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With applications for Cohort 3 of the Solana Incubator now closed after receiving nearly 200 submissions, the program is set to welcome its next group of founders this September in New York City. Meanwhile, its impressive community of alumni continues to impact the tech ecosystem across sectors like finance, payments, data, and AI.
At the Solana Accelerate conference in May, Emon Motamedi, Head of the Solana Incubator, outlined the program's ambitious vision for driving real-world adoption of blockchain technology. "We want to build and work alongside four to six teams to help them create the next blue chip company on Solana,” says Motamedi. "We really want to drive real world use cases that are also Solana specific use cases.”
The Solana Incubator’s selective approach allows each team to build alongside Solana Labs, leveraging years of expertise and resources over three months of intensive, in-person collaboration and support. The Incubator's track record speaks for itself. Cohort 1 included successful projects like Sanctum, Espresso Cash, and Shaga. However, Cohort 2 marked a strategic pivot. "Given the maturity of the ecosystem and technology, we decided to focus entirely on real world adoption of Solana," Motamedi explains.
Cohort 2's focus on real-world adoption delivered results across multiple verticals. The numbers tell a compelling story: Alphaledger, leveraging 20+ years of PIMCO experience, has already moved $800 million in assets on-chain while pioneering municipal bond origination. Easy Labs achieved dramatic growth, scaling their payment processing pipeline from $25 million to $1.5 billion during the program — a 60x increase — by using stablecoin rails to help merchants reduce transaction fees.
On the institutional front, staking powerhouse Marinade secured a major partnership with BitGo and made history by filing for the first Solana ETF that includes staking, after strategically recruiting Fidelity's former head of digital assets. Other achievements include Chakra’s Scout Chrome extension hitting 130,000 downloads in just one week, and Crunch Labs enabling machine learning modeling improvements for clients like ADIA through their 8,000-strong ML engineer community.
What sets the Solana Incubator apart is its intensive, hands-on approach. "The most important thing in this program is actually working alongside Solana Labs, building alongside the labs team to help accelerate the progress of your company," says Motamedi. “In person is at the heart of everything we do.” And with 95 events held during the last cohort — including office hours, workshops, and speaker events — the program offers comprehensive support beyond the bespoke collaboration.
The Solana Incubator has established a clear formula: select a small number of teams, focus relentlessly on the problems they’re solving, embed them in the heart of the Solana ecosystem for three months, and provide hands-on development support, direct access to Solana Labs teams, and connections to institutional partners and investors. For an ecosystem built on speed and efficiency, the Incubator delivers both. Cohort 3 begins in September in New York City, and the focus remains clear: solving real-world problems at scale using Solana.