codex

Colosseum Codex: Congestion Issues, Circle Web3 Services, Solana Changelog

Congestion Issues, Circle Web3 Services, Solana Changelog, Lighthouse Docs, Flare CLI

Mike Hale

11 Apr 2024 — 5 min read

🏁 Renaissance Hackathon Concludes

The Solana Renaissance Hackathon has come to an end with more than 8,000 builders participating and more than 1,000 projects submitted, making it the largest hackathon in Solana’s history!

Colosseum’s judging process has started and winners will be announced the week of May 6th.

🥂 Cheers to all the teams that submitted a project!

Many of the biggest projects in Solana came out of previous hackathons so I can't wait to see what everyone has built.

😩 Congestion Issues & Fixes

If you've been trying to do anything on Solana lately, you've noticed we've been hitting some serious congestion issues causing a big impact on transactions.

This situation has stirred up a lot of discussion and debate about what is happening and how to fix it among users and developers.

The congestion on Solana is primarily attributed to an overwhelming number of transactions. The biggest culprits being spam transactions, notably from bots, and a surge in memecoin trading activities.

This level of activity has led to a network overload, where the existing infrastructure, particularly the QUIC networking stack, struggles to handle the amount of incoming transactions.

There's a common misconception that failed transactions indicate a scalability issue or that increasing priority fees could serve as a workaround.

However, the real problem lies in the networking layer and the specific implementation of QUIC within Solana's infrastructure, making higher fees ineffective in this case.

Failed transactions are occurring before reaching the consensus layer, making fee adjustments meaningless.

Shout out to @0xBreadguy for creating this image to explain the problem!

Solana developers and contributing teams are actively working to resolve these issues.

Networking Patches and Updates

Efforts are focused on improving the QUIC implementation and enhancing the efficiency of how transactions are processed at the network level. These include addressing the bottlenecks in packet processing and the complexities of the QUIC protocol that make filtering and prioritization challenging.

Software Updates

The upcoming 1.18 update aims to make transaction scheduling more deterministic, reducing bottlenecks and improving overall network performance.

Dynamic Priority Fees

There is also a push towards integrating dynamic priority fees in dApps to improve transaction prioritization, addressing one of the underlying issues contributing to the congestion.

The community's collaborative efforts are key to finding a fix, highlighting the need for both immediate and long-term strategies to enhance network resilience and scalability.

Solana developers rally to combat network congestion

🧰 Circle Web3 Services on Solana

Circle's Web3 Services is a suite of tools designed to enhance the accessibility and utility of USDC for developers.

These services include:

APIs for Secure Wallet Integration: These APIs allow developers to easily integrate USDC wallets into their applications. By simplifying wallet integration, developers can provide a seamless experience for users to work with USDC.

On-Chain Transaction Management: Circle provides tools for efficient management of on-chain transactions, including functions for sending, receiving, and monitoring USDC transactions on the blockchain.

Program Management: For DeFI platforms requiring complex operations, Circle offers solutions for deploying and managing programs that automate various financial transactions without the need for intermediaries.

Streamlined User Onboarding and Transaction Flows: To enhance UX, Circle's services include features for smooth onboarding of new users and streamlined transaction processes. This includes KYC integration, user verification processes, and simplified transaction flows, making it easier to onboard users to your application.

Applications for early access are open to developers now.

Circle Expands Solana Presence with Launch of Web3 Services

📋 Solana Changelog - April 9

In this week's changelog Bri, a new developer advocate at Solana Foundation, dives into the recent updates on Solana.

SIMD 133 proposes a new "Get Epoch Stake" syscall to allow looking up stake delegations during an epoch for convenient access to vote counts and delegated stake.

An improvement to scan indexes was made to help with some performance issues validators were running into. The total account state was exceeding the available RAM so a new storage format with better indexing was introduced.

It was discovered that there is an issue with web3.js pre-flight commitment handling that was addressed this week in version 1.91.4.

A new CLI tool called Flare (linked in ⚙️ below) that allows interacting with Solana smart contracts directly from the command line.

Check out the full update:

💎 Developer News

Lighthouse Documentation
Lighthouse is a "runtime assertion" program that fails transactions when onchain state is not the expected state, intended to prevent exploits and wallet drainers. The initial developer docs are now available for projects interesting in implementing Lighthouse in their apps.

Comprehensive list of Solana NFT Standards
The growth of NFT standards on Solana is marked by significant advancements aimed at enhancing efficiency, reducing costs, and broadening the scope of use cases for NFTs within the ecosystem. This round-up of Solana NFT Standards covers Metaplex, Core, SPL-404, epNFTs, and more.

Web3 Developers Course in France
Alyra Blockchain is offering a 100% free, application-only 8 week training course to dive into Solana development, Rust, and the SVM from June 3 to July 28 in France. Applications close May 30.

Solana Summit APAC
Solana Summit is launching its first-ever summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on June 20-22 with 50+ speakers, workshops, and more from Asia Pacific and beyond.

💸 Funding

Zeus Network, a project dedicated to enhancing the Solana blockchain's efficiency and interoperability, has raised nearly $8 million from OKX Ventures, UTXO Management, Anagram, Animoca Venture, and individual investors like Solana Co-Founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Stacks Co-Creator Muneeb Ali.

Sanctum, a liquidity staking protocol, has raised a total of $6.1 million with a seed extension round led by Dragonfly, with participation from Solana Ventures, CMS Holdings, DeFiance Capital, Genblock Capital, Jump Capital, and Marin Digital Ventures.

Ellipsis Labs, the team behind the development of Phoenix, a non-custodial limit order book DEX, announced a $20M Series A fundraise, led by Paradigm, Electric Capital, and several public Ethereum figures including Justin Drake and Mike Neuder, Tim Beiko, and EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan.

⚙️ Tools & Resources

Flare is a new CLI tool for interacting with programs directly from the command line. You just provide your IDL and Flare handles passing arguments, making building and testing contracts simpler.

Proxy, from nifty-oss, is a pattern to define program interfaces without the need for hooks or 3rd party extensions. Proxy allows extending the behavior of a program in a simple way without adding more logic to it.

SolToolkit adds sendTxUsingJito method to help land transactions during times of high congestion.

mTransaction (currently inactive), an RPC-like service that allows Solana users to send transactions to block-producers for stake-weight transactions forwarding that may resolve some of the congestion issues, is looking for partners for testing the viability of the project.