Solana Changelog: October 29, 2026

This is a weekly newsletter on the latest Solana engineering news this week. If you want to stay updated on Solana tech every week, follow Solana Changelog at @solana_devs and @readylayerone and turn on notifications.

Action items

• Solana CLI is decoupling from cargo-build-sbf, the binary used to build Solana programs. Install the latest version with the following command:

  cargo install cargo-build-sbf --force --locked
  

• Offchain message signing has been released

Releases

New versions

• Agave v4.5.0-alpha.4, v4.4.0
• Firedancer Mainnet Release v26.10.5
• Superbank v0.8.1
• Solana Kit v8.6.0
• Token-2022 Program Rust Legacy SDK v0.21.0, Proof Generation SDK v0.7.0, Proof Extraction SDK v0.7.0, Program v12.0.0, Rust SDK v4.0.0, Elgamal Registry v0.6.0, Elgamal Registry Interface v0.3.0, CLI v5.7.1
• Anchor v1.2.2
• Pinocchio v0.12.0
• Mollusk v0.16.4
• Surfpool v1.7.0

Ecosystem work

SIMDs

• A discussion has started about adding a new syscall for optimized arithmetic operations, especially vectorized operations
  • WTM - Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) operations apply one instruction to multiple data points instead of performing each operation serially. This proposal would standardize these operations on Solana and assign static compute unit costs.

Validator clients (Agave, Firedancer, Mithril)

• Agave created a new crate for a generalized worker pool pattern, with implementations planned for ledger, retransmit, and shred Sigverify

  • WTM - This pattern replaces Rayon thread pools with a custom thread pool and a work-stealing job queue. A shared crate lets Agave reuse the pattern across validator services instead of implementing it repeatedly.

• Solana CLI is working to build transactions through the CLI, using V1 transactions by default

  • WTM - The new abstraction converts message payloads into transactions. It supports interactions with the upcoming durable nonce replacement program and creates a path for the CLI to send transactions in the future.

• Agave will publish slot events through its events service

  • WTM - Slot events allow Agave to monitor validator performance as it produces a block or participates in consensus. Validators can use events within a slot to inspect bottlenecks and diagnose performance issues.

• Agave is updating its program upgrade workflow to load program bytes faster during extension and shrink program byte space faster

  • WTM - Upcoming Loader V3 instructions will dynamically allocate data and rent as a program grows or shrinks during an upgrade. These changes improve the runtime operations that support that workflow.

• Agave will deprecate Dalek in favor of its solana-ed25519 crate

  • WTM - The new crate is designed to improve performance and reduce compute unit use for operations such as transaction signing and signature verification.

• Agave will implement a custom validator configuration crate

  • WTM - The crate will let validator operators manage custom configuration and tune performance parameters in a configuration file instead of relying on a large set of flags, including those used to tune XDP.

• The cargo-build-sbf installation has been decoupled from the Solana CLI installation

  • WTM - cargo-build-sbf is the standard binary for building Solana programs but is not needed to run CLI commands. Decoupling the installations lets frameworks and developers install only the tools they use.

• Firedancer improved memory use by changing where the Sysvar Cache is allocated

  • WTM - Validators need fast access to sysvars such as Clock, Instructions, and Epoch when executing programs. This change removes redundant allocations when loading the Sysvar Cache into memory.

• Firedancer will support VLAN networking

  • WTM - Firedancer currently supports AF_XDP, native mlx5, and GRE networking. Adding VLAN interfaces for ingress and egress expands the network interface card hardware that can run Firedancer.

• Mithril improved its replay performance

  • WTM - The changes prioritize transactions by bank fork length and improve encoding and decoding. The pull request includes benchmarks against the current Agave implementation.

RPC 2.0

• Superbank’s solparq crate will support Alpenglow footers and V1 transactions

  • WTM - solparq stores Solana account data for Superbank as Parquet files. Supporting Alpenglow footers and V1 transactions keeps its data format aligned with upcoming transaction and block formats.

• Shipstern added Triton One’s Harmonic preconfirmed transaction feed as a source

  • WTM - Both Jito’s BAM service and Temporal’s Harmonic service provide preconfirmed transactions. This change lets Shipstern use Harmonic to push transactions for indexing.

Solana language clients (Web3.js, Solana Kit, Kit plugins, Solana SDK, Codama, Solana Go)

• Solana Web3.js will wrap Solana Kit’s getTransactionsForAddress implementation
  • WTM - Fetching transaction history previously required getSignaturesForAddress followed by a separate getTransaction request for each signature. The newer method returns transactions for an address directly, reducing the number of RPC calls.

Solana Program Library (SPL) and Core BPF

• Several crates were affected by RustSec advisories this week: zstd-sys, pulldown-cmark, rustls-webpki, and webpki-roots
  • WTM - Patches have been made to the affected Solana Program clients and are expected in a future release.

Testing frameworks (Mollusk, LiteSVM, Surfpool)

• Surfpool is working to support sandboxed agent environments in its testing environment
  • WTM - The sandbox is intended to keep coding agents isolated while they build and test Solana applications.

Other interesting things

• @OkohEbina upgraded sbpf-eye to show bytecode across compiler versions

• @joeymeere is adding LiteSVM and Mollusk test harness support to Caravel

• @r0bre wrote about the economics of a Solana program audit

• @r0bre explained how to understand a Solana program before conducting an audit

• @nocircuit interviewed Alex and Quentin about Quantumglow, a post-quantum improvement to the Alpenglow consensus framework

• @jacobvcreech explained Quantumglow in a whiteboard session with @qkniep

Developer Events

• Solana Hacker House London - November 1-12, 2026
• Scale or Die - November 14, 2026
• Solana Breakpoint - November 15-17, 2026

Last Week’s Issue

Changelog·Oct 23, 2026

Solana Changelog: October 22, 2026

Agave v4.3.2 and Firedancer v26.10.4 arrive with new program SDKs and work on Alpenglow, validator I/O, gossip, and Transaction V1.