Solana Changelog: Agave v4.1.0, RPC 2.0, and Alpenglow

This week brought new Solana engineering releases across validator clients, RPC infrastructure, language clients, and program tooling. Agave v4.1.0, Solana Kit v7.0.0, Cloudbreak v0.1.2, Superbank v0.5.0, Solana Go v1.22.0, and other packages all shipped new versions.

Releases

Teams shipped new versions across core infrastructure, SDKs, and testing tools. Review the linked release notes for package-specific changes.

• Anza shipped Agave v4.1.0.
• The Solana RPC team shipped Cloudbreak v0.1.2.
• The Solana RPC team shipped Superbank v0.5.0.
• Anza shipped Solana Kit v7.0.0.
• The Solana Foundation shipped Solana Go v1.22.0.
• The Solana Program Library team shipped Solana Stake Rust SDK v4.3.1.
• OtterSec shipped Anchor v1.1.2 and Anchor v1.0.3.
• Anza shipped Mollusk v0.13.4.

Validator client work

Agave continued conformance work across Solana validator client implementations, including Agave, Firedancer, and Mithril. The work focuses on fuzzing, a testing technique that generates many edge-case inputs to help ensure different clients and client versions behave consistently.

• Agave continued work on supporting fuzzing between validator client implementations, with recent work on syscalls and transaction costs. These changes support conformance between runtime system calls and transaction costs, which need to work the same regardless of validator client implementation.
• Agave merged the final feature flag for turning on Alpenglow, marking the first step of validators switching to Alpenglow in v4.3. Only the Votor portion of Alpenglow will be released starting in v4.3; Alpenswitch is expected on Testnet in July and on Mainnet in August, with this PR turning on Alpenswitch during the epoch-based feature flag.

RPC 2.0

Cloudbreak and Superbank added coverage for Solana RPC use cases. The changes improve support for the Solana HTTP RPC spec and add backend streaming functionality for infrastructure providers.

• Cloudbreak added three RPC call implementations: getTokenSupply, getVoteAccounts, and getTokenLargestAccounts. These methods improve coverage of the Solana HTTP RPC spec, which RPC providers need to support.
• Superbank added gRPC streaming support. gRPC is a backend protocol used by various services, and support for it allows Solana events to be streamed to gRPC backends so more infrastructure providers can build their own RPCs when the service is turned on.
• Superbank added support for the getEpochInfo method, improving coverage of the Solana HTTP RPC spec.
• Superbank added support for transaction versions. Legacy, v0, and v1 transaction versions are expected in the coming months, and surfacing them is standard for the JSON response on a getTransaction RPC call.

Language clients and app tooling

Solana language clients and app tooling received updates across Solana Kit and Solana Go. The work expands React support, transaction introspection, and client access to common Solana account and RPC data.

• @solana/react now supports full React functionality for Solana Kit applications. Improvements include importing @solana/kit as a separate dependency, new useClient and useSubscription hooks and providers, hooks for RPC requests, loading states, types for RPC responses, TanStack Query hooks for tracked data and subscription queries, and SWR hooks for tracked data and subscription queries. Because Kit is now decoupled from React, the change also enables possible support for frameworks such as Angular, Vue.js, Svelte, and SolidJS.
• Solana Kit added @solana/transaction-introspection, a package for parsing the instructions of confirmed onchain transactions with Kit program clients. The package supports easier interoperability with transaction responses and program clients, including applications that check for program instructions, validate values, and surface data directly in an app; read the transaction introspection guide.
• Solana Go added support for Sysvar accounts, which allow other accounts to use details such as the clock and epoch info as account data. This brings Solana Go in line with other client SDKs that support this access and parsing.
• Solana Go added support for the getTransactionsForAddress method. The method was pioneered by Helius, the RPC provider, and Solana Go support lets Go users avoid a custom implementation for the RPC method.

Program libraries and Core BPF

Solana Program Library and Core BPF work focused on account-address clarity and cryptographic verification helpers. These changes give developers more explicit APIs and reusable verification tooling.

• The Solana Associated Token Account program Rust SDK will deprecate get_associated_token_address in favor of get_associated_token_address_with_program_id. The change reduces confusion between token accounts for SPL tokens and Token-2022 tokens, because the SPL Token Program and Token-2022 Program have different program addresses and derived addresses require the program ID as a seed.
• The Solana Program Library team created a new secp256k1-verify Rust crate. Instead of relying on the program itself to do verification, the crate provides verification helper methods for users who want to implement these functions without depending on the secp256k1 program.

More from the ecosystem

Builders and researchers also shared security research, debugging tools, monitoring tools, and explainers. The links below point to the original posts and articles.

• Asymmetric Research published initial findings for the STRIDE program, which aims to improve security across Solana projects.
• Claire F. announced that sbpf will support CFG analyses in its tooling, enabling more granular debugging and inspection at the level of program bytes.
• @inspiration_gx wrote about Constellation.
• @soltop_sh shared a new tool for live Solana program monitoring.
• @trenchdiver0x published a deep dive on the technical internals of @world_xyz.
• @inspiration_gx wrote about eBPF.
• An article covered a bug in Solana’s ZK Elgamal Proof Program, the cryptography foundation for Confidential Balances.
• @dev_jodee created a web application about the cryptography behind Alpenglow.
• @catmcgee introduced Confidential Balances on Token-2022 token accounts.
• @SolPlay_jonas shared major updates to Solana Explorer.

Keep up with Solana engineering

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