Latest Developments in the 2023 Solana Ecosystem and Development Tools

Latest Developments in the 2023 Solana Ecosystem and Development Tools

Latest Developments in the 2023 Solana Ecosystem and Development Tools

In 2023, the Solana ecosystem made significant progress in terms of development tools, developer experience, and programming language diversity. As of now, there are still over 2,500 active developers contributing to Solana’s open-source code on a monthly basis, making Solana’s development environment more mature.

Let’s now review the key indicators and latest developments in development tools in 2023:

Part 1: Understanding the Solana Developer Ecosystem
– Number of active developers per month
– Developer retention rate
– Distribution of developer experience
– Growth of developers and hackathon teams

Part 2: Developing on Solana
– Developer experience
– Developer documentation and implementation examples
– Education courses and training programs
– SDKs and development frameworks
– Local development tools
– Tools parity with various EVM development tools
– Maintenance
– Testing and debugging
– Security
– Data analysis
– Future outlook

The robustness of the developer ecosystem is a key indicator to assess the health of public chains. Solana considers the following four key indicators as references:
– Number of active developers per month
– Developer retention rate
– Distribution of developer experience
– Growth of developers and hackathon teams

Number of active developers
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One of the most intuitive ways to measure the growth of a public chain is to observe the number of active developers contributing to development on that chain. The Solana Foundation uses an open-source service to collect developer data, and there are public documents available to verify the data collection method and authenticity. According to this research method, Solana has consistently maintained 2,500 to 3,000 active developers per month in the past year.

It is worth noting that this indicator only counts developers who contribute to public repositories (Repo), and does not include development activities in private repositories. Therefore, the actual number of active developers is higher than the data shown.

Developer retention rate
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In addition to observing the number of active developers per month, developer retention rate also plays an important role, as a low retention rate in the developer community will hinder sustainable growth. The definition of retention rate in this report is that developers who have “at least one record of development contribution” within three months of joining are considered to be successfully retained.

In 2023, the developer retention rate in the Solana ecosystem increased from 31% to over 50%, indicating that more new developers have been retained compared to before.

The increase in retention rate may be attributed to the following reasons:
– Continuous optimization of the developer onboarding process
– Solana becoming a better option in the minds of developers
– Increased opportunities in the ecosystem

In the past year, the Solana Foundation has published multiple guides to guide developers on how to get started. At the same time, by organizing various developer training camps on different topics and levels, an average of 400-500 advanced developers with the willingness to continue developing on Solana can be produced every six months. According to recent data from the Solana Hyperdrive Hackathon, about 50% of the top 150 submissions were from these trainees, and about 50% of the final winners also came from these training camps.

In addition, teams in the Solana ecosystem have provided great assistance, with a focus on Helius publishing an introductory article on why developers should choose to develop on Solana.

We can also observe the increase in job postings on Jobs Solana to see the increase in new opportunities. From 15 job postings in January 2023, it has reached 95 job postings at the time of writing, with 41 new job postings added in December alone. Although the increase in job vacancies is not directly related to retention rate, providing job opportunities to retain talent can be considered an important phenomenon.

Distribution of developer experience
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Projects built by experienced developers tend to perform better in acquiring new users, indicating that development experience directly affects the overall success of a public chain. According to statistics, over half of the developers in the Solana developer ecosystem have at least 3 years of experience, bringing strong development momentum to Solana.

Solana Hacker House is a one-week event organized by the Solana Foundation, providing a learning and networking opportunity for developers and entrepreneurs. According to statistics, out of the 1,059 developers who participated in the 2023 Solana Hacker House, 52.5% had more than three years of development experience.

Growth of developers and hackathon teams
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Since its launch in March 2020, Solana has become the second-largest ecosystem in terms of monthly active developers globally, despite being relatively young compared to other public chains. It has achieved rapid expansion through proper resource allocation. Since the launch of the mainnet beta, the Solana Foundation has been operating and funding various ecosystem development projects, including Solana Hackathon, Solana Hacker House, Breakpoint, educational training camps, and student activities. In addition to the official initiatives, many regional communities have contributed significantly to the ecosystem, such as SuperteamDAO, mtnDAO, Metacamp, and Gen3 from Taiwan.

Since its inception, the Solana Foundation has considered Solana Hackathon as an important indicator to evaluate the health of the developer ecosystem. To provide tangible assistance to developers, the Solana Foundation has raised over $6 billion in funding since 2020, sponsored eight Hackathons, and successfully launched over 3,000 projects. It is worth noting that the total number of project submissions has been increasing with each Hackathon, with the recent Solana Hyperdrive receiving over 900 project submissions, breaking past records.

A significant part of the growth of the Solana ecosystem comes from newly joined regions. The global developer ecosystem develops in a bottom-up, inside-out manner, rather than solely driven by official initiatives. A classic example is SuperteamDAO, a developer community centered in India, which expanded to other countries in early 2023 and now has branches in eight countries. Other groups with similar concepts include Gen3 from Taiwan, MetacampDAO from Singapore, and mtnDAO from the United States.

The Solana Foundation does not track regional development data on a daily basis but observes the growth rate of each region through the Solana Hackathon held every six months. The recent Hyperdrive Hackathon had participants from 151 countries, and ultimately, participants from 65 different countries submitted final projects.

In the past, the United States has consistently had the highest number of participants in Solana Hackathons, closely followed by India. In recent years, the proportion of teams outside the United States submitting projects has significantly increased, from 76% in 2021 to 91% in Hyperdrive. Countries with abundant software engineering resources, such as India, Germany, China, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Vietnam, have always been a priority focus for their developer communities. In the coming year, countries worth paying attention to include Brazil and Latin America, Japan, France, Nigeria, Israel (including Taiwan).

As the most mature region in the Solana ecosystem, teams from the United States still dominate the winning ratio in hackathons, but these numbers are constantly changing, and the landscape is quietly shifting.

Developing on Solana
The adoption of blockchain technology requires strong infrastructure and developer tool support. When developers choose an ecosystem, they are mainly influenced by two factors:
– Developer experience: The difficulty of learning and developing products in this public chain.
– Maintenance: The time and cost required to maintain and monitor products in a production environment.

Developer experience
When deciding whether to develop on Solana, developers may ask the following questions:
– Developer documentation and implementation examples: The ease of reference to documentation and resources during the development process.
– Education courses and training programs: What learning resources are available for developers?
– SDKs and development frameworks: Whether there are user-friendly SDKs and development frameworks to accelerate the product development process.
– Local development tools: Whether there are flexible tools to quickly create product prototypes.
– Equivalent tools: Whether there are tools in the Solana development toolkit that are equivalent to other ecosystems (e.g., Hardhat).

Documentation and implementation examples
The current Solana documentation mainly consists of conceptual content, including an introductory guide to help new developers get started. In the past year, Solana has published a large number of sample codes to assist anyone developing applications on the Solana chain, which helps drive the launch of the on-chain developer ecosystem. The Solana Cookbook contains rich client code examples, with hundreds of code snippets in at least three different programming languages.

As SolanaThe speed of agreement updates is fast, and developers who need to obtain the latest operational methods and information of the agreement still lack real-time internal information. Solana Optimization Document and Protocol Specification aim to fill these gaps. As Solana continues to mature, unofficial research units such as Umbra Research have begun writing articles about the internal operation mechanism of Solana.

There are currently several complete education courses and training programs available to help developers integrate into the Solana ecosystem. These include self-learning courses and learning group programs led by mentors. The diverse structure of education programs helps developers learn in their preferred ways and increases the chances of completing the learning process.

The courses and training programs in the past 12 months are as follows:
Self-learning courses and training programs:
– Unboxed Solana Course
– Freecodecamp
– EasyA
– IdeaSoft

Programs led by mentors:
– Web3BuildersAllianace
– Encode Club
– Ackee Blockchain
– Narr8ative
– Calyptus
– DevsNest
– RiseIn
– Nas Academy

Solana has a powerful SDK, and in terms of UI frameworks, Solana primarily uses React and Next.js tools. For various programming languages, we can evaluate them using the following three indicators:
– Solana SDK: Does the language have an SDK?
– Program Framework: Is there a corresponding program framework?
– Developer Impact: What is the proportion of developers who have used this language?

New developers joining the Solana ecosystem can now fully develop Solana using TypeScript alone, without having to learn Rust or develop Solana smart contracts. In addition, developers from different technical fields have new tools available for use: game developers can use the full-featured Unity SDK, Godot SDK, and Unreal Engine SDK; fintech developers can quickly get started and use SolanaPay.

The most popular frontend frameworks currently are React and Next.js. To make the development experience easier, Solana provides scaffold and wallet-adapter for these frameworks.

Scaffold: A tool that allows developers to quickly build templates.
Wallet-adapter: A tool that provides easy integration with Solana wallets.

Local development environment is an integration of tools designed to reduce resistance when developing new applications. Developers can develop on their local machines, which speeds up development and reduces costs.

Solana’s local development tool is the Solana Tool Suite. The Solana Tool Suite allows developers to run and test in a production environment, run test nodes on local machines, send transactions, airdrops, deploy smart contracts, and test in different environments, among other things.

Compared to mature tools like Foundry in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), although the Solana Tool Suite has features such as sending transactions through CLI and easily replicating accounts on the mainnet, the process of fetching accounts requires more manual operations due to the stateless nature of smart contracts on Solana. This also means that when running tests locally, developers need to collect or create states in many different locations and do not have the scalability of EVM. In addition, the Solana protocol provides serialization options when interacting with smart contracts, leading to a lack of unified standards in communication. However, both of these issues mentioned above can be solved in the near future.

Almost every developer who first encounters Web3 will choose Solidity as their first blockchain programming language. This initial exposure to the EVM makes it more difficult to transition to the Solana ecosystem. Switching to development using the Solana protocol’s account model means developers need to let go of their understanding of the EVM. Among the 5,800 monthly active Solidity developers, only 7% have tried developing on Solana.

There are already tools available to accelerate the adoption of Solana and help EVM developers adapt. Here are some projects that support Solidity development:
– Neon: EVM-compatible developer environment
– Hyperledger Solang: Solidity compiler on Solana

Most of the major tools available in the EVM ecosystem also have equivalent tools in Solana. Considering Solana’s emerging position compared to the EVM, the developer ecosystem for Solana is actively constructing all the necessary tools to enhance the developer experience. Although it has not yet reached the high standard of Foundry, the Solana ecosystem continues to improve and optimize its development tools.

Maintenance convenience mainly involves the following points:
– Testing and debugging: Methods and difficulties of testing smart contracts
– Security: How to ensure the security of smart contracts?
– Analysis: How to monitor running applications in a production environment?

Testing and debugging play a very important role in the development cycle, as they help teams quickly identify problems and reduce potential risks in a production environment. Solana already has a series of tools to make testing and debugging easier, such as the Bokken and ledger-tool debuggers. With these tools, developers can step through breakpoints on Solana-based smart contracts and understand the account status of each line of code.

Testing: Mocha in the Anchor framework is the most commonly used testing framework in Solana smart contracts. The newly launched Solana Bankrun offers faster testing and more testing features. Solana-program-test also has similar functionality and speed.

Code coverage: Solana currently lacks smart contract code coverage tools. Although general Rust code coverage tools can be used, most of them still cannot be accurately measured.

Logging: In most cases, solana-program is the most commonly used Solana logger. This logger can extract logs from smart contracts and import them using Geyser or sologger for analysis. In addition, there are SaaS tools like Ironforge that can assist in monitoring application logs in a production environment. In the past year, improvements have been made to basic logging in the Anchor framework to avoid many early limitations.

Events: The Anchor framework currently provides basic event handling capabilities. However, infrastructure support is still required for implementing real-time event queues. There are proposals expected to improve this aspect.

Security
How can developers ensure the security of their smart contracts?

CI scanning: Developers can use Github Actions for basic scanning to identify vulnerabilities in smart contracts before any deployment.

Auditing: Any legitimate smart contract developer will have third-party companies within the ecosystem conduct audits. Solana already has several companies specializing in auditing.

Fuzz testing: Proper fuzz testing of common known vulnerabilities is a good way to maintain smart contract security. There are some fuzz testing frameworks like trdelnik that can quickly test smart contracts to see if they are susceptible to attacks.

Real-time scanning: It is best to scan for transaction anomalies in real-time when running in a production environment to proactively address potential threats. Riverguard provides high-level scanning services on the mainnet for monitoring the vulnerability of applications on the chain.

Solana’s ecosystem has built a considerable number of tools to ensure the security of on-chain applications in a production environment. However, as developer skills improve, more complex attacks also emerge. Solana will continue to optimize and evolve security and tools.

Data analysis
To quickly observe market trends, developers need to understand the performance data of their applications and competitors. Currently, many mainstream analytics platforms support Solana. However, due to the lack of widespread adoption of Interface Definition Language (IDL) in deployed Solana smart contracts, there are limitations in the availability and depth of data for analytics platforms, preventing them from providing comprehensive account insights. However, with the gradual adoption of the Anchor IDL framework, we can expect the analysis of smart contracts to improve.

Future prospects
Although the Solana developer ecosystem has only existed for a short four years, during this time, we have gradually cultivated a robust ecosystem. There are still many opportunities in the Solana ecosystem, such as further optimizing the local development environment, a more powerful event system, and more examples of complete product lifecycles.

The Solana Foundation will continue to strive to develop the Solana developer ecosystem, while also encouraging new developers to contribute and improve development tools, aiming to create an ultimate developer experience.

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