Solana September Newsletter — New LAMPORT Smart Contract Engine, Github Repo Activity (By The #s), and more!
Media, Podcasts, and Light Readings:
- Podcast: BlockZero Interview With Kevin Rose: 710,000 transactions a second with off-the-shelf hardware and no sharding. Sound impossible? Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko is here to change your mind.
- Podcast: 500 Startups BlockCrunch Interview: “Can Proof of History Bring About The Fastest Blockchain?”
- Blog: Scalability Untangled & Deciphered: A Complete Guide To Blockchain Scalability Challenges, Solutions, and Key Projects by: Bonnie Cheung, Partner at 500 Startups
- Blog: High Performance Memory Management by Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana
- Blog: Solana Product Update: Testnet Initial Metrics by Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana
Recent Events:
- Portland Meetup with ZCash, ParityTech, and Solana on “Why Use Rust For Blockchain Development?” Watch the panel discussion here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbK3qkobvw
- Rust Conference: It was a pleasure meeting some of you at our booth!
- San Francisco Meetup with Solana, Nervos, and InterStellar / Lightyear on “Learnings From Building Blockchain Infrastructure.”
New Hires
Engineering Updates:
Always check our GitHub for the newest release notes!
Meet our new LAMPORT Smart Contract Engine:
In this release (v0.8 — Windansea), we introduce the LAMPORT smart contract engine, our biggest innovation since Avalanche replication. With LAMPORT (Language-Agnostic, Memory-oriented, Parallel-friendly, Optimized Run-Time), we can execute smart contracts concurrently, and written in the client’s choice of programming language. Furthermore, we demonstrate Solana’s built-in smart contract language Budget can target LAMPORT without any loss in performance. The two features that allow LAMPORT to work:
- Client-owned memory identified by public keys. By declaring ownership upfront and separating the program’s state from the program, the runtime knows which contracts can safely be executed concurrently.
- Solana’s blockchain-encoded VDF tells validator nodes at precisely what times they need to end up in the same state. Between those times, they are free to introduce non-deterministic behavior as-needed to improve execution times.
Major Features & Improvements:
- Initial support for web-based clients via JsonRPC
- Accounts with state: forms the basis for Solana’s smart contracts engine
- Dynamic testnet deployment for Google Cloud SDK — run your own testnet!
- 20% performance improvement over v0.7 in transactions per second
- Improved metrics and network monitoring
- Simpler and more robust rendezvous with gossip
- Simpler and more consistent CLI interfaces
What’s Next?
- Upcoming Product Improvements:
- Developer SDK
- Dynamically-loaded Smart Contracts
- Leader rotation
Upcoming Events:
- 10/5 — SF Global Blockchain Forum: Point of No Return — Global Marketing To Raise Public Funds (Hsin-Ju Chuang speaking)
- 10/9 — SF Blockchain Week: Workshop — Hack The Blockchain: Security & Attacks (Anatoly Yakovenko speaking)
- 10/10 — SF Blockchain Week: Panel — State of Scaling: Progress & Challenges (Anatoly Yakovenko speaking)
- 10/13 — Colorado Blockchain Summit / Hackathon (Greg Fitzgerald speaking)
- 10/ 23–10/24 — Berlin: Web3 Summit (Dom Tsang attending)
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Want to learn more about Solana?
Check us out on Github and find ways to connect on our community page.
