October Newsletter

👽 Wormhole Bridge released connecting Ethereum with Solana

🎧 Audius Brings Decentralized Music to Solana

💲 USDC-SPL is live with $25M already in circulation on Solana

🛠 Wormhole Hackathon Commences with 1,000+ builders participating

🖼 NFT Marketplace Launched on Serum

🎙 Wormhole Events with Compound, Aave, Curve, Balancer, and more

Wormhole — Solana/Ethereum Bridge

In partnership with Certus One, Solana announced Wormhole, the first of many bi-directional cross-chain bridges on Solana. Wormhole connects Ethereum to enable ERC-20 tokens to be converted into SPL Tokens, the token standard of the Solana blockchain. Wormhole grants existing projects, platforms, and communities the ability to seamlessly move tokenized assets across blockchains to benefit from Solana’s high speed and low cost.Learn More

Audius Joins The Solana Ecosystem

Audius is the latest project to announce their move to Solana. Audius is one of the most popular apps in the crypto space, and the Solana Foundation is excited to welcome them to the ecosystem and support their mission in providing a music streaming platform that puts the power back into the hands of content creators.

As Audius has grown, now with over 1 million monthly listeners, so has the gas fees and load times for users. To continue growing, the Audius team specced and built proofs of concept with over 20 layer 1 and layer 2 scaling solutions. After much research and testing, Audius selected Solana to scale to a mainstream, global audience.Read More

USDC is now Live on Solana

USDC is officially integrated natively on Solana! The Solana tokenized version of USDC is known as USDC-SPL. $25M USDC-SPL has already been issued in just the first week, and there are already several Solana ecosystem projects that have incorporated USDC-SPL, including Serum and across several wallets like Coin98 and Sollet.

With a DeFi ecosystem emerging on Solana, USDC-SPL offers users and projects a transparent and stable form of collateral.Read The Announcement

Wormhole Hackathon

In celebration of the Wormhole announcement, the Solana Foundation invited developers worldwide to participate in the Solana Wormhole Hackathon that started on October 28th! It will be exciting to see what teams build on Solana over the next 2 weeks.

Over 1,000 individual builders from around the world are now creating Solana-based projects that will be judged by industry leaders from Compound, Gauntlet, Curve, FTX, Audius, Aave, and more. There is also a stacked schedule of presentations and open office hours. See the full schedule here and stay tuned on our social channels for event updates.Visit Wormhole Hackathon Page

NFT Marketplace Launched On Solana

On October 22nd, the team at Bonfida launched Solible, the first NFT marketplace built on Project Serum and Solana. Soluble is an easy-to-use NFT marketplace that takes advantage of the cheap fees and fast latency Solana is known for. New NFT’s are being added daily, and more development is expected in the near future.

The Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong recently listed the first redeemable NFT, Bitcoin Tram. The purchase of Bitcoin Tram gets you a physical Bitcoin Tram model mailed to the mailing address of your choice. Check Out Solible

Wormhole Events

During the registration period and into the initial days of hacking, Solana hosted over a dozen events to bring together industry leaders to discuss the hottest topics in crypto. Each event focused on a different subject to inspire a range of hackathon project ideas to be built during the hackathon.

Some of the stand-out events include a DeFi Recap, a discussion on the recent decentralized finance boom, a fireside chat with Stani Kulochev (Founder of Aave), and a fireside chat with Robert Leshner, the Founder of Compound.

If you missed any of the events, you can find the recordings on the Solana YouTube channel.Watch The Events

Engineering Update

The engineering team had another productive month as development work continued on the v1.3 branch and marched forward with the v1.4 release.

✨ The Highlights

Say Hello, v1.4: Development work commenced on the upcoming 1.4 software update this month. Current priorities include developing the solana-program-test framework, continuing to improve gossip mechanisms, and speeding up the solana deploy subsequence while improving error handling. A network upgrade to 1.4 is expected in the near future; relevant information will be posted on all social channels.
Transaction Logging Improvement: Version 1.3.18 improves transaction program logs, including logging pubkeys as base58 strings, exposing error constants, and surfacing logs in the Solana CLI.
Successful Upgrade to v1.3: The Validator network successfully upgraded the Mainnet Beta cluster to the 1.3 software line in early October. More information related to the upgrade can be found on this Forum post.
Base58 Support: As of v1.3.16, base58 encoded transaction data for sendTransaction and simulateTransaction RPC endpoints are DEPRECATED. Please update all applications to use base64!

Take a look at our introductory issues in GitHub, peruse our current pull requests, and get in touch with the engineering team on Discord.

Ecosystem Update

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Cool things going on in the Solana Ecosystem:

Serum hits 100M total volume
USDC-SPL launched
Frontier mint’s NFT on Solana
Chainlink starts building Oracle for Serum
Audius hosts launch party with RAC and Deadmau5
Waves integrates Solana into Gravity Protocol

October was another exhilarating month for the Solana community. Audius joined the Solana ecosystem, over $25M USDC-SPL is now in circulation, and the Wormhole hackathon has attracted over 1,000 participants from around the world.

As this mailing list continues to grow, it’s essential that Solana is only bringing the highest quality emails to your inbox. If you have any comments or questions, please respond to this email with your thoughts.

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