Howdy!

From the bottom of my heart, I would like to thank everyone who supported me in my quest to reach 5,000 followers and a Blockworks affiliate badge. It is truly the honor of a lifetime. If I write too much more now I fear I’ll start getting choked up.

Today, we’ve got the newest Colosseum grand champion, Solana’s rent costs, and Jupiter’s memecoin launchpad:

Solana data storage project wins Colosseum hackathon

TAPEDRIVE won the grand prize in the latest Colosseum hackathon, a popular hackathon-cum-venture accelerator started by original Solana Labs hackathon organizers. 

The contest, which I tend to view as a partial litmus test for what Solana builders are interested in at the moment, had a large number of stablecoin entries, one organizer told me. But the grand prize winner took at a stab at a problem internal to Solana: the cost of storing data onchain.

Solana is the busiest blockchain in existence as things stand. With all of this onchain activity paired with fast block times, it can get expensive to store data on Solana. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and others have talked about this problem of reducing data storage overhead on the network. 

TAPEDRIVE claims to have the ability to read or write data (that is, access or add it to the chain) 1,400x cheaper than Solana’s status quo. 

The program basically bundles Solana data and adds less expensive cryptographic proofs to the blockchain. A network of miners is incentivized to store this data using the TAPE token. To earn these token rewards, TAPEDRIVE miners solve data storage challenges in parallel every minute to prove that they hold their assigned portion of the data archive. This all still relies on Solana’s proof-of-stake mechanism for security.

This sounds reminiscent of the first Colosseum hackathon winner in ORE, which was a viral proof-of-work game built on Solana that had miners solve puzzles every minute. 

The project’s founder, known as Z, told me they’re still “shell shocked” after winning. “I’m really grateful to have the opportunity to work on this full time now. Job’s not done. I’m fairly optimistic it could help a lot of teams once it’s dialed in,” they added.

Interestingly, TAPEDRIVE intentionally doesn’t use zero-knowledge technology for reasons laid out in the white paper of data storage platform Arweave, Z said.

The rest of the hackathon’s winners ran the gamut from prediction markets to gaming, but Colosseum co-founder Matty Taylor said he thinks the strongest entries came from the stablecoins track. Builders in that area were pushing to “grow crypto payment adoption within specific regions and industries,” Taylor said.

— Jack Kubinec

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Speaking of Solana storage costs:

Ghost co-founder Chris posted this chart showing how much SOL is used for state rent, or crypto used to store data on the blockchain. 

Interestingly, a significant amount of rent is seemingly owned by Serum v3 — the now-defunct DEX launched by FTX.

— Jack Kubinec

Jupiter added yet another piece to its DeFi super app puzzle yesterday with the launch of a full-stack token creation lab called Jupiter Studio.

The surface pitch is that it's an attempt to standardize the culture layer of crypto. Every new project gets a home, distribution rails, embedded incentives and visibility from day one. Studio also aligns long-term incentives with creators through a mix of fee-sharing, delayed LP unlocks and vesting controls.

On CT, however, reception was tepid (and in some cases even hostile). Many comments chided the project as "late," "nothing," and the "worst launchpad ever." Critics pointed to launch fatigue, market apathy and the sense that creator tools often miss the point, as most coins act as low-effort cash grabs.

But what naysayers fail to grasp is that it may be more about enclosure than the Jupiter team's authentic excitement for token-creation tools.

Jupiter is building a walled garden of community primitives that keeps user attention in-house. Every new token launched, no matter how unserious, becomes a liquidity event on Jupiter rails. Plus there’s the obvious death by a thousand cuts upside to stealing market share from pump.fun.

Do you know how to build an empire? One brick at a time.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Matty Taylor, co-founder of Colosseum: