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.
Velocity dropped the whitelist on its public beta, opening the rebuilt Drift perps exchange to anyone with a wallet. Traders can post wBTC, wETH, SOL, and USDT as collateral in one account at 2 bps, on code OtterSec audited with no critical findings and Velocity published on GitHub.
Cloak is live on Solana mainnet, keeping balances, amounts, and counterparties private while letting you prove any transaction to an auditor through a viewing key. Shielding is free and withdrawals cost 0.3%, and the shielded pool opened after more than $500,000 in payment volume during private beta.
The Solana Foundation launched Hackathons Solana, a platform where anyone can propose a hackathon theme, the community votes on it, and sponsors fund the prizes in onchain USDC escrow. Stocklana is the first event running on it, with $126,000 across a main track and five sponsor bounty tracks, and a hackathon opens once deposited bounties reach about $50,000.
MagicBlock has named the winners of Solana Blitz v8, with a Solana Mobile party game called Herd taking first place out of 36 projects shipped from 11 countries in one week. All four winners run their game logic in an Ephemeral Rollup, from Ultra Pong's physics at 20 ticks per second to a three-year-old MMORPG that delegated only its duel arena.
Anza has published a migration guide for SBPFv3, the bytecode format that becomes the only deployable one on Solana once SIMD-0500 activates in Agave v4.4. Deployed programs keep running, but 17,332 upgradeable programs still on old bytecode will need a rebuild before they can ship another upgrade.
Four Pillars' 131-page x402 report models annual agent payment volume reaching as high as $1.9T by 2028, with roughly 96% of it landing in purchases an agent makes without a human approving anything. Solana already handles about 70% of x402 protocol volume, so the report's headline scenario is running today on rails that shipped this year, from Pay.sh to Ramp's 70,000 business wallets.
