Breakout Hackathon Kicks Off & Canada Launches the First Solana Staking ETFs!
Big week for Solana buildooors! On Monday the 14th of April 2025 the Solana Breakout Hackathon kicked off, with $250k of pre-seed funding on offer for up to 15 teams. Today, the 16th of April, the first spot Solana ETFs with staking go live in Canada. And on the tooling side, formal verification for Solana programs took a big step forward with Kompass. Let's break it down.
The Solana Breakout Hackathon is ON!
The Solana Foundation's Breakout Hackathon, powered by Colosseum, is the next big online hackathon for the ecosystem.
runs from April 14 through May 16, 2025.
https://twitter.com/colosseum/status/1911765550901948508
It's online and global, so you can build from anywhere. There are seven tracks, each with its own sponsor (Colosseum Codex):
| Track | Sponsor |
|---|---|
| AI | Replit |
| Consumer Apps | MagicBlock |
| DeFi | Wormhole |
| DePIN | Render Network |
| Gaming | Metaplex |
| Infrastructure | Walrus Protocol |
| Stablecoins | Perena |
Interesting to see Stablecoins get its own track. Payments are one of the clearest real-world business cases for Solana, so this is where we'd expect a lot of startups to come from.
Prizes
| Prize | Amount |
|---|---|
| Grand Champion (sponsored by Pump.fun) | $50,000 USDC |
| Each track: 1st to 5th place | $25k, $20k, $15k, $10k, $5k |
| Each track: best student team | $2,500 |
| University Award | $10,000 |
| Public Goods Award (open source) | $10,000 |
| Solana Mobile Award (best dApp Store submission) | $25,000 |
The track breakdown comes from Superteam Vietnam's guide, and the rest is from the official announcement.
The prize money is nice, but the real prize is the accelerator:
Up to 15 winners will be accepted into the program, and each will receive $250,000 in pre-seed funding
That's how a hackathon project turns into a company. Solana hackathons have been doing this since the 2000+ person DeFi Hackathon back in 2021, when the grand prize was $200k in seed funding.
What can Buildooors do?
- Register at colosseum.org/breakout and pick a track
- Find a team, or build solo
- Submit before the 16th of May 2025
Kompass - Formal Verification Comes to Solana
One for the security-minded devs. Runtime Verification is building Kompass, a formal verification tool for Solana smart contracts written in Rust, with support from the Solana Foundation (Colosseum Codex).
https://twitter.com/rv_inc/status/1905320466706805231
Under the hood it's a symbolic execution engine for Rust's Mid-level Intermediate Representation (MIR). In plain English, instead of testing a handful of inputs, it explores the paths your program could take. So far it can run basic programs, it supports SPL Token contracts, and the codebase is public. Next up is property-based testing and formal verification of SPL Token and SPL Staking.
If you are building anything that holds other people's money, this is the kind of tooling that lets businesses trust what's deployed on-chain. Keep an eye on it!
Canada Launches the First Spot Solana ETFs with Staking
The Ontario Securities Commission has approved spot Solana ETFs from four issuers, Purpose, Evolve, CI and 3iQ, and they start trading today (The Block). The funds hold actual SOL rather than futures (FXStreet), and they stake it.
https://twitter.com/PurposeInvest/status/1912509342307213613
We are not here to talk price. What's interesting for us is the adoption angle: regulated asset managers are now holding SOL and taking part in staking, the same mechanism that secures the network. Purpose did the same thing with Bitcoin, launching a spot Bitcoin ETF in Canada years before the US (Sherwood News). Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, VanEck and others have US filings in too (The Block, The Block).
Quick throwback! Back in July 2020 we were writing about when Solana staking was even going to be enabled, because staking rewards weren't switched on yet on Mainnet Beta. Five years later it's being packaged up by regulated funds. One hell of a ride!
Good Luck and Happy BUIDL'ing!
Hackathons bring the builders, better tooling keeps their code safe, and institutions are starting to plug into the network itself. Not a bad week 😉
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