Solana’s Latest Upgrade Turbocharges Network—20% More Block Capacity, Dev Tools Get Love

Solana just fired a shot across the bow of sluggish Layer 1 chains with its latest upgrade. Block capacity jumps 20%—because apparently, ’high throughput’ wasn’t enough for the ETH killers.

Devs get shiny new tools too, because what’s a blockchain without developers? (Answer: a very expensive Excel spreadsheet.)

The upgrade drops just as SOL flirts with its ATH—coincidence? Sure, and your ’decentralized’ project totally doesn’t have a VC backdoor.

Solana Agave 2.2 brings speed, improved experience

The network will also replace Merkle trees with Account lattice hash. This means that updates to the accounts will only track the changes, rather than the entire data, which significantly reduces the load on the network. According to Ben Hawkins, head of staking ecosystem at the Solana Foundation,

For developers, the upgrade brings a better experience in several ways. For one, developers will be able to pause and update the apps when they find bugs, without deleting them. At the same time, developers will also be able to update small parts of an app, instead of reuploading the entire codebase, saving them compute resources.

At the same time, developers will be able to connect app components without workarounds for caller restrictions, which have been removed. For users, Solana has added support for logins without passwords, which makes apps safer for Web2 users.

In 2022, Solana suffered several network-wide outages, prompting criticism over its stability and decentralization. This came after the collapse of FTX, which was a major validator for Solana. Since then, the network has not suffered technical challenges on that magnitude.