Technical Updates | October 2024 Recap

In October, Vara Network saw 23 commits to the Gear Protocol repository and 45 commits to the Sails repository, nearly 34,500 users, 205,000 transactions, 352,000 exchanged messages, and 186 newly uploaded programs. Throughout the month, the developers continued refining the platform, releasing several updates to enhance functionality and performance. Below is a summary of the key technical changes.

Gear Protocol Upgrades

This month, Gear Protocol has progressed from version `v1.6.0` to `v1.6.2`, introducing several improvements and fixes. Notably, Pull Request #4261 marks a significant upgrade where Gear tooling now uses `Wasmer` instead of `Wasmi` for running WebAssembly modules, streamlining version management and enhancing developer experience. Another critical update is in Pull Request #4270, which addresses a bug in gas tree operations within `gtest` that could cause a user-space panic in specific conditions. Other updates include optimizations to `gstd`’s async runtime to use the safer `waker-fn` crate and further improvements to `gtest` functionality, allowing greater flexibility in program creation and application testing.

Sails Upgrades

Sails has been updated to version `v0.6.2`, introducing key enhancements to its development capabilities. Most notably, this release includes support for `Gear.exe`, enabling developers to seamlessly integrate Sails into `Gear.exe` development workflows.

Additionally, a breaking change has renamed the `new-program` command to simply `program` within the `cargo sails` command suite.

Join Vara Network and Start Building

Vara Network is a stand-alone layer-1 decentralized network built and running on top of Gear Protocol. Created by Gear Foundation, Vara aims to be a performant and scalable network for developers to build market-leading decentralized applications.

Whether you’re looking to build a new project or bring existing applications to the blockchain, the benefits of Vara’s unique architecture — including deep scalability and unparalleled composability — makes Vara Network the ideal platform for developers looking to build the next generation of dApps.

Would you like to become part of the community? Make sure to join Vara’s Discord or Telegram!