Practical guides, in-depth technical pieces, and lessons from real projects.
The first step of SIMD-0437 activated at mainnet epoch 1028, dropping lamports_per_byte from 6,960 to 6,333. Four more feature gates follow, each one waiting on state growth data, until Solana's storage cost lands 90% below where it started.
Superteam Korea has published the recap of the Google Cloud and Solana AI Agentic Hackathon Demo Day, where 10 finalist teams out of 160 builders competed for a $5,000 Solana Foundation grant pool. The more useful result is that all ten converged on the same architecture, splitting AI judgment from code-enforced spending limits.
The Solana Foundation shipped payment channels, a primitive that lets an AI agent authorize a spending cap once and settle the real amount in a single onchain transaction. In testing, 100,000 wallets pushed more than 1 million payments per second through a payment channel proxy at an estimated $0.000000000776 per payment, and Alibaba Cloud is live with it at launch.
Colosseum has opened registration for the Crypto World's Fair, an online hackathon running September 14 to October 12, 2026 that is open to builders on every blockchain rather than Solana alone. Every submission is eligible for prizes regardless of chain, though the $250,000 pre-seed check and the accelerator seat behind it still go only to Solana teams.
Solana Labs named six teams to Cohort 5 of the Solana Incubator, a three-month program that puts founders in New York City building alongside the Solana Labs team. The group runs from robot fleets and agentic finance to opinion markets and verifiable trade settlement, and applications for the next cohort open in October.
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.
