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Solana Foundation announced its readiness to double its efforts to attract developers and new ventures to its ecosystem by transferring the management of hackathons and accelerator programs to an online platform called Colosseum. The organization will organize two to three online hackathons per year for the Solana Foundation and will run the Colosseum Accelerator, a five-week program to help hackathon winners quickly join the Solana ecosystem.
Notable Steps for the Colosseum Initiative
Projects accepted into the accelerator program will also receive a $250,000 pre-seed investment from Colosseum. Colosseum co-founder Matty Taylor, who formerly led hackathon events as the growth director for the Solana Foundation, stated that the ecosystem has taken significant steps to make the technology stack more developer-friendly since the inception of Solana:
“It wasn’t like that initially, but in the last two years, the amount of documentation, developer tools, and the abstraction of complexity have made it much easier to deploy an application on Solana, even in a 5-6 week hackathon event like Colosseum.”
Teams participating in the accelerator program will also receive ongoing developer support and benefit from mentorship, educational content, and a customer base within the Solana ecosystem. The Colosseum accelerator program will conclude with a demo day where founders will present to venture funds for additional investment and support.
Taylor confirmed that the Colosseum prize pool for hackathon event winners will be about $600,000. Meanwhile, winning founder teams from the hackathon event accepted into the accelerator program will receive an additional $250,000 in seed investment.
High Developer Interest in Solana
Solana’s hackathon events have attracted over 60,000 participants in the eight programs held since 2020. It is reported that hackathon participants have launched 4,000 products and raised over $600 million in venture capital. The Solana ecosystem is estimated to have retained about 2,500 to 3,000 monthly developers by 2023. According to data from Electric Capital, Ethereum‘s total monthly active developer count was estimated to be 5,769 as of October 1, 2023.
Taylor also clarified that the figures highlighted by the foundation are open-source developers tracked on GitHub, and this represents only a small percentage of all developers in the ecosystem:
“Most developers working on Solana are closed source, like all the developers at Phantom, which is a closed-source product.”
