Colosseum runs the world’s largest hackathons. Our most recent saw close to 1,500 projects. These fully online, global startup competitions are how we grow the Solana ecosystem, find talented builders, and support promising ideas.
These ideas should be viewed more like a prompt than a blueprint. Choosing to build one of them does not guarantee a prize or investment. In fact, we can’t even guarantee they are good ideas. But either way, we hope they inspire you to start building.
A system that lets creators add interactive widgets to their live streams, giving exclusive utility to token holders. Fans can trigger on-screen alerts when they buy, push creators to hit milestone goals tied to market caps, or send messages that get read aloud via Text-to-Speech (TTS). Each interaction directly shapes the flow of the stream while driving higher engagement, trading volume, and creator revenue.
A payment layer built with Solana’s confidential transfer and permissioned token extensions, designed to bring businesses, banks, and financial infrastructure on-chain. Organizations can move assets privately while still benefiting from blockchain’s openness — faster settlement, deeper liquidity, and interoperability with a global ecosystem. This unlocks a future where institutions can embrace on-chain finance at scale, combining privacy with the efficiency and liquidity of an open blockchain.
A loyalty program powered by on-chain token extensions, letting businesses issue reward tokens that grow over time and can be redeemed seamlessly. These tokens can be recognized across partner brands or entities within a larger group, making collaborations seamless and rewards more meaningful. Customers benefit from verifiable, transferable points with real cross-brand utility, while businesses gain a direct, lasting connection to their audience.
When Nepal recently chose a Prime Minister through a Discord vote, it showed the appetite for digital consensus but also the flaws of such platforms — no Sybil resistance, no way to verify citizenship, and high risk of manipulation. A governance system built on-chain can solve this: verified credentials proving Nepali citizenship, private yet auditable voting, and tamper-proof results.. This infrastructure would make democratic decision-making accessible, secure, and trustworthy at scale for citizens to reach on a consensus for national discussions.
Blockchains are excellent at value transfer. Yet most of us in the US still use platforms like Venmo and Cash App instead of crypto to pay each other. The reasons why we don’t switch are obvious to identify but tricky to solve – privacy, key management, and network effects, to name a few.
We believe now is the right time to build a crypto payments app that just… works. The Solana network is ready. Privacy infra is ready. The stablecoin infra is ready. And users are ready.
The key problem to solve is GTM. A wedge into this market could be focusing on specific payments corridors like Brazil<>Argentina, Mexico<>USA, etc. Or perhaps serving a niche community, like digital artists. A hyperlocalized app experience from a regionally-focused founding team could unlock the beachhead market that allows for future growth across the world.
A shocking amount of crypto discourse happens on Telegram. In many ways, it is the beating heart of our industry. Telegram is where warm intros happen, friends hang out, and alpha gets shared.
We are particularly interested in this last point. Telegram bots were an early example of “turning Telegram into a trading platform” but we think there’s much more to build. Telegram bots are great for single player trading, but have neglected more multiplayer experiences.
You could imagine a degen chat on Telegram contributing to a shared pot of money. The capital is then controlled by several members of the chat who have permission to trade. These permissions are programmatic but adjustable – all from Telegram. This tooling turns a groupchat into a gamified hedge fund.