View this email in your browser THE SOLANA NEWSLETTER We plan to give a small group of our supporters some infrequent updates, mainly on technical milestones in our project. However, since this is our first newsletter, this one is a bit long. There’s a treat at the end if you make it that far!

Loom is now Solana

To avoid confusion with the Ethereum-based Loom Network, we've renamed our project to Solana. Why Solana? We're proudly paying homage to the most beautiful place we've lived, Solana Beach, California. The co-founders have fond memories of surfing mushy waves at Fletcher Cove 🌊🦈🌊 and enjoying much grub and grog at Pizza Port just around the corner. 🍺🍕🍺



New Team Members

We’ve added to our team!











And we’re continuing to hire. If you’re interested in seeing how you can contribute to Solana, email



Talk at Coinbase This Past Friday

We gave our first public presentation under our new name to a packed house at Coinbase this past Friday. Our friends at Origin Protocol presented their platform first, and then Anatoly and Greg went up to talk about Solana’s approach to scalability. It was great fun! If you’re interested in learning about upcoming events, please To avoid confusion with the Ethereum-based Loom Network, we've renamed our project to Solana. Why Solana? We're proudly paying homage to the most beautiful place we've lived, Solana Beach, California. The co-founders have fond memories of surfing mushy waves at Fletcher Cove 🌊🦈🌊 and enjoying much grub and grog at Pizza Port just around the corner. 🍺🍕🍺We’ve added to our team! Greg Fitzgerald is the CTO and principal architect of Solana. Formerly of Qualcomm's Office of the Chief Scientist, Greg has explored the full landscape of embedded systems. He created an bidirectional RPC bridge between C and Lua for the BREW operating system, helped launch the ARM backend for the LLVM compiler toolchain, and published a variety of open source projects including a streaming LLVM optimizer in Haskell, license analysis tooling in Python, and a reactive web framework in TypeScript. If you have time to burn, ask him "Why Rust?" We dare you. Eric Williams heads data science and token economics. He studied particle physics at Berkeley and received his PhD from Columbia while Higgs hunting at CERN. He completed a postdoc in Medical Physics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and later led data science at Omada Health.And we’re continuing to hire. If you’re interested in seeing how you can contribute to Solana, email jobs@solana.io . Learn more about us and our team at solana.io We gave our first public presentation under our new name to a packed house at Coinbase this past Friday. Our friends at Origin Protocol presented their platform first, and then Anatoly and Greg went up to talk about Solana’s approach to scalability. It was great fun! If you’re interested in learning about upcoming events, please join our Telegram where we’ll keep you updated.

Join Our Telegram NEW RELEASE: v0.4.0

Solana's TPS Report: now processing 35,000 transactions per second

This release offers a 700% increase in transaction throughput, from 5ktps to 35ktps, over the v0.3.0 release while also laying the groundwork for a slew of new optimizations. Thanks to the new streamer functionality contributed by @aeyakovenko, input to the server is already I/O bound and able to consistently pull transactions off the wire at over 700ktps!



Introducing smart contracts

We added a highly-constrained, but surprisingly flexible form of smart contracts called spending plans to the blockchain. We can represent postdated checks, cancellations of those checks, transaction expirations, and witness signatures. SUNNY DAYS AHEAD FOR SOLANA

35ktps is just the beginning and we're optimistic about our odds of improving that by another 10x in the near-term. Here's why:



Consensus with OCC (no relation to Orange County)

Solana's soon-to-come consensus mechanism, that relies on our unique Proof of History blockchain format, won't degrade performance. We're happily moving forward under the same technical constraints of a centralized system. As we approach our theoretical maximum of 710,000 transactions we'll trade throughput for availability, but that's it!



Blockchain format upgraded for parallel verification

One of the most exciting aspects of Proof of History is that it allows for parallel verification. We're working to extend that property to all aspects of blockchain verification, including accounting and our smart contracts. Here's some of the changes we made: We've moved to a token encoding where the maximum number of tokens can be represented within a signed 64-bit integer. The new format means that we can apply the highly parallel map-reduce technique to calculating balances without spilling into multi-word integers. We've relaxed the ledger entry format such that transactions may be added without requiring serialization via a hash from the Proof of History hash chain. That means we get to start shipping huge batches of transactions to GPU for verification. Four thousand cores at our disposal! THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

You made it to the end! And your treat is...a super rare, limited edition t-shirt! We only have 30 “Loom” t-shirts left from before the rebrand. All you have to do is be one of the first 30 people to join our Telegram and send a DM to Raj with your name, address, and size. Go do it! These things are really comfortable. Join Our Telegram