SHILL Issue 150

the Jupiter airdrop and Helium’s migration to Solana.
Helius has remained steadfast in its commitment to
Solana, leveraging its scale and performance capabilities
to drive innovation.
Helius has been committed to the Solana ecosystem
since day one.
Craig Burel, partner at Reciprocal Ventures
With a small team and limited funding compared to
competitors, Helius has made significant strides in
empowering Solana developers
We’ve done this with a small team, while everyone
called Solana dead and with a tiny fraction of our
competitors’ funding. With this raise, we plan to accelerate
the adoption of crypto-powered systems and
Solana as much as humanly possible
Mert, CEO of Helius
With the
funding,
Helius plans
to accelerate
the adoption
of crypto-powered
systems and
Solana itself,
including
generalized
ZK compression
and
next-gen
RPC tooling
further
enhancing
the Solana
developer
experience.
This funding round validates Helius’ mission to empower
Solana developers with its scale and performance,
and also signifies a trend of VC investment
into Solana’s ecosystem.
Solana developer platform Helius raises $9.5 million
in Series A funding
But the fun didn’t stop with Helius!
There were two other notable raises announced just
as I was finishing this issue:
Backpack Raises $17 Million Strategic Series A Round
Led by Placeholder VC
Sphere raises $2.8 million to accelerate global access
to stablecoins
Solana Developer News
Farcaster Adds Solana Address Support
With all the new entries into the decentralized social
game, Farcaster has made a lot of noise with a lot of
Crypto Twitter folks making the move. Now they’ve
added Solana wallet address support which opens the
door to Solana apps and Frames (See an NFT Minting
example in the Quick Hits section below) on the Farcaster
platform. 9,328 unique Farcaster FIDs verified a
Solana address within 24 hours of the announcement.
Rome: Introducing Rhea and Remus
In Issue #26 I shared the announcement of Rome
Protocol, a shared Solana sequencer for EVM Rollups.
The introduction of Rhea and Remus APIs as core
components are a step forward in bringing the functionality
and utility of rollups to the Solana ecosystem.
Rhea is designed to enable Solana to function as
a shared sequencer for executing rollup transactions,
and Remus is an API designed to enable atomic execution
of cross-rollup transactions.
Encode x Solana Hackathon Winners & Summary
The 4-week Encode x Solana Hackathon finale allowed
participants to showcase the projects they
developed over the month. Participants had the
chance to engage in several Solana workshops by the
Solana Foundation, Codigo, Ironforge, and SolanaFM.
In this recap, you can watch all the workshops and the
presentations from the winners across the five tracks.
Check out all the winners and show them some support!
Tools & Resources
epNFT-standard is the first partial program-owned
NFT Standard that leverages Transfer Hook and Instruction
Introspection to create an Allowlist-based
program capable of allowing Cross-Program Invocation
(CPI) & Instruction only from selected programs.
soldisperse is a simple web GUI built using Next.js 13,
Radix UI and Tailwind CSS for distributing SPL tokens
in bulk to multiple addresses.
Fix IDL is a rewrite of Anchor IDL is a rewrite of the
IDL that includes a new IDL type specification, rewritten
IDL generation, and Client implementation (TS)
improvements planned for inclusion in Anchor v0.30.
WNS Bug Bounty program covers the Wen New
Standard program and the Wen Royalty Distribution
program. The goal of this program is to promote a legal
and profitable means for diagnosing and disclosing
security information.
sec3-solana-txs is a curated dataset containing
parsed transactions access to millions of deciphered,
non-voting transactions from Solana Mainnet-beta
from September 2023.