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.
Major network announcement
Solana is preparing to introduce V1 Transactions. Builders and teams should follow the guidance on the upgrade page as they prepare for the release.
Releases
This week brought feature-gate activity across Testnet, Devnet, and Mainnet, alongside releases for validator clients, SDKs, programs, and testing tools.
Notable feature gates
- The post-execution
min_balancerelaxation reached Testnet and Devnet. - Testnet set lamports per byte to 6333.
- Devnet upgraded the BPF Stake Program to v5.1.0.
- Mainnet activated a feature gate to reduce slot time to 300ms.
New versions
The latest releases span validator clients, RPC tooling, language clients, program SDKs, and local testing environments.
- Anza released Agave v4.3.0-beta.2.
- Firedancer released Testnet v26.08.1 and Mainnet v26.08.2, plus Frankendancer Testnet v0.1202.40302.
- Solana RPC released Shipstern v0.8.0.
- Anza released Solana Kit v8.0.0, and the Solana Foundation released Solana Go v2.0.0.
- Solana program teams released JavaScript SDK updates for the Address Lookup Table Program v0.14.0, Stake Program v0.9.0, System Program v0.14.0, Memo Program v0.13.0, and Compute Budget Program v0.18.0.
- Solana program teams also released JavaScript SDK updates for the Token Program v0.16.0, Token-2022 Program v0.16.0, Loader V3 Program v0.6.0, Record Program v0.4.0, Program Metadata Program v0.9.0, ZK ElGamal Proof Program v0.4.0, and Token Wrap v2.7.0.
- The Solana Foundation released Token ACL Gate Program v0.3.0, while LiteSVM released v0.16.0.
Ecosystem work
SIMDs
Contributors opened several Solana Improvement Documents (SIMDs), proposals for changes to Solana’s protocol and network behavior. The proposals address runtime arithmetic, leader scheduling, stake deactivation, account withdrawals, and transaction ordering.
- A proposed runtime move from floating-point to integer arithmetic aims to provide more predictable behavior with fewer edge cases and improve performance.
- A proposed leader-schedule implementation change aims to keep a validator’s leader slots within one four-slot leader window during an epoch.
- A proposed change would allow stake accounts delegated to nonexistent vote accounts to deactivate.
- Two proposals would prohibit self-withdrawals from nonce accounts and vote accounts.
- Contributors opened a discussion on enforcing priority ordering for transaction batches, with the goal of creating more deterministic ordering within a slot.
Validator clients and RPC 2.0
Agave and Firedancer continued work on transaction delivery, bank lifecycle management, program caching, TLS, and Alpenglow-related support. Shipstern also joined the RPC 2.0 initiative.
- Anza plans to deprecate Agave’s original TPU client in favor of
tpu-client-next, its current transaction-sending service for validators. - Agave implemented graceful shutdown for an unused bank state in a fork, decoupled the global program cache from banking forks, and improved behavior during a Core BPF migration.
- Agave hardened its TPU client API to use QUIC streams rather than QUIC datagrams.
- Firedancer is building an X.509 certificate verifier service and a no-dependency TLS implementation.
- Firedancer is adding support for Alpenglow rewards, BLS API usage, Rotor FECs, Rotor repair responses, and Alpenglow footers.
- Firedancer reimplemented its public-key hash function to speed cryptographic operations involving Solana keypairs.
- The RPC 2.0 initiative added Shipstern, following the project’s rename from Yellowstone-vixen.
SDKs, programs, and developer tools
Updates this week included a transaction-signature validation fix, confidential-transfer support in Solana Go, program framework improvements, and TLS support for Surfpool.
- The Rust Solana SDK transactions crate fixed a bug by requiring signature and public-key counts to match before signature verification.
- Solana Go is adding confidential transfers and incorporating Firedancer’s AVX2 implementation for faster cryptographic operations on supported x86_64 processors.
- The Subscriptions Program is adding Token-2022 transfer-hook support.
- Anchor is adding a minimal target binary and logging option for building and deploying programs in CI.
- Surfpool is adding TLS connections to Surfnet.
Other interesting things
Community members published research, bug reports, tooling, and visualizations related to Solana development and network performance.
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dreamsin_3d shared a Solana BPF bug report and reported an sbpfv3 compatibility issue involving C extern syscalls.
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m_a_zeeshan shared a tool for saving selected account state, reconfiguring it, and simulating a transaction.
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0xIchigo shared an article on LSM trees published on the Helius blog.
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GuiBibeau built a web app that represents 200ms slot times visually and through audio.
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Triton One published notes on Agave v4.2 breaking changes.
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MoneyGram announced its Solana validator.
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Solana released a 200ms dashboard for tracking slot-time reductions as they occur.
