Doctor Kevin Bowers on Firedancer
We go deep with KFB on
- The architectural decisions of
@jump_firedancer
- High performance networking
- What a successful mainnet rollout will look like
- KFB's unconventional views on programming languages, scaling solutions, data flow
Overheard date in Brooklyn last night
Him: "I work on such big data sets I had to get a new computer so Excel could keep up."
Her: "If it fits in Excel, it's not a big data set."
The Solana network is, once again, being battle tested with a huge influx of traffic. Bug fixes are rolling out over the next week, and things will start to improve.
But there is no silver bullet and no "finished" โ we expect demand will continue to increase, which will require
What an unbelievable day. I'm thrilled I can finally share what a skunkworks group of engineers have been working on.
Introducing Solana Mobile Stack โ the word's first open-source Android framework for web3 development.
Oh, yeah, and Saga. A flagship web3 Android phone.
Iโve been so impressed with
@weremeow
and the
@JupiterExchange
team with their practical and honest communication in the run up to next week. Itโs a master class in how web3 differs from web2.
But behind the scenes thereโs 31 people from defi, infra, wallets, data scientists,
Whoever started "Solana is for the poors" as an insult, I owe you a drink.
You perfectly captured why Solana can become the global execution layer for the world's information: you don't need to be rich to give it a try.
David, maybe you weren't in crypto in 2017 or you just don't remember, but CryptoKitties made eth unusable for weeks. It resulted to a rethink of some design decisions, helping to lead to the robust eth L1 we know today. This also happened in 2016 with the Shanghai attacks.
Developers from Anza, Firedancer, Jito, and other core contributors are working diligently (and not sleeping much) to shore up Solana's networking stack to meet the unprecedented demand the network is seeing today.
There's been a lot of threads on what exactly is causing the
Solana sees traffic and demand that no other network has ever come close to โ itโs a stress test of the whole system. These are exactly the type of stress tests you cannot model in simulation, you have to just see how stuff works in prod and adapt.
The scaling and bug squashing
The craziest part about
#SolanaBreakpoint
is the vast majority of people building on the network weren't able come, and 4 venues were simultaneously packed
Solana is the only blockchain in the world on which the CBOE, Jane Street, Virtu and 70 other major financial institutions submit txs to every single day.
@PythNetwork
is an onboarding path for financial institutions
Solana's pace of improvement remains strong ๐ช
- Firedancer aiming for mainnet Q4
- Sig (other new client) in active development
- Additional Token Extensions rolling out in Q2 and 3
- 1.18 bringing lots of perf improvements
- 1.19 looks to be raising CUs again
- Generalized
Watching people delight in the collapse of a bank thatโs been vital to the greatest wealth generation engine this country has had for the last 2 decades is really disheartening to see.
I think this is a Twitter problem.Iโm gonna be spending less time here.
Weโve legalized real mathematically-you-will-always-lose gambling for everyone 18+, but somehow access to early stage investing (in equities and tokens) is โtoo dangerousโ for everyone with less than $1m in net worth โ excluding your houseโs value ๐
gm, Some Personal News
When I joined the Solana community in January of 2021, there were about 35 programs on the network, and just over 20 people between Labs and Foundation. It seemed like a weird move at the time โ Solana wasn't even a network I was thinking about until
The real story about
#Solana
from yesterday is ~20%+ of staked SOL and 1,000+ validators went offline with no warning and the network continued to successfully process more transactions than any other blockchain ๐ฅ
Token Extensions is the rename of Token-2022, and we're rapidly approaching launch alongside 1.17 adoption on mainnet ๐ฅณ
I think this is going to be one of the most impactful tools shipped for devs in 2024, and you'll hear a lot more about them later in the month.
Some
The crypto team at
@Visa
outlines, in great detail, why theyโve selected Solana to expand their USDC settlement operations.
This technical deep dive is worth a read. The team at Visa put a ton of effort into thinking things through for the long term.
#OPoS
Big news today: Visa is scaling its USDC merchant payout program with Solana!
USDC on Solana lets Visa and other send any denomination anywhere in the world for less than $0.0025 โ with sub-second remittance.
Read more ๐
1/ We are excited to announce that Visa has expanded our stablecoin settlement capabilities to merchant acquirers launching pilots with
@Worldpay_Global
and
@Nuvei
utilizing the Solana blockchain
@aeyakovenko
@frankdegods
@Twitter
@y00tlist
You gotta draw a line in the sand somewhere โ a lot of big web2 companies want to have it both ways - attract Web3 creators, but still maintain control that's unaccountable to the community.
I don't think that's going to fly anymore.
Big week for Solana and it's only Wednesday ๐คฏ
In no particular order...
@brave
announce Solana NFT integrations for NFT token-gating to Brave Talk ๐ค
@Shopify
x Solana Pay can now power USDC on Solana for tens of thousands of merchants ๐ธ
@elusivprivacy
launched ZK-powered
Visa adopted the Solana Network and USDC not because no other real time payment network exists โ theyโre pretty common outside of the United States โ itโs that each country has its own, segregated system. USDC on Solana is poised to become a global, instant interchange network๐ฅ
In early November at
#SolanaBreakpoint
@aeyakovenko
shared his thoughts on the hard problems the Solana community is working on solving today, as well as some of the hard problems coming down the pike.
Here's what we talked about ๐งต 1/x
Helium + Solana is the other merge you should be watching ๐
#hip70
If approved by the Helium community, all the advantages of Solanaโs composable global state machine (defi, NFTs, smart contracts) would be available to Helium users and developers 1/
@aeyakovenko
@frankdegods
@Twitter
@y00tlist
Some folks are DMing me calling this favoritism โ it's not that.
A big portion of my job is to go to bat for the ecosystem in times of need and FrankDAO is a big part of that community.
Yes I'm on the list โโ happy to give up my spot if the community thinks that's fair.
The last 24 hours saw developers, security firms, and individual contributors from across Solana, Ethereum, and cross-chain wallets come together to investigate what at first appeared to be a massive supply-chain hack, impacting Solana and Ethereum
The
@MadLads
team has done something no other NFT community has yet managed to do: make the community influential enough to attract airdrops from independent projects.
The closed analogy we have is the Saga Genesis Tokens solbound to phones.
Itโs a sight to behold and likely
@0xMert_
@solana
Hardcore agree with you here โ one thing to remember is Solana is first and foremost an engineering community.
On the foundation side, we've under-invested in marketing and are making adjustments and hiring folks ๐ช while staying true to our core of engineering first
Hey
@decryptmedia
and
@ahaywa
this headline needs a rework.
1) There's no "distancing" taking place, just no involvement or prior knowledge.
2) No one needs an invitation to build on a public blockchain, please don't imply otherwise.
Join
@aeyakovenko
today at 2pt/ 5 ET for another tech deep dive into
#Solana
.
This week weโre talking about the QUIC rollout, and your questions.
๐งต them below!
The thing is such a mess because Twitter isn't transparent or accountable. Maybe y00ts did something horrible, maybe Twitter verified a fake y00ts account which submitted a take down...
Problem 1 is transparency & honesty โ no one knows why this happened, or who to talk to.
Join
@aeyakovenko
and me for a technical conversation on the recent Solana Mainnet Beta outage, and an update on network resilience.
As always, leave your questions below and weโll get to as many as possible
Join
@aeyakovenko
and me for a chat on network upgrades, new developer tooling, and more
As always, drop your questions below and weโll answer them live
Solana's tech stack has received much well-earned respect and attention over the past 12 months ๐ฅ
Today, the network received regulatory clearance for payment stablecoin issuance from one of the most important regulators. This is a meaningful unlock to scaling
@solana
payment
Compression on Solana solves one of the key pain points faced by institutions and mass-consumer applications: the cost of on-chain account storage.
Generalized compression brings the same cost-savings to tokens and accounts as cNFTs did to NFTs before ๐ช
If youโre a business
Why would Solana Foundation 'let' Matty leave and 'outsource' an incredibly important component of the Solana ecosystem? The idea is simple but the implications are radical:
Nonprofit blockchain foundations should do as little as necessary for as short a time as possible,
1:1 backed US dollar stablecoins are one of America's best chances at maintaining the US dollar as the global reserve currency in 2040
๐บ๐ธ๐ก๏ธ๐ซก
In 2020 I sold some crypto to buy an espresso machine from a cafe that was closing down from Covid.
Today, that crypto could have bought the machine new 4x. But Iโve had the joy of using this machine for 4 years.
Remember: wealth is a means to an end, not the end goal itself.
tl;dr
@anza_xyz
is comprised largely of the engineers who built the existing Solana Labs validator client โ they'll be continuing this work at Anza with Agave, and Solana Labs will eventually deprecate their validator client.
@aeyakovenko
@joemccann
@solana
Anza will fork the current Labs client and continue development under the name Agave. Agave 1.0 is scheduled in approximately July, '24. Starting with Agave 1.1, the current labs client will no longer be maintained
Controversial take: Bitcoin is a meme coin
I mean this with all due respect and admiration for what Bitcoin has accomplished over the last two decades โ Bitcoin is a community held together by an idea โโ a meme โโ powerful enough to start this entire blockchain revolution ๐ช
For the record:
Ethereum has done and continues to do great things
Bitcoin has done and continues to do great things
Todayโs builders in Solana and beyond are building only because of the work that came before.
Yesterdays builders are benefiting from what developers on
Layer 1 blockchain Avalanche is suffering a block production issue and has not finalized a block in the past four hours. $AVAX was down slightly on the news.
@httpsageyd
reports