Network Reliability
Early in 2022, Solana ran into a series of bugs that caused the network to halt — and ever since, network reliability has been the main focus of the core Solana engineering team. Several of these bugs were novel, while others were the result of exponentially increasing use of the network.
“We’ve had a lot of challenges over the last year,” Yakovenko said. “I would say this whole last year has been all about reliability for the Solana engineering team. And a lot of that, I think we’ve solved.”
Network upgrades are already in the process of being rolled out, if not already:
- QUIC: Solana uses a permissionless UDP-based protocol to process transactions — but under the old design, high transaction volume could overwhelm the network. Redeploying the UDP on top of QUIC, a protocol written by Google, allows for fast asynchronous communication. QUIC is currently live on Mainnet-beta.
- Stake-weighted QoS: Weighting validator priority by stake, instead of processing transactions regardless of source, “prevents unstaked nodes or low-stake nodes from spamming everyone else,” Yakovenko says. Stake-weighted QoS is already live on Mainnet-beta.
- Local fee markets: Local fee markets will allow users to pay a little extra to have their transaction processed first. These fee markets are live on Mainnet-beta, with RPC and wallet support coming soon.
And while a number of community projects, like Jito and Mango, are working to make the network more reliable, the biggest wholesale upgrade of the network could come from Firedancer, a new validator client developed by Jump.
Firedancer is a second validator client, meaning that people could potentially run their validators using one of two entirely different software packages with independent dependencies. It is extremely performant and processes 600,000 transactions per second in a test environment (much more than the current network’s average of 4,000, which is still far more than other blockchains can support).
Solana would be the only other smart contract network besides Ethereum to have more than one independent validator client — which would be a boon for the network. If a bug happens to take down one of the clients, the network will remain running on the other, increasing Solana’s reliability and resiliency.
Programmability
“I’ve always said that Solana is like Linux, and it should be as programmable as Linux,” said Yakovenko. “That means using modern tools like compilers to support a very large set of developer languages.”
The Solana community has made some major strides in ensuring the network became more programmable. There is already a Solidity compiler for Solana, solang. Anchor, a framework for building on Solana, has become much easier for developers to use — and the newly released program Seahorse allows people to write Anchor programs using Python. “We went from chewing glass last year to surfing glass,” Yakovenko said.
But there’s still some major moves on the horizon. Token-22, a new token standard, will enable the development of new applications, like collecting royalties on transfers and ownership and confidential payments. Token-22 is coming soon.
Performance
There’s been a number of other upgrades in the works to make Solana a more secure, performant network.
In order to make sure the Solana network can transmit information almost instantly around the world, the core engineering team has introduced some turbine optimizations that are deep under the hood. “I think this is probably the coolest piece of technology that we built that nobody knows about,” Yakovenko said.
There is also a lot of work being done on runtime optimizations as well. While upgrades to Solana’s Sealevel runtime have made the network even faster at processing transactions, engineers are still making headway on two really big, difficult problems — the transaction scheduler, and then playing those transactions back.
“These are those kinds of engineering problems that you can spend a lifetime on,” Yakovenko said. “The solutions are getting better and better, and heuristics are getting much closer to the best possible you can have.”
Security
The security of the network is paramount to mainstream adoption. Luckily, a number of improvements will be implemented soon to make Solana more secure–for both the network at large and users.
And while Solana’s massive increase in the number of validators has made the network more secure and censorship resistant, there are still improvements that are needed before widespread adoption.
“If you really imagine these networks taking over the majority of finance — like real finance, trillions of dollars being moved between banks, between Forex, between payments — these networks need to provide guarantees that are much, much stronger than, than what exists today,” Yakovenko said. “How do we scale the set to the point that at a gut level, when you’re the Chief Security Officer at Bank of America, you’re like, ‘Well, I can trust this thing, because there’s so many nodes that the probability of something going wrong is basically zero’?”
Yakovenko points to automatic audits as a security feature developed by ecosystem teams like OtterSec and Sec3 that will help developers catch common smart contract and development mistakes. “As much automation as we can build, the more robust that these systems can get.”
Meanwhile, consumer-facing products such as the Solana Mobile Stack’s seed vault will make self custody much easier — and more secure — for consumers.
Conclusion
Solana has made significant strides in improving its network reliability, programmability, performance, and security. With ongoing upgrades and innovations, Solana is poised to continue to evolve and improve, solidifying its position as a leading smart contract network.
FAQs
- What are the primary focus areas for Solana in 2022?
- Network reliability
- Programmability
- Performance
- Security
- What are some of the key network upgrades Solana has implemented?
- QUIC protocol
- Stake-weighted QoS
- Local fee markets
- Firedancer validator client
- What is the significance of Firedancer for Solana?
- Firedancer is a second validator client, providing redundancy and increasing reliability
- Firedancer is extremely performant, processing 600,000 transactions per second in a test environment
- What is Token-22 and what is its significance for Solana?
- Token-22 is a new token standard
- Token-22 will enable the development of new applications, like collecting royalties on transfers and ownership and confidential payments
- What are some of the key security features Solana is implementing?
- Automatic audits
- Seed vault for Solana Mobile Stack
