OSS Report: January 2026

If January is any indication, 2026 is going to be massive for the open-source stack, with clear themes starting to take shape. 

On one side, there's the explosion of “vibe coding,” where the barrier to hacking on Solana is dropping at crazy speeds. On the other, there's a growing focus on privacy, particularly around institutional use cases.

We believe the best infrastructure is built in the open, not only shipping OSS ourselves, but also celebrating every team doing the same. From Agave updates to new privacy primitives and community hackathon highlights, here's the January roundup of all things open-source:

Privacy tooling and updates

Starting off, the Solana Foundation unveiled Contra, a private payment channel on Solana that lets institutions run high-speed, fully private transaction rails. It locks assets in on-chain escrow and then executes high‑throughput transfers off‑chain with SMT/Merkle‑based withdrawal proofs, role‑based authorities, and mint whitelists to prevent unauthorised deposits or double‑spends.

Halborn released SSTS, an open-source security token standard built on Token-2022 that adds compliance-focused extensions (KYC/AML, verification, corporate actions) so traditional securities like stocks, bonds, and RWAs can live and trade on-chain in a regulator-friendly way. It assumes one mint per security and one token account per holder, and then layers a neutral, extensible rules engine so issuers can encode their custom workflows.

Chainflow released a critical tool for operators that don't want their private keys on a network‑connected device. It lets you build transactions online, sign them fully offline, and broadcast them hours or days later without worrying about blockhash expiry. It fixes classic air‑gapped pain points using durable nonce accounts, ships as a single standalone binary with human‑readable transaction previews for SOL and SPL transfers.

Alongside these releases, the Solana Privacy Hackathon has been underway from 12 January to 1 February, producing a new wave of ZK tooling. These are the submissions that seem to have caught the most traction (at the moment of writing):

AnonMesh (X)turns every user into a peer in an off-grid mesh, relaying encrypted Solana transactions and messages over Bluetooth and LoRa (via Meshtastic) until they reach a connected “beacon” that settles them on-chain using Arkham for confidential execution. By combining nonce-based serialised transactions with Meshtastic, it gives people in censored environments a censorship-resistant way to use Solana without direct internet access.

Secure Legion (X) is a serverless, metadata-resistant messaging application that utilises a "Ping-Pong Wake Protocol" and TAP heartbeat instead of central servers, layering hybrid post-quantum crypto and hardware-backed keys on top of an integrated Zcash/Solana wallet so users get peer-to-peer coordination and payments without exposing identity, communication patterns, and social network.

Privacy Swap is a ZK-powered protocol that breaks the on-chain link between sender and receiver for SPL tokens using Light Protocol compressed tokens and the Pinocchio SDK. It moves users into a universal privacy pool, then out via a DEX aggregator with Groth16 proofs, nullifiers, and a keeper pattern to prevent double spends and timing leaks, while still supporting fractional claims, shareable links, and gasless swaps.

AI and vibe coding

You could hardly open X this month without running into a wave of new “vibe coding” projects. Low fees, high throughput, and powerful LLM coding assistants are feeding into a loop where on Solana ideas turn into deployed code within days or even hours.

Solana Vibe Coding Hackathon proved it’s more than just hype, receiving over 150 public submissions in only 10 days. The creativity was off the charts, but more importantly, it resulted in real functionality: tools, games, and agents were built. Here's the highlight reel:

Air O2 (X) is a consumer app that turns global air quality into an interactive, 3D “air audit” map, using an AI‑generated Mapbox globe and an LLM health assistant to translate sensor data into personalised, plain‑language advice. The longer‑term vision is a peer‑to‑peer network where users’ phones and portable purifiers act as on‑chain data oracles, validating public sensors and “mining” hyper‑local pollution readings that feed into a Solana‑backed marketplace for clean‑air destinations and services.

DEV K-Line Simulator (X) is a strategy game that simulates running a meme token launch from the developer’s seat, complete with live‑updating K‑lines, random “whale/KOL/FUD” events, and an 18‑action control panel for pumping, dumping, and narrative management. A Next.js frontend talks to an Express/PostgreSQL backend that monitors in‑game metrics and market state, firing off chain‑sleuth “exposure” events and sharp drawdowns when certain thresholds are hit.

Onchain Cupid (X) is a Solana‑based dating and social app that matches people by comparing their wallet holdings instead of swipes or questionnaires. Under the hood it pulls token data, runs a cosine‑similarity and weighted scoring algorithm on two wallets’ portfolios, and wraps the result in a polished Next.js front end with AI‑generated commentary, playful labels, and shareable cards.

Over in the student ecosystem, AI is also "taking over". Out of 89 projects submitted to the Solana Student Hackathon, 65 mentioned AI in some way. The 1st place winner, Quarry, built a decentralized data marketplace and AI Agent that queries datasets that are micropayment gated with x402, and an in-built reputation system using Solana Attestation Service (SAS). It was built by Belleville High School students, which feels very “only on Solana”.

If reading all that made you want to vibecode something yourself, these are the frameworks to bookmark:

• Solana Agent Kit (SendAI): toolkit that lets AI agents call 60+ on‑chain actions across Solana protocols (Jupiter, Raydium, etc.) for token flows and NFT management.
• ElizaOS: lightweight TypeScript framework for autonomous, character‑style agents (for example X/Discord bots) with native Solana plugins for trading and on‑chain actions.
• GOAT Toolkit (Great Onchain Agent Toolkit): universal adapter that gives agents access to 200+ blockchain tools across Solana and EVM, useful when you need multi‑chain reach from one API.
• Rig: Rust library for building modular, scalable LLM apps with support for agentic workflows, streaming, tool use, and on-chain kit for Solana integration.
• LangChain: standard stack for modular, stateful agent workflows; LangGraph adds graph‑based orchestration for multi‑step tool use and Solana‑aware agents.
• Solana Dev Skill: Claude Code skill that encodes the current Solana best‑practice stack (framework‑kit, Kit, Anchor/Pinocchio, LiteSVM, Surfpool, Codama) so the model behaves like a Solana‑native dev.

Infrastructure and developer tooling updates

While the application layer innovates with agentic workflows and privacy payments, the infrastructure layer has been doing the upgrades that keep the network secure and IBRLing.

Yellowstone gRPC Node.js SDK. We shipped a major update to our JS gRPC client, introducing NAPI‑as‑an‑Engine (NaaE) while keeping it fully backwards compatible with existing ‎@grpc/grpc-js. The old setup ran everything on the main event loop, so heavy protobuf parsing could block application logic and trigger HTTP/2 backpressure; by moving connection management and deserialisation into Rust and bridging it back to Node via NAPI, we 4x-ed the data throughput. Read the

JetStreamer v0.4.0. Jetstreamer is a high‑throughput toolkit for streaming Solana ledger via Triton’s Old Faithful. The 4.0 update exposes transaction logs for all epochs and, by using lencode plus optimised diffing, cuts account‑update payload sizes by up to 80% in specific benchmarks, making historical data cheaper to pull.

SLV (Solana Validator Toolkit), the successor to solv from ValidatorsDAO, is a toolkit for quickly building, testing, and deploying Solana validators. It streamlines upgrade, configuration, and launch workflows and now adds Jito BAM client integration, snapshot downloads via aria2, Agave testnet and Firedancer mainnet presets, and support for remote builds.

Client and validator updates

Agave patch v3.0.14 shipped as a critical security update addressing two issues: a gossip‑layer bug that could be used to crash validators and a vote‑processing bug that could be abused to censor votes. Both were fixed in coordination with Firedancer, Jito, and the Solana Foundation, and once the release was out, operators moved quickly, with nearly 20% of stake upgrading within the first 24 hours.

Later in the month, Agave v3.1 landed with a batch of performance and RPC improvements for validators and builders. Restart times drop to a couple of minutes, with disk I/O during replay down by ~93%, and scheduler fixes mean banking workers now spend about 91% of their time actually processing transactions (up from 61%), with epoch transitions reduced to under 400ms. 

This release also includes critical SWQoS updates: congestion-triggered fallback logic that kicks in at 90% TPU load, expanded unstaked connection slots (from 500 to 2,000) to reduce handshake churning, and latency compensation via BDP scaling to stop high-latency connections from being artificially throttled.

One last thing...

We’re convinced the network’s future depends on open code, opportunity, and community. 

Right now we are working on a new initiative with Solana Foundation that goes back to the roots of why we built Project Yellowstone and Old Faithful, so keep an eye out!