Solana Tech Roundup
This past week QUIC has reached its final stages of development. QUIC is being tested in Testnet pretty thoroughly at this point, and mainnet-beta is now running QUIC servers by default. QUIC will not come fully online until RPCs start using the QUIC client. Some RPCs are planning on using the client starting next week. 1.11 will run QUIC by default, deprecating UDP.
Proposal Highlight
Off-chain Message Signing
Off-chain message signing has been a widely requested feature for hardware wallets with Solana support. The difficulty with supporting off-chain signing is that there are a lot of upcoming features to transactions that need to be accounted for, such as address lookup tables and transaction size increases.
The current proposal outlines how off-chain message signing can be accomplished with hardware wallets to enable features such as log-in with wallet and proving ownership over a wallet without a transaction.
The proposal is still being discussed. Join the discussion on off-chain message signing on Github!
Commit Highlights
You can test your anchor verified programs on the explorer again!
QUIC is coming to mainnet-beta soon, enabled by default in 1.11.
List of Changes
July 29
- QUIC: Compute max parallel streams using client stake
- Web3.js: Make clear that minContextSlot in sendTransaction affects preflight checks
- Incremental snapshots only hashing accounts in the snapshot
- Ledger-tool: Verify can store debug info on hash calc
- This is useful when a validator vails with a hash mismatch in accounts, storing to later debug
July 30
- Add withdraw durable nonce
- This feature is aimed at making it easier to bench test nonce accounts. Doesn't affect app development
July 31
- Add signatures required for repair requests
- When the bank is being repaired after forking, signatures are now required.
August 1
- Explorer: Use apr.dev for anchor verified builds
- Repair packets are marked for discord only after successful signature verify
- Docs: Add retrying transaction documentation
August 2
- Don't collect rent on newly created accounts
- Add IO Metrics
- Add error for an invalid account provided
- More granular errors!
- CLI: Compute unit price support
August 3
- Enable QUIC client by default
- Add oldest root stat in accounts hash calculation
- Track number of data shreds obtained from serializing entries
August 4