Solana presents the Hackathon, a fast-paced program to the Colosseum.
The Solana Foundation is set to redouble its efforts to attract developers and startups to the ecosystem by handing over management of the hackathon and an online platform called Colosseum.
The organization runs two to three annual online hackathons for the Solana Foundation and the Colosseum Accelerator, a five-week program for hackathon winners to fast-track within the Solana ecosystem. Projects accepted into the accelerator program will receive a pre-seed investment of $250,000 from Colosseum.
Colosseum co-founder Matt Taylor, who led the Solana Foundation hackathon as a former development lead, told Coytelegraph that the ecosystem has made significant strides in making the technology stack developer-friendly since the creation of Solana.
“It wasn't in the beginning, so the “chewing glass” community memory. “However, over the past couple of years, document size, developer tools, and sophistication have made it much easier to deploy an app on Solana, even with a 5-6 week hackathon like Colosseum,” Taylor explained.
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Teams participating in the Accelerator Program will receive ongoing developer support and benefit from mentorship, educational content, and the customer base within the Solana ecosystem. The Colosseum Accelerator program culminates in a showcase day where founders prepare to raise funds for further investment and support.
Taylor confirmed that Colosseum's non-dilutive prize pool for the winners of the hackathons will be approximately $600,000. Meanwhile, winning teams from the hackathon who are accepted into the accelerator program will receive an additional $250,000 in seed investment.
The Solana Hackathon has attracted more than 60,000 participants across eight programs since 2020. Hackathon participants have brought 4,000 products and raised more than $600 million in venture capital.
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As Cointelegraph recently reported, Solana estimates that the ecosystem will have 2,500 to 3,000 monthly developers by 2023. Ethereum's total monthly active developer count was estimated at 5,769 on October 1, 2023, according to data from Electric Capital.
3/ Developer retention has increased over 2023 and is now over 50%, demonstrating their commitment to building new developers on Solana.
Developers who build on Solana now are more likely to stay in the ecosystem, making it easier to onboard large-scale developers in the future. pic.twitter.com/5nWtG7YZtO
— Solana (@solana) January 8, 2024
Taylor also said the numbers highlighted by the foundation are open source developers tracked on GitHub, which make up a small percentage of all developers in the ecosystem.
“Most of the developers who build on Solana are closed source, like all the devs on Phantom, which is a closed source product.”
Colosseum's founder added that his main goal is to increase the number of developers and technical founders who can build products that work on blockchain technology. Colosseum was founded by Clay Robbins, former principal of Taylor, Slow Ventures, and former Stripe software engineer Nate Levine.
The Solana Foundation recently stated that developer retention will peak at the end of 2023, due to increased activity on the Solana network, as well as a significant increase in the Solana (SOL) token alongside Bitcoin (BTC). .
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