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.
Releases
This week brought new validator client releases, program SDK updates, and testing tooling releases for Solana builders. Review the linked release notes for version-specific changes before upgrading.
- Anza shipped Agave v4.3.0-alpha.2 and v4.2.0-beta.2.
- Firedancer shipped v1.1.2 and v0.1102.40201.
- The Address Lookup Table JS SDK shipped v0.13.0.
- The Stake Program JS SDK shipped v0.8.0.
- The System Program JS SDK shipped v0.13.0.
- The Memo Program JS SDK shipped v0.12.0.
- The Compute Budget Program JS SDK shipped v0.17.0.
- The Token Program JS SDK shipped v0.15.0.
- The Token 2022 Program JS SDK shipped v0.13.0.
- The Loader V3 Program JS SDK shipped v0.5.0.
- The Single Pool Program shipped v6.0.1.
- The Record Program JS SDK shipped v0.3.0.
- The Program Metadata Program JS SDK shipped v0.8.0.
- The ZK Elgamal Proof Program JS SDK shipped v0.3.2.
- The Token Wrap Program JS SDK shipped v2.6.0.
- LiteSVM shipped v0.15.0.
Ecosystem work
Accepted SIMD: Resource and Inclusion Fees
Solana Improvement Documents (SIMDs) describe proposed protocol changes for Solana. The Resource and Inclusion Fees SIMD has been accepted.
Moving forward, part of the base fees — 2500 lamports — will be paid to the validator. The other part will be computed based on requested compute units and then burned, implementing a protocol-level buy-and-burn strategy on SOL tied to network usage.
Validator clients and RPC 2.0
Agave, Firedancer, Mithril, and RPC 2.0 work continued across program deployment, proof-of-history efficiency, epoch boundaries, and data archiving. These changes focus on validator operations and infrastructure used by developers and network operators.
- Agave will make improvements to the program deployment CLI, addressing one of the main pain points of Solana program development: deploying a program to mainnet.
- Agave changed how proof-of-history records are grouped together. Proof of history gives validator nodes a sense of time on the chain and runs as a service continuously; this change makes memory allocation more efficient by simplifying the types that store proof-of-history records, leaving more space for higher-priority tasks such as processing user transactions.
- Firedancer is making improvements to its epoch boundary procedure. The epoch boundary prepares the validator set to be rewarded for its work and sets up the leader node schedule for the upcoming epoch.
- Superbank will add support for archiving via Parquet files. Parquet files are common data storage formats used in data stacks across organizations and are one way to archive historical data.
Program libraries, frameworks, and testing
Solana Program Library (SPL), Core BPF, program frameworks, and testing tools also saw updates this week. The work includes subscription cancellation support, framework-level associated token account helpers, and renewed Web3.js support in LiteSVM.
- The Subscription Program will allow immediate cancellation of a subscription, supporting cases where a user wants to stop subsequent payments and enabling the full subscription use cases common in several SaaS businesses.
- Caravel will add associated token account helper CPI invocations. Associated token accounts are a staple building block for many Solana programs and allow tokens to be created and transferred between users.
- LiteSVM will support Web3.js once again, adding support for the revived
@solana/web3.jsframework. LiteSVM will support both Web3.js, which many legacy projects already use, and Kit, the newer web interface to Solana.
Other interesting things
Several teams and contributors also shared tools, articles, and research for developers working across RPC, zero-knowledge proofs, Anchor releases, and proof of history.
-
Helius released an RPC benchmarking tool.
-
@cryptodavidw shared an explanation of how Groth16 works under the hood.
-
Anza started a bug bounty program ahead of the switch to Alpenglow on Mainnet.
-
@osec_io published an article on doing Anchor releases in a trustable and safe way.
-
@inspiration_gx wrote another article on observing Solana’s proof of history with eBPF.
-
Triton One published two articles on indexing the entire blockchain and Superbank, one of its RPC 2.0 services.
