Curious about BUIDLing at ETHDenver & ColoradoJam 2021 with Solana but wanting more details on their project? Get the scoop from their recent interview with ETHDenver:
What is Solana?
“It’s just pure hardware optimizations. Our core value is performance and not just for performance’s sake. So there’s just kind of two ideas happening. There is a fundamental, you know, that when I think of censorship, resistance, or decentralization, I really think of the general problem, like you have, you know, users are trying to connect to each other, and they’re being intercepted by some, you know, some bad guy. And all these systems are based on the security of the minimum set of participants that are securing the network.
So when we talk about performance and making this thing faster, it’s talking about maximizing that set. So like, if you think of BFT, and it takes 33%, to break the network, what is the smallest number of nodes or participants that add up to 33%. The vision is like that, for that set to be 1000, the network has to be a super connected network that has at least 1000 of those nodes super connected to each other’s messages, and can handle that kind of level of throughout. And if you have 1000 of these machines, that add up to 33%, and the tail doesn’t matter how long it is, because that’s kind of the minimum, that’s the minimum sub. If we focus on performance in such a way that every time we make the runtime faster, we increase, you know, like how many signature verifications we can do per second, that allows that set to grow to a much larger size. So at the end of the day, it’s kind of like when we talk about performance and making this thing as fast as possible. It’s really like building it for censorship resistance. The cool thing is that our consensus runs in the same virtual machine as a smart contract’s engine, literally, those are transactions. So when we make stuff faster, it makes it faster for everyone, not just that particular use case.”
What Are You Looking Forward to at ETHDenver?
“Hackathons are a really good way to engage the developer community in the space and get them to go try your tools. And then, you know, you start kind of getting a feedback loop of what we need to do better. It’s also an opportunity to kind of test new product ideas and directions from folks that are already building and running a salon; they may have some features that they want. In general, I think you got to have users and as a kind of platform level layer one, our users are devs, you know, no matter what we do, so that’s really the best way you can engage with them: assume, go talk with them, build something with them.”
What Else Should BUIDLers Know?
“Folks that are coming into the space, it’s almost easier to onboard them because our stack is so much more like a traditional stack. We use Rust as the smart contract language; the interfaces look like a lambda. Like it’s less farther from Ethereum and closer to what you expect the database and the interfaces to look like. So we’ve had a bunch of luck with people that are even without Rust experience, but have like Java, C++, like in a traditional language experience in traditional application development, be able to really kind of get started and build things out pretty quickly.
Devs that are like coming from Ethereum need a bit more onboarding. And we have a bunch of reference implementations that they can jump into and then kind of see, ‘Okay, this is how swap looks like on kolomna versus uniswap.’ And once they make that transition, you know, if they like Rust, they can really build a lot fairly quickly. Anyone that kind of wants to poke around and build some applications and see what a highly parallelized transaction system looks like, please jump into our Discord! It’s quite different from Ethereum. But kinda optimizations that we took, like really required us to rethink the problem from first principles. So it is more of a learning experience, like, ‘What does a different world look like?’ And, ‘Why did we make the stretches really like this, this makes the system faster, like this.” This is kind of our primary question and every design decision that we make, so if you’re curious, what the result of that looks like, just kind of jump in and check it out!”
Meet the team and learn more about Solana at ETHDenver & ColoradoJam 2021, February 5–12! Apply today at ethdenver.com.
