Over the past 100 days, we’ve gone from the basics of wallets and transactions to deploying programs on Solana devnet.
Some people completed every challenge. Others joined for a week, an arc, or whenever time allowed. However you took part, congratulations! You learned something new and built on Solana.
And if you missed the live run, you haven’t missed your chance. All 100 challenges are still available, and you can start from Day 1 whenever suits you.
What is 100 Days of Solana?
You may be curious about blockchain development but find that many tutorials assume you already understand the terminology, use cases, and other fundamentals.
100 Days of Solana was designed to provide a clearer route in: from “I’m a web or mobile developer and this looks interesting” to “I can build and deploy something real on Solana.”
Here’s how it works:
- 100 daily challenges
- Most challenges introduce one focused idea in around 10 to 20 minutes.
- Each week has a theme that introduces and reinforces a new concept.
- It’s free to take part.
And the whole thing is designed so that you can still make progress if you complete just a couple or every challenge from a week.
What we covered
If you start at Day 1, here’s how the journey unfolds.
First: learn to speak Solana
- Create a wallet — a cryptographic keypair that acts as your identity — and send your first transactions
- Read live data directly from the network
- Get to grips with Solana’s account model
Next: create digital assets
- Create your own tokens and NFTs, which are built from accounts with clearly defined roles and rules
- Configure features such as transfer fees, interest, and transfer restrictions
- See how your Solana program enforces those rules on every transfer
Then: write your own programs
- Learn the basics of Solana programs
- Learn enough Rust to build with Anchor, a framework that provides some of the structure Rails or Express brings to Web2 development
- Design state with program-derived addresses, or PDAs: predictable addresses calculated from known values
- Call other programs in much the same way that one service calls another service’s API
After that: think like an attacker
- Treat every input as hostile, because anyone on a public network can send instructions to your program
- Audit your code and write tests that actively try to break it
- Use property testing and fuzzing to find edge cases you might never write by hand
- Reproduce a real Solana exploit, understand why it worked, and then fix the vulnerability
Finally: ship what you built
- Deploy to devnet, Solana’s free staging environment
- Publish your program’s interface, roughly the on-chain equivalent of an OpenAPI schema
- Build a frontend that connects to a user’s wallet and asks them to approve transactions while their private keys remain under their control
- Give an AI agent tightly limited access to a wallet through a deny-by-default policy layer
- Bring everything together in a capstone project of your own
By Day 100, you’ll have gone from creating your first wallet to deploying your own program, with an understanding of the major layers in between.
Shout-outs
One of the best things about 100 Days of Solana was the community that formed around it.
People published hundreds of posts here on DEV, while the event Discord became a place to compare approaches, untangle tooling problems, review code, and celebrate first deployments.
If you’re starting the challenges now, those posts are a valuable companion along the way. Whatever error you’re staring at, there’s a good chance someone has already encountered it and written about what they learned.
Thank you to everyone who wrote, demoed, answered a question, or reviewed someone else’s code. You made 100 Days of Solana far better than the challenges could have been on their own.
And a special thank you to Vincent Jande, a graduate of MLH’s Solana Fellows program, who helped reivew and create content throughout the 100 days.
Continue your journey
Whether you’ve just shipped your first Solana project at the end of the 100 days or you’re about to begin day 1, there are several ways to keep going:
- Solana Developer Bootcamp — a free, project-based video course from the Solana team for developers who want to go deeper
- Global Hack Week — MLH’s free monthly online hackathon, where you can use your Solana skills in a new project
- MLH events — find an in-person or digital hackathon and build alongside other developers
The scheduled 100 days may be over but there's always more to explore.
Happy hacking!
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