Welcome to the first Issue of Dean’s Letter!
Our newsletter is dedicated to keeping you informed about the on-chain performance and development of the Solana network. With Dean's Letter, we aim to provide you with a weekly update to keep you engaged in the conversation about everything that’s happening in Solana.
What can you expect from Dean’s Letter?
Network-at-a-glance — Get a quick overview of Solana's weekly network performance
The ‘Grape Vine’ — Stay informed about the latest protocol updates from the past week
Dean's List Updates — Keep up with the latest developments from one of Solana's most active DAOs!
Join us as we explore the exciting world of Solana together. Happy reading!
Nosana, a platform for crowd-computing and CI/CD tooling, has partnered with Squads, the Multisig standard on Solana to create a ‘multi-sig flow’ for Solana developers.
Nosana's ‘multisig flow’ makes it easy for developers to integrate multisig into their smart contract development workflow and ensure the security of their code during the deployment process. By using multisig for your Solana programs, you can protect your program authority key by dividing it among multiple trusted parties (such as team members, investors, auditors, etc.).
We’ve got exciting news to share! 
Katana, a DeFi options protocol has been acquired by PsyFi, a protocol providing risk-adjusted investment strategies in the form of options, futures, and perps.
PsyFi has been handed over the baton to use Katana’s IP of both launched and unlaunched products to carry the protocol moving forward.
Under the agreement of the acquisition, PsyFi will be able to further expand its portfolio of top-class yield offerings for its users, staying true to Web3’s core values. Moreover, for Katana, this is nothing less than the perfect opportunity to fulfill its mission of offering preeminent yield generation products in DeFi. Both Katana and PsyFi intend to work together in perfect harmony in their hopes of contributing to DeFi.
Gum is a decentralized social media protocol on Solana that unbundles traditional social media into ‘Social Legos’ similar to how Defi unbundled traditional finance into ‘Money Legos.’ Gum provides the infrastructure for developers to use the wallet data to build applications that offer a differentiated value proposition.
Say goodbye to the hassle of approving and signing transactions every time you use an app. With Gum, once you connect your wallet, you get a token (session token) that approves a set of actions (handpicked by the developer and known to you), which you can do without signing any extra transactions. That's right - you can use the app just like any other regular web app after connecting your wallet. This is huge for crypto apps that require frequent interaction with your wallet.
It was discovered that the bridge was vulnerable. The vulnerability would allow an attacker to burn random fungible tokens (freshly minted shitcoin by the attacker) on Solana to mint verified NFTs on both Ethereum and Polygon. The vulnerability existed due to the program Dustlabs had developed around the wormhole and had nothing to do with the bridge itself.
A bug was discovered in the Metaplex token metadata that allowed anyone to set arbitrary NFTs to certified collections of the attacker's choosing. Imagine thinking you are minting a Degods, or SMB but instead you mint a worthless NFT worth a fraction of the price of the actual NFT. During this process, another bug specific to MagicEden was also identified. The vulnerability was discovered December 22nd, and has since been fixed.
When it comes to security in Web3, it's more like waiting for the house to catch on fire and then asking the fire nicely to go away and save what's left.
@thehasheddude is the lead auditor for SolShield (solshield.io), a Solana Smart Contract Auditing and Security Services. Follow him to show your love, push your favorite projects to take security seriously, and have a bug bounty. Make SolShield a part of the conversation when it comes to sourcing smart contract audits!
Compressed NFTs have recently been launched on Solflare Extension and are set to revolutionize the world of digital assets. With Solana's focus on scalability and removing performance bottlenecks, compressed NFTs enable the minting of millions of digital assets at a minimal cost, making it a game-changer for large corporations, events, and the metaverse. The ability to issue millions of tickets and digitize records on the blockchain will also drastically reduce costs and minimize ticketing fraud. This new technology opens up a whole new world of possibilities and use cases for digital collectibles, making it an exciting time for the NFT market.
Compressed NFTs, HUGE value 
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