Agave, Firedancer, Superbank, Solana Go, and LiteSVM all published new versions this week. Engineering work also continued across validator clients, RPC 2.0 coverage, language clients, and testing frameworks.
Releases
Several Solana engineering projects shipped new release tags, including beta and release-candidate versions for core infrastructure and developer tooling.
- Agave published v4.2.0-beta.0 and v4.1.1.
- Firedancer published Mainnet v0.1005.40100.
- Superbank published v0.5.0.
- Solana Go published v2.0.0-rc.
- LiteSVM published v0.13.1.
SIMD discussion
A new Solana Improvement Documents (SIMDs) discussion proposes adding optional fees for successful transaction execution. The proposal comes from @cavemanloverboy and focuses on validator incentives.
- The proposed optional fees for successful transaction execution would incentivize validators to ensure transactions are added to blocks successfully, aligning network economics around packing transactions into blocks.
Validator client work
Validator client work continued across Agave and Firedancer, with changes focused on snapshotting, signature verification, packet handling, and compilation speed.
- Agave added Wincode serialization for banking stage snapshots. Solana’s current consensus algorithm keeps copies of several chain histories called forks; when one reaches the right height, validators restart with the new root and purge the other histories. Agave snapshots the state of all accounts, called the Banking Stage, when forks reset the root, and this change makes mapping the bank snapshot to system memory more predictable and faster.
- Agave continued work to optimize SigVerify, the stage that deduplicates transactions and verifies transaction signatures. Performance improvements here can help transactions get into blocks faster.
- Agave is working to drop packets faster in XDP. Services using XDP will receive packets through QUIC datagrams rather than QUIC streams, which can arrive out of order and require more deduplication; dropping invalid packets from the networking receive queue faster leaves more time for validator logic.
- Firedancer is working to speed up service compilation. Faster compilation affects developer experience, CI builds and tests, and how quickly a service can be redeployed after a downtime fix.
RPC 2.0 coverage
RPC 2.0 work expanded coverage of the Solana HTTP RPC spec across Superbank and Cloudbreak. These changes target methods RPC providers need to support.
- Superbank has live work to implement
getEpochSchedulethrough two pull requests: Superbank PR #39 and Superbank PR #36. The work improves coverage of the Solana HTTP RPC spec. - Superbank may soon implement
getTransfersForAddress, a relatively new method pioneered by Helius. Transfers are generally harder to support thangetTransactionsForAddressbecause they include SOL transfers, token transfers, deduplication of SOL and wrapped SOL, and other cases. - Cloudbreak is adding support for the
simulateTransactionRPC method, improving coverage of the Solana HTTP RPC spec.
Language clients and testing tools
Developer-facing libraries and test frameworks also saw new work, including React hooks in Kit and program account testing support in LiteSVM.
- Kit added transaction planning and sending hooks in
@solana/react. The hooks let web developers bundle transaction planning and sending into React hooks instead of writing raw Kit functions, enabling more dynamic component behavior based on transaction planning and sending state. - LiteSVM is implementing an interface to the
getProgramAccountsmethod. The feature would let programs test whether a program-derived account was successfully created in the test harness, helping developers catch wrong seeds or unexpected addresses.
Community notes
Several builders and community contributors shared new proposals, tools, podcasts, and profiling work.
- @sns proposed adding
.solas a top-level domain to ICANN in an SNS post on X. - @soundsonacid added a new profiling feature for the seashell test harness in a post on X.
- @catmcgee is hosting a new podcast called The Privacy Show, shared by Solana on X.
- @ChainflowSol created a tracker for the lowest validator version qualifying for SFDP in a post on X.
- @jkdotsol created a new disk profiler powered by eBPF in a post on X.
- @OkohEbina and @a_ix_d posted a new Devs at a Bar podcast with @shek_dev in a post on X.
- @inspiration_gx created an eBPF program that tracks uprobe events in Solana’s proof-of-history service in a post on X.
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