Heavy Duty Builders

Heavy Duty Builders is a global developer community with a particular strength in the Spanish-speaking world, where it has established itself as the largest Hispanic developer hub in the Solana ecosystem. Founded in 2021 by a small core team with an open-source ethos, the project has grown across two distinct but intertwined tracks: building production-grade developer tooling for Solana, and running free community education programs designed to onboard the next wave of builders.

From Two Developers to a Community Platform

Heavy Duty Builders began as a side project by two developers who wanted to create what they called "the dopest power tools so other builders can focus on what matters, their projects." Their first major output was Bulldozer, a low-code platform for creating Anchor-based programs on Solana. Bulldozer allowed developers to manage their program ecosystems through a graphical interface rather than writing boilerplate code by hand—abstracting away the complexity of Anchor workspaces while storing program data on-chain to enable real-time collaboration. The platform, hosted in the heavy-duty/platform monorepo (78 GitHub stars), was an early demonstration of the team's philosophy: reduce friction for builders so they can focus on logic rather than tooling.

From that starting point, Heavy Duty Builders expanded into a full open-source organization with 28 public repositories spanning TypeScript, Rust, Shell, and HTML.

Developer Tooling

znap is the team's most active current tool. It is a performance-first Rust framework for building APIs that comply with the Solana Actions Specification—the protocol that lets developers expose on-chain transactions as callable HTTP endpoints, enabling use cases like Blinks (blockchain links). Built as a Rust eDSL with a macro collection and a dedicated CLI, znap offers syntax that will feel familiar to developers already working with the Anchor framework. The package splits into four crates: znap (core), znap-syn (code parsing and generation), znap-macros, and znap-cli. The repository has accumulated 71 GitHub stars, with active issues indicating ongoing community use.

@heavy-duty/wallet-adapter is the official Angular library for integrating wallets from the Solana ecosystem. Where the framework-agnostic @solana/wallet-adapter requires Angular developers to bridge patterns manually, the Heavy Duty version conforms to Angular conventions from the ground up. It uses dependency injection to provide wallet services throughout an application, and is RxJS-based rather than callback-based, allowing wallet state to be consumed as reactive Observable streams. The library ships three packages: a base module, a headless CDK layer, and a pre-built Angular Material UI component. Compatibility is maintained through current Angular versions.

box provides trust-less development environments—credential-free, network-isolated coding setups—aimed at hardening how developers access and work within Solana projects. A companion CLI tool, rig, enables bootstrap of hardened, tailnet-joined nodes via curl-install. These infrastructure tools reflect a broader interest in the security posture of the development environment itself, not just the applications built on top of it.

nft-as-a-wallet is a newer experiment that turns Metaplex Core NFTs into functional wallets, letting users connect, view, and manage SOL and SPL tokens owned by an NFT rather than a traditional keypair.

HeavyDutyCamp: Free Education in Spanish

Alongside tooling, Heavy Duty Builders runs HeavyDutyCamp, a recurring free online bootcamp taught entirely in Spanish. The program covers the full stack of Solana DApp development—from writing programs in Rust using the Anchor framework through to building frontend clients. Each cohort is offered at no cost and conducted online, making it accessible to Spanish-speaking developers across Latin America, Spain, and beyond regardless of geography or resources.

The first bootcamp of 2024 launched on February 5th and ran for four weeks. A second cohort followed in June 2024, starting June 17th and running for a month. A 2025 edition—a complete bootcamp on creating Solana programs from scratch—was recorded and published to YouTube as a long-form resource for developers who missed the live sessions. The consistent return of HeavyDutyCamp across multiple years reflects genuine demand and the community's ongoing investment in growing the Spanish-language developer base on Solana.

Open-Source Philosophy and DAO Aspiration

From its earliest days, Heavy Duty Builders articulated ambitions beyond being a tooling company. The founding team framed their community as a DAO-in-progress, where developers earn credentials and recognition through contribution rather than capital. Early design documents referenced NFT-based merit systems to recognize builders' expertise. While the DAO structure has not been formally implemented, the open-source model and community-driven bootcamps represent a practical approximation of those values—a community that builds in public, teaches for free, and keeps its infrastructure open.

The organization's GitHub hosts 28 public repositories with contact through [email protected]. Active maintenance across multiple repos, including open issues and pull requests through mid-2026, indicates the project remains operational and engaged with its community.

Summary

Heavy Duty Builders sits at an underserved intersection in the Solana ecosystem: it is simultaneously a developer tooling team producing production-relevant infrastructure (znap for Solana Actions, Angular wallet integration, secure dev environments) and a community educator running free, recurring bootcamps for Spanish-speaking builders. Its influence extends beyond the tools it ships—through HeavyDutyCamp, it has trained and onboarded developers across the Spanish-speaking world who might not otherwise have had a clear pathway into Solana development.