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Solana Tech Roundup - #3

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Published February 4, 2022

Solana Tech Roundup

If you're a Solana developer like me, you may find it difficult to keep up with the latest updates to the Solana repository. This is because the Solana repository is a large and complex project with many contributors constantly adding new features and bug fixes. There's just so much content to read and digest.

This week's roundup is a summary of the most recent commits to the Solana repository.

Proposal Highlight

Bankless Leader

Documentation

The bankless leader proposes a design to greatly increase the efficiency of getting transactions into a block and blocks produced. Currently Leaders do a number of things such as:

  • Ordering transactions
  • Deduping/verifying signatures
  • Generate PoH
  • Executing transactions
  • Shredding entries
  • Broadcasting shreds

This is a lot of work for a leader to do, and we could actually remove some of the work with bankless leaders. If we have both a bankless leader and a leader, we could have the leader just replay the transactions and execute, while doing all the memory intensive work in the bankless leader.

So we'd have a bankless leader doing:

  • Ordering transactions
  • Dedup/Verify signatures
  • Generate PoH
  • Ordering transactions
  • Shred entries

Then a leader could just replay, execute, and broadcast the shreds. This could lead to multiple leaders doing transaction execution at once because PoH is already generated, leading to much faster slot times!

Screen Shot 2022-02-04 at 10.09.57 AM.png

Commit Highlight

Previously you could get and understand all instructions in a transaction during the processing of a single instruction, but not what had been processed thus far. This is great for program composability to understand what instructions have processed vs not during a transaction.

List of Changes:

January 28

January 29

January 31

February 1

February 2

February 3

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