Solana Foundation Opens Applications for Solana School: Fall Class, a Free 7-Week Developer Program Starting August 31

The Solana Foundation's developer accounts announced Solana School: Fall Class on August 13, a free seven-week developer program open to anyone who applies. The Luma registration page is live, and classes begin August 31.

The program runs Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for 90 minutes per session, totaling roughly 21 live sessions through October 16. Participants are expected to ship a working program every week, not accumulate work toward a capstone at the end.

Anchor, Token 2022, Pinocchio, and Geyser: What the Seven-Week Curriculum Covers

The curriculum advances through increasingly technical Solana development over the seven weeks, opening with architecture, program derived addresses, and dev environment setup before moving into applied smart contract work with Anchor, using vault and escrow programs as practicum assignments.

Mid-program sessions turn to the token layer: Token 2022, Solana's extension standard that adds transfer hooks, confidential transfers, and programmable token behaviors, then native Rust with the Pinocchio framework alongside compute unit optimization. Closing sessions cover Metaplex and Codama for automated client generation, then Geyser indexing to build real-time on-chain data streams.

That last topic marks a departure from typical free Solana programs. Geyser is a plugin interface that lets applications subscribe to live account and transaction data directly from a validator. Most beginner and even intermediate curricula stop well before it. The Foundation's program reaches it in week six, after participants have shipped several programs with progressively more complex mechanics.

Guest lectures from Solana developers run throughout, alongside open office hours with the Foundation's DevRel team.

Open Enrollment, Approval-Based Admission: How to Join Solana School Fall Class

Registration is through Luma, with admission based on host approval. Unlike a prior cohort of the program, no institutional email address is required. According to the Luma event page, applications are open to anyone.

The format is live and collaborative. Participants code during sessions, work through solo challenges between classes, and debug collectively with the group. Working toward a weekly shipping requirement, participants accumulate a portfolio of production-quality projects across the seven weeks rather than completing a single final assignment.

Office hours with the Solana Foundation's DevRel team run alongside the regular sessions, giving participants direct access to the people who build and maintain the tools they are learning.

Demo Day on October 16 and the Colosseum Hackathon Path

The program concludes on October 16 with a Demo Day structured around presentation practice. The stated target is Colosseum, Solana's global hackathon and startup accelerator platform.

Colosseum's scale gives that positioning real weight. According to the program's Luma event page, the Frontier hackathon in April and May 2026 drew 2,857 submissions from more than 150 countries. Accelerator Cohort 5 admitted 21 startups from that pool at a 0.7% acceptance rate, each receiving $250,000 in pre-seed funding.

A developer who ships programs across all seven weeks of Solana School and presents at Demo Day arrives at a Colosseum application with a portfolio of working projects, built incrementally rather than assembled at the deadline. That is a different starting position from a developer completing a self-paced tutorial.

Applications are open on Luma now. The program starts August 31.