Mike Hale writes and edits every article on Stacksmith. He has 25 years of software development and enterprise technology experience. He is the Solana Technical Writer at Quicknode and Editor of the Colosseum Codex newsletter.
You can find him at mikehale.me, on X, GitHub, and LinkedIn.
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.
