- The brand new improve permits ZK proofs to reinforce runtime assist for Solana.
- With encryption on SPL tokens, customers could make personal transactions with out compromising on safety.
Solana [SOL] has lastly adopted a brand new replace to its validator shopper often called the Solana v1.16. In an article posted on 6 October, the undertaking’s final developer platform Helium, wrote an in depth explainer on what the most recent improve is about.
Sensible or not, right here’s SOL’s market cap in ETH phrases
ZK-SNARKS to the rescue
Earlier than going into the attributes, Helius gave a step-by-step report of how the v1.16 was examined. In line with the submit, the improve was in improvement for ten good months with efforts by each volunteers and canary nodes.
For context, a canary node entails the testing of a brand new function with actual customers earlier than it’s finally deployed. Helius famous that the Solana v1.16 had been operating on Testnet since 7 June.
The event group, nevertheless, famous that there have been some points with the RPC nodes and a little bit of safety.
However with the assistance of the canary node, Solana was in a position to name in Halborn a blockchain safety answer agency to audit the improve earlier than it went stay on Mainnet Beta.
Curiously, the options of the brand new improve constituted a few of the advantages customers and validators have been hoping Solana integrates.
First, Solana famous that the v1.16 improve permits for the efficient implementation of Zero-Data Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Data (ZK-SNARKS). Sometimes, ZK options are identified to be linked with Ethereum [ETH] scaling options.
Nonetheless, Solana’s choice to implement it was due to its mission to reinforce runtime assist for ZK computations. Therefore, the report talked about that,
“These operations are standardized on Ethereum by EIP-196, EIP-197, and EIP-198. The introduction of alt_bn128 syscalls is a major leap in the direction of bridging the compatibility hole.”
Indexing and extra for validators
One other function launched with the improve is confidential transfers which additionally want the Zero-Knowldege enter. With Solana’s confidential transfers, customers can enhance privateness and encrypt transactions and balances of SPL tokens.
SPL is an acronym for Solana Program Library. They’re just like Ethereum’s ERC-20 tokens. However what SPL tokens do is a bit totally different from ERC-20 tokens. Nonetheless, they comply with a particular normal for creating and managing tokens on the Solana blockchain.
For validators, the v1.16 improve robotically reduces the Random Entry Reminiscence Utilization (RAM) for indexing accounts. For the reason that deployment of the improve, validators now run on 39 GB of RAM as a substitute of the earlier 120GB. This was additionally confirmed by Yanshu, a developer from Luganodes.
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We have been carefully monitoring reminiscence necessities for operating @solana nodes & it is exceptional how they’ve dropped because the launch of v1.16! 🚀We lately upgraded our nodes to the most recent v1.16.14, which comes with host of efficiency enhancements & enhanced resiliency🧵👇 pic.twitter.com/D1B423y0Ey
— Yanshu | Luganodes (@0xyanshu) September 28, 2023
At press time, information from Solana Seashore showed that there have been 1,993 validators on the blockchain. Additionally, 81.1% of the nodes have been working on v1.16.14 whereas 12.14% upgraded to v1.16.15.
How a lot are 1,10,100 SOLs price as we speak?
Different options of the brand new improve embrace higher useful resource allocation for deploying purposes. Additionally, v.1.16 addresses launched the Epoch Account Hash, which permits the Solana community to extend safety by figuring out corrupt information.
Whereas Solana admitted that the ZK integration was lengthy overdue, it famous that it received’t relaxation on its oars. In concluding the report, its improvement arm famous that Solana might be engaged on releasing one other improve within the subsequent three months, and v1.17 might be subsequent.