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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.
The Solana Foundation is now a Platinum member of the Rust Foundation, the top tier, which comes with a seat on the board that decides how the Rust Foundation spends its money. It joined at RustConf 2026 in Montreal alongside NVIDIA and is the only blockchain organization among nine Platinum members that include AWS, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
Solana Mobile and RadiantsDAO have opened Clock In, a four-week hackathon putting $135,000 behind mobile-first Solana apps, with submissions closing October 9, 2026. Ten teams get paid, the deliverable is a working Android APK rather than a pitch, and winners have 30 days to ship to the Solana dApp Store.
Solana Foundation president Lily Liu argues that tokenization is a decades-long “token supercycle,” and a new Allium report backs a good part of that up. Solana executes about a third of all onchain RWA trading, but it holds just 12% of the market cap, and $1.7 billion of institutional balances sitting on it never trade at all.
The first step of SIMD-0437 activated at mainnet epoch 1028, dropping lamports_per_byte from 6,960 to 6,333. Four more feature gates follow, each one waiting on state growth data, until Solana's storage cost lands 90% below where it started.
Superteam Korea has published the recap of the Google Cloud and Solana AI Agentic Hackathon Demo Day, where 10 finalist teams out of 160 builders competed for a $5,000 Solana Foundation grant pool. The more useful result is that all ten converged on the same architecture, splitting AI judgment from code-enforced spending limits.
The Solana Foundation shipped payment channels, a primitive that lets an AI agent authorize a spending cap once and settle the real amount in a single onchain transaction. In testing, 100,000 wallets pushed more than 1 million payments per second through a payment channel proxy at an estimated $0.000000000776 per payment, and Alibaba Cloud is live with it at launch.
Colosseum has opened registration for the Crypto World's Fair, an online hackathon running September 14 to October 12, 2026 that is open to builders on every blockchain rather than Solana alone. Every submission is eligible for prizes regardless of chain, though the $250,000 pre-seed check and the accelerator seat behind it still go only to Solana teams.
