Mike Hale writes and edits every article on Stacksmith. He has 25 years of software development and enterprise technology experience. He is the Solana Technical Writer at Quicknode and Editor of the Colosseum Codex newsletter.
You can find him at mikehale.me, on X, GitHub, and LinkedIn.
MagicBlock has named the winners of Solana Blitz v8, with a Solana Mobile party game called Herd taking first place out of 36 projects shipped from 11 countries in one week. All four winners run their game logic in an Ephemeral Rollup, from Ultra Pong's physics at 20 ticks per second to a three-year-old MMORPG that delegated only its duel arena.
Anza has published a migration guide for SBPFv3, the bytecode format that becomes the only deployable one on Solana once SIMD-0500 activates in Agave v4.4. Deployed programs keep running, but 17,332 upgradeable programs still on old bytecode will need a rebuild before they can ship another upgrade.
Four Pillars' 131-page x402 report models annual agent payment volume reaching as high as $1.9T by 2028, with roughly 96% of it landing in purchases an agent makes without a human approving anything. Solana already handles about 70% of x402 protocol volume, so the report's headline scenario is running today on rails that shipped this year, from Pay.sh to Ramp's 70,000 business wallets.
Dev3pack is running its global hackathon October 30 to November 1, 2026, a three-day hybrid event with more than 40 in-person build stations across four continents. The three days sit in the middle of a longer program that opens with a free Solana Rust bootcamp on October 6 and ends with three months in the Bridge Accelerator for the teams that place.
Solana Accelerate China is back for a second year, running October 16 to 22 with single-day stops in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, and Beijing. Each city has its own Luma page and a single General Admission ticket, with the Solana Foundation hosting all four and internet capital markets as the stated theme.
The Solana Foundation opened STOCKLANA, a one-week hackathon with $100,000 in prizes for apps built around stocks on Solana, with submissions closing Friday, September 18 at 4:00 pm ET. It is also the launch event for hackathons.solana.com, a self-serve platform where the community proposes hackathon themes, votes on them, and funds bounty tracks with USDC held in onchain escrow.
