Lots has happened in 2019 thus far and there’s more to come! Here’s a summary of the first quarter of tech improvements, updates and community development.
Engineering Updates:
Always check our GitHub for the newest release notes!
Check out our awesome new online book written by our CTO, Greg Fitzgerald: Solana: Blockchain Rebuilt for Scale
Major Features & Improvements:
- Validator Script (Alpha)
- DEX Demo
- Custom Solana block explorer (Alpha)
- Beacons release
- Deploy beta testnet with 100 nodes across AWS and GCP
- Support for configuring testnet nodes across multiple cloud services
- Enable leader rotation in beta testnet
- Multi-region cloud testnet
- Fullnodes now use stake weights to take turns producing new blocks
- Preview release of Rust programs compiled to BPF bytecode and running on chain
- Tic-tac-toe on-chain games now funded using an off-chain Ethereum-style faucet
- Transaction format extended to support single transaction multisig
- SDK now includes a fork of the LLVM compiler toolchain that includes an enhanced BPF backend
- On-chain C programs can now return structs and pass them across translation units
- Validators now do Proof of History verification
- Banking code restructured to track multiple forks (though fork selection and rollback not yet implemented)
- Lots of progress to replicator nodes (though not yet integrated into the data plane)
- Migrate codebase to Rust 2018
- Upgraded GPU code to CUDA 10.0
- Budget programing language for simple smart contracts
- Parallel verification for transactions
- Banking and account tracking
- Proof of History interactive historian and verification
What’s Next?
Upcoming Product Improvements:
- Voting
- Slashing
- Block Explorer improvements
- Multi layer data propagation
- Stable testnet launch
Reading list:
- Book: Solana: Blockchain Rebuilt for Scale by Greg Fitzgerald, CTO of Solana
- Blog: How to Create Decentralized Storage for a Multi-petabyte Digital Ledger by Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana
Recent Events and Media:
- 1/8 — Anatoly featured in Episode 2 of the Whiteboard Series with NEAR
- 1/8 — Internet Archive DWeb Meetup in San Francisco
- 1/29–1/30 — Presentation at this year’s #DecentralizedSummit2019
- 1/29 — Meetup with Hub, GlobalID, Evernym, Identity at the Solana office in San Francisco (Link to video coming soon)
- 3/7 — The Future of Decentralized Finance
- 3/27 — Hacker Days: Blockchain Security
- Follow us to keep abreast of announcements of upcoming events and meetups!
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Want to learn more about Solana?
Check us out on Github and find ways to connect on our community page.
