Solana Startup Terminal 2.0: a boarding pass to the Colosseum hackathon

Do you have ideas you love that just sit in a drawer? Everyone I know has a few. I have about a dozen myself, and they would all still be lying there, waiting for a miracle, if not for one story I want to tell you.

A year ago one of mine had already grown into a half-built project: an analytics dashboard for the Solana network, where I run a validator. By early spring it was outdated, slow, and I was quietly tired of it. But by summer the same project had been through the biggest startup competition in the Solana ecosystem and was moving faster than in the whole previous year. And the bigger change was around it: it was no longer just me and the code - there were people who noticed, helped and cheered.

What happened in between is an eight-week free program by Superteam Ukraine called Solana Startup Terminal, for Ukrainians at home and anywhere in the world. Season two is boarding right now, so let me show you around.

From $100 bounties to a $250K seed

The program is free to join, but what you can take out of it may well exceed anything you expect from a free course. During the season Superteam Ukraine pays bounties from $100 to $2K+ for side tasks, and the three most active teams with a quality Colosseum submission get $1000 each. At the hackathon, Ukrainian teams compete for a local track worth up to $10K, and everyone can grab partner sidetracks - 54 of them last time, worth $439K. The main Colosseum prizes run from $5K to $50K, the strongest projects get a shot at seed funding of up to $250K, and promising community projects can apply for Superteam Ukraine grants of $1K to $10K on top. No one hands these prizes out just for showing up, but last season Ukrainian teams took them on almost every step of this ladder.

The doors are still open

Registration is open until Ukraine’s Independence Day - August 24, 2026, the very day the new season takes off - grab your seat here. The program takes eight weeks, online with offline meetups, and flows straight into the Solana x Colosseum hackathon on September 14 - October 12. Colosseum is a startup competition held twice a year, not a weekend hackathon: you enter solo or with a team, judges look at working products, and winners get a door into the Colosseum accelerator.

Pick your lane: business or code

A few years ago an idea without a developer was a dead end. In the AI era you can get a working prototype out of almost any idea. What AI will not give you is direction - what to build first, where the users are, where the money is. That is exactly what Terminal covers, one step at a time, in two parallel lanes.

💼 Business lane	💻 Dev lane
From a raw idea to a pitch you can defend	Hands-on Solana bootcamp
Idea validation and product market fit	Chain architecture, PDAs, CPIs, SPL tokens
Competitors and the white space between them	Onchain programs in Anchor
Go-to-market plan and roadmap	DeFi integrations and the Jupiter SDK
Pitch deck and pitching	Transactions, logs, AI in the workflow

The dev lane expects a base: some Rust, async, a bit of TypeScript, REST and websockets. If that reads like a foreign language, the business lane is your door. If you can read it, you will manage.

Inside the Startup Terminal

I got here through the community door. Superteam Ukraine does a lot of quiet useful work, and one day they gathered Ukrainian validators on a call - simply to meet the people who keep the network running and ask what we need. It felt good to be noticed at home. It felt even better to see what opens up when a community stands behind you. So when Terminal was announced, I registered the same day, and a few validator friends followed.

Boredom is not on the schedule: weekly checkpoints, workshops, mentor sessions, feedback days in the Kyiv coworking, X Spaces, a tech roast - around fifty events and announcements in one run. Nobody pushes you on stage though. I went to almost everything, mostly kept quiet, and the lectures alone were worth the seat.

How I accidentally won a roast

One evening there was a session where anyone could show their project and get a friendly roast. I showed my duct-tape dashboard with zero preparation, talked for two minutes, and waited for the roasting. It never came - I even asked where it was. A few days later I found out I had won.

One evening replaced months of doubt: the project was good, I just could not see it from the inside. After that the season swallowed me whole - unstuck code, startup lessons, a submission almost at the deadline. My friends outside crypto heard more about Terminal in those weeks than they ever asked to. And somewhere in week two of the hackathon I became a member of Superteam Ukraine - here is my video update from exactly that week.

The wins kept coming

Official season-one numbers from Superteam Ukraine: 284 people through the Terminal, 85 projects at the Frontier hackathon, over $143K in prizes and grants - and the counter is still running, because not every project has claimed its grant yet.

Cashflow, a personal finance app on Solana, took $10K on a partner sidetrack plus two more prizes. Rift, a network of two-way crypto ATMs, won on four different tracks. Holdout brought a skill-based mobile game, Backyard a stablecoin yield manager, Polygaming an esports prediction terminal - and the full scoreboard is in the official season recap. Separately, twenty teams shared $113K in grants, and the team keeps working with the granted projects that show potential - helping with contacts, marketing and bizdev, and connecting them with the right people across the ecosystem.

You could be on that list

Check yourself:

✅	You have an idea gathering dust in a drawer
✅	You have no idea yet, but you want in - the first lectures are literally about finding and shaping one
✅	You are a developer who wants Solana in the portfolio
✅	You are looking for people for your project - devs, marketers, designers: teams form right inside Terminal
✅	You run a working web2 product, even with a big team, and wonder what onchain could add - Superteam wants you just as much as the first-timers

The program runs in Ukrainian, for Ukrainians anywhere in the world. The honest price is about two months of real attention. And the sentence I wish someone had told me earlier: you are not obliged to win.

You test your idea against mentors instead of your own head, you earn along the way on bounties and session prizes, you meet the people who actually build the Ukrainian corner of Solana - And if you keep building and doing your own thing, you can eventually become a Superteam member. What I got back was speed: a project that moves again, people around it, and fuel to push further.

How to board ✈️

Registration is a short form on Luma. The hosts approve the cohort, so write a couple of honest sentences about yourself and what you want to build. Questions are welcome in the Superteam Ukraine community chat, and once the season starts, the cohort gets a chat of its own - last season it was friendly to beginners in a way I did not expect from crypto.

I asked Karina, Lead of Superteam Ukraine, what to expect from season two:

Season two comes with new tooling: we are releasing an AI tool that walks a project from the idea and its validation to market research and the MVP. The best ideas from the ideathon will get access to it, plus tokens to finish the build. We are also changing the format: workshop recordings are available right away, and the live calls are purely for team work. Most of all we are waiting for people with crypto experience who understand what users are missing - though for those starting something of their own for the first time, this is a great entry point too.

I will be around this season too. My projects keep growing, and the new Colosseum window is a good deadline for the next batch of improvements. If this article nudges you to register, tell me under its announcement post on X - that would honestly make my week. See you on board!