player trading, but have neglected more multiplayer experiences.
You could imagine a degen chat on Telegram contributing to a shared pot of money. The capital is then controlled by several members of the chat who have permission to trade. These permissions are programmatic but adjustable – all from Telegram. This tooling turns a groupchat into a gamified hedge fund.
By Nate Levine
Everything is a memecoin. This has become a common refrain in our industry. The fundamental problem is there’s no way to differentiate between a memecoin and a legit project, so the legit projects are discounted as if they are memes.
Transparency solves this lemon market problem. The legit projects will opt in to basic transparency while the scammy projects will not. This creates clear differentiation and gives investors more confidence.
The Blockworks Token Transparency Framework is a step in the right direction. It’s a standardized, open source disclosure rubric for token issuers. However, it remains permissioned and offchain, which limits scalability.
We believe there’s an opportunity to leverage new approaches like zkTLS, or crowdsourced analysis, to solve the transparency problem onchain.