Practical guides, in-depth technical pieces, and lessons from real projects.
OpenSea has relaunched Solana NFT trading on its OS2 marketplace, four years after its original 2022 beta stalled out with only 165 collections. The comeback opens with five collections, including Claynosaurz and Mad Lads, and follows Rarible's own Solana NFT relaunch three weeks earlier.
Solana has opened the Solana University Ambassador Support Program, a paid, one-semester role for two student ambassadors per participating university who run Workshops, Build Nights, and Demo Days from September through December. Ambassadors get a USDC stipend, event funding, full RPC/AI/data toolkit access, and a shot at Breakpoint or Accelerate for top performers, with applications closing September 1, 2026.
Solana Name Service is migrating every existing .sol domain to .sns, and holders caught in the August 17 snapshot get a matching new .sol domain for free on the Solana Record Service. The upgrade is automatic with no claim step, but .sol resolution pauses at slot 452,825,395 in mid to late October, so .sns becomes the name to use for payments.
Kamino has launched Fixed Rates, a fixed-rate, fixed-term credit market built directly into Kamino Lend, with the first loans already originated in private beta. Borrowers set a rate ceiling and a term through Borrow Intents, while lenders quote terms through Conditional Liquidity without pulling capital out of the variable-rate reserves where it is already earning.
DeFi Development Corp launched State of Solana, a free public dashboard pulling SOL price and returns, live network throughput, staking yields, validator concentration, and cross-chain comparisons into a single page. It also tracks Solana's scheduled protocol upgrades, which most crypto dashboards leave out entirely.
Velocity, the Solana perps exchange formerly known as Drift, opened a private beta with a 0.02% fee tier applied from a trader's first trade. The rebuild follows Drift's $285 million hack in April 2026, and traders can now earn yield on the same SOL or USDT balance that backs their positions.
Bench, built by the encrypted computation network Arcium, turns job hiring into a confidential prediction market on Solana, letting vouchers stake capital on candidates without competitors or the hiring company seeing where the money is going until the role is filled. Its devnet alpha drew 900 participants across 12 markets and $7.67 million in combined stake volume before the August 24, 2026 mainnet launch.
Solana ID is shutting down, with the Hub, API, and Display Network going offline September 30, 2026 and user data deleted by year-end. The team burned 73.78% of the total SOLID supply from its own treasury and already returned all 13.8 million staked SOLID across 1,239 wallets with zero failures.
Solana Mobile has launched the USDC Earn Vault in Seed Vault Wallet, giving Seeker owners a one-tap way to earn variable yield on USDC through Kamino's SOL/BTC lending market. It routes 95% of deposits into the lending pool and keeps 5% in reserve, with no lockup, no minimum deposit, and a flat 0.25% annual fee already netted out of the APY on your home tab.
Anchor v2.0.0-rc.1 is a complete rewrite of Solana's most widely used program framework, rebuilt on Pinocchio with binaries over 90% smaller and compute costs three to six times lower than v1. The release candidate ships coverage-guided fuzzing through Crucible, plus a profiler, a step debugger, and LCOV coverage as first-class CLI subcommands.
Rain has launched the Agentic Payments Alliance, a coalition of more than two dozen founding members including Visa, Mastercard, Solana, Circle, and Fiserv, to set shared standards for how AI agents make payments on a user's behalf. The group operates as a collective working group rather than a Rain-owned project, with early work covering agent identity, authorization, fraud detection, and regulatory advocacy ahead of a market McKinsey projects at $3 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030.
Solana Mobile has launched a Vulnerability Disclosure Policy and Bug Bounty Program that pays researchers up to $75,000 in SKR for critical vulnerabilities in Seed Vault, SKR's onchain programs, and Seeker Genesis Token infrastructure. Rewards are paid under a signed Award Agreement across four severity tiers, and a separate Security Grants program launched alongside it.
