Colosseum Announces 26 Winners of the Solana Frontier Hackathon, the Largest Crypto Hackathon Ever

Colosseum has announced the 26 winners of the Solana Frontier Hackathon, selecting a Grand Champion and expanding the prize pool after what the organization called the largest crypto hackathon ever held. The winners were announced on June 26, with Phantom CASH$1.000+0.0%-sponsored DePIN project CrowdBrain taking the top prize.

The hackathon ran April 6 through May 11, 2026 (Colosseum's fifth edition) and drew more than 10,000 participants from 150 countries, generating 2,857 final project submissions, according to the official announcement. That submission count, reported by Crypto Briefing in May, was a record for any crypto competition.

Colosseum had initially planned a smaller winner group but added five additional teams after reviewing the submissions. "We saw a significant increase in both total submissions and quality of submissions," the organization noted in its announcement. "Therefore, 5 additional teams were selected to receive a reward." Matty Taylor, Colosseum's cofounder, announced separately that the organization will double the size of its next accelerator cohort as a direct result of the submission quality.

CrowdBrain Wins $30,000 Grand Champion Prize

CrowdBrain, a robotics DePIN platform, won the $30,000 Grand Champion prize, paid in CASH (Phantom's USD stablecoin). The project describes itself as "a vertically-integrated robotics DePIN built to train users in simulation, qualify them through QA, and route the best operators to real robots for teleoperation, data collection, and failure recovery."

The robotics-DePIN category is a relatively new angle for Solana's builder ecosystem, connecting physical robot operator networks with on-chain coordination and reward mechanisms.

Two special awards carried $10,000 prizes each: IOChain won the University Award, and Zoneless (an open-source project) took the Public Good Award.

The Full 26-Winner Field Spans DeFi, RWA, and Consumer

Beyond CrowdBrain, the Top 25 winners represent a broad spread across Solana's current growth areas. The DeFi cohort includes Bench (prediction markets), Senthos (structured prediction), Dropset (on-chain FX), YieldCompass (yield rankings), KinnectFi (stablecoin neobank), and Stablecorp. On-chain equity and real-world assets appear through ODL (an RWA liquidation marketplace targeting private equity and private credit secondaries), Housd (real estate debt yields), and Crafts, an equity-linked token project that drew a congratulatory post from Raydium RAY$0.627+8.4%.

Consumer-facing winners include Peaks (AI-driven investing), Alpha Group Trading (social mobile trading), WeLikeSports (a fantasy sports pool platform that earns revenue from interest on pooled funds rather than a house rake), and One Arena. AI infrastructure is represented by Flovia, while agentic finance appears through Clawpump. Cross-border stablecoin payments feature in DashX.

The full 25-project list also includes Mentioned, Cesto (thematic investment baskets), Sudont (infrastructure/security), JK Index, Fraudsworth, The Syndicate, Nomu, Memetic Machines, and Traded.gg.

Colosseum's Accelerator Cohort Will Double

The prize announcements are a precursor to the more significant capital event: Colosseum's accelerator program, which historically has placed $250,000 in pre-seed funding into each selected project. Taylor confirmed that the next cohort will be twice the usual size, which means more teams from the Frontier field will enter Colosseum's funding and mentorship pipeline. Colosseum will announce which winners join the cohort separately.

Colosseum has now run five hackathons and across its full history has seen over 80,000 builders participate, with more than 6,500 products launched and $700 million raised by winners, according to the organization's homepage. The Frontier cycle is the largest single event in that run.

Sponsors Include Phantom, Raydium, and Metaplex

Anchor sponsors for Frontier were Phantom CASH$1.000+0.0% and Altitude, with additional sponsors including Metaplex MPLX$0.020+9.8%, Raydium RAY$0.627+8.4%, Arcium, World, Reflect, Coinbase, and the Solana Foundation. Phantom's involvement extended to the prize structure itself: the $30,000 Grand Champion award was denominated in CASH, the wallet's native USD stablecoin.

Frontier is one of two hackathons Colosseum runs per year, each followed by an accelerator cycle. The next hackathon in the sequence has not been announced, but Taylor's stated intent to double the accelerator suggests the organization is scaling its capacity to match the builder interest the Frontier cycle revealed.

For Colosseum's full winner list and project descriptions, the announcement is at blog.colosseum.com.