New release at 250k transactions per second

See details below, but this is kind of a big deal. We’ve 7x’d our transaction throughput in one month, and this is just the beginning.

The community is exploding

This email list is now 12,000 strong, and our Telegram is almost at 8,000 members. We started last week in the low hundreds. We’re thrilled at the support of our community, and are happy to announce that we’re starting a new Subreddit. You can be one of the first subscribers! We also have new Medium and Youtube channels. Join up!

Join Our New Subreddit

Partnerships

We’re proud to be partnering with GlobalID and Yaka Labs (led by friend of Solana, former Ripple CRO Greg Kidd) to deliver portable, private, secure identity for individual and group interactions and payments at scale. We’ll also be announcing partnerships in decentralized exchanges, ads, marketplaces, and others as they come. Contact partnerships@solana.io if you’re interested in partnering with us!

The team is growing

Stephen Akridge is our latest addition. Stephen spends all his time in the codebase. He has 10 years of critical GPU optimization expertise at Qualcomm and Intel. He led the GPU backend that constantly beat Nvidia. And we’re continuing to hire. If you’re interested in seeing how you can contribute to Solana, emailjobs@solana.io.

Sold out panel with Dfinity, Kadena, TrueBit

We had an incredible event focused on scalability on the 24th, moderated by Sam Lessin, former VP Product at Facebook. If you’re interested in learning about upcoming events, and to listen to the whole panel event (audio is posted, video is coming), please join our Telegram. As you can see by Alan’s cart, we provide ample booze.

We had 150+ folks with panelists from Dfinity, RadarRelay, Kadena, Solana, and TrueBit.

Alan knows how to get people tipsy!

NEW RELEASE: v0.5.0

TPS Report: now processing 250,000 transactions per second on a single-node testnet, peak at 400,000

This release once again increases transaction throughput by 700%, from 35ktps to 250ktps (with peaks up to 400ktps), over the prior release. A big thanks to @sakridge for his GPU implementation of signature verification, which can verify signatures at 870 thousand signatures per second, roughly 20% faster than what’s required for a gigabit network at full-throttle. While we applaud Stephen’s efforts, the team is now heartbroken that we won’t be able to 7x throughput again until we move to a 40 gigabit network.

Introducing Avalanche replication

We created a new ledger replication architecture that minimizes bandwidth usage, allowing the network to scale 10’s of thousands of nodes with only a small bump in finality times. We call the architecture Avalanche and while you might guess it’s named after the way data flows downward to and increasingly large set of validators, the truth is we named it after the surf break in Ocean Beach, California where back in 2005, @aeyakovenko and @garious learned to …crash.

As always, you don’t have to take our word for it. Check out our GitHub to run a node for yourself!

WHAT’S NEXT?

While continuing to optimize for transaction throughput, the Solana engineering team will also be turning its attention towards smart contracts and scaling the multi-node testnet. Avalanche replication is under active development and we look forward to publishing transaction rates and finality times as the network scales from 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 nodes.

THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

Contributions

Thanks to those that contributed code since v0.4.0

@rleungx for improving the error handling of all the command-line executables

@rlkelly for helping us move towards an asynchronous client API

@djKooks for cleaning up compiler warnings

@gavin and @GhettoCryptoz for helping to moderate our growing community

@lessin for moderating our panel, and all the panelists for a lively discussion

And thanks so much to the Rust team and to the community for a fantastic language and impressive libraries (especially Rayon!). We are standing on the shoulders of giants and have never felt so productive writing systems software.

Investment interest

We’ve had tremendous interest in a potential pre-sale. We have no announcements to make on this front, but if you’re interested in expressing your interest in an allocation, please visit the presale form on our website, which is launching to the public with this newsletter.

Newsletter #1

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Want to learn more about Solana?

Check us out on Github and find ways to connect on our community page.