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Development on Solana: 2024

Development on Solana: 2024

Tanishq Sharma's photo
Tanishq Sharma
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17 min read

Table of contents

Introduction:

The Solana Developer ecosytem has been growing at a fast pace each year since the launch of Solana Mainnet in March 2020.

  • Significant advancements have occurred within the Solana ecosystem since then, facilitating the onboarding process for developers transitioning from Web2 or other blockchains.

    • High-quality guides have been developed to provide developers/users with a quick understanding of the Solana ecosystem so that they can start building cool projects on Solana.

    • Every Solana developer community on twitter or Discord are always ready to welcome new developers and help them to get started in every way they can.

  • Throughout 2023, the developer ecosystem has made major advancements in tooling, developer experience, quality of content, and diversity of available programming languages

Today the solana developer ecosystem has over 2500 active developers on open source repositories, ongoing growth of professional developers joining the ecosystem, and a maturing developer environment.

Number of developers and developer growth in the recent past:

Developer Ecosystem:

Ensuring the health of the developer ecosystem of any blockhain is important for sustaining the network. The solana foundation in one of there blog also states that measuring the health of an ecosystem is not an easy task and there is no single factor that can tell the whole story, but solana foundation highlights following metrics as essential for measurement:

  • Total Monthly Active Open Source Developers: The monthly count of active open-source developers contributing to the ecosystem's development

  • Developer Retention: The “stickiness” of the ecosystem to foster ongoing development. Sustaining developers is an important indicator for healthy ecosystem as it shows that the ecosystem is good at attracting new talent and retaining them.

  • Developer Experience Level: The professional experience of developers. The more experience the developers would be having the better applications they can create which attract more user towards the ecosystem.

  • Developer Growth: Amount of developers joining the ecosystem at any given point.

Parameters affecting Developer Growth:

  1. Total Monthly Active Open Source Developers: One of the important factors that contributes towards measuring how a network is growing is the number of Active Developers building on the chain.

    • In November 2022, there was 2053 total active developers on projects with a Solana integration.

    • Throughout 2023, solana was having 2500-3000 active developers building on Solana.

  2. Developer Retentions: Sustaining developers is also an important indicator that contributes towards the growth of the ecosystem.

    • According, to solana foundation, a developer is defined as retained if they have made at least one commit in three consecutive months after starting.

    • Over the course of 2023, the developer retention within the solana ecosystem has spiked from 31% to >50%, retaining developers that join in the ecosystem. Following factors maybe the result of Developer Retention

      1. Developer Onboarding is Improving: Solana foundation has luanched multiple new guides on how to get started

      2. The Solana blockchain has become a clearer choice for developers.

      3. Oppurtunites in the system has increased: New jobs are being added on "jobs.solana.com", SuperTeam Earn also provinding earning oppurtunities for both developers and content creators

  3. Developer Experience Levels: The different levels (Junior to Senior) of developers that are engaged in building applications on blockchain siginificantly effects the blockchains overall success.

    1. The solana fondation has noticed that most of the developers on solana blockhain are having at least three years of experience in development leading to a more senior level of contribution to applications built on the network.

    2. If network has more senior level developers than the application built by them will be more efficient and will attract more users

  4. Developer Growth: The Solana developer ecosystem has grown to the second largest ecosystem in total monthly active developers. This growth is due to many factors and its hard pinpoint any specific factors that led joining of majority developers. Since, the launch of mainet many initiatives have taken by solana with core objective of growing the ecosystem and some of these initiatives includes:

    • Solana Hackathons, Solana Hacker Houses, Breakpoint, educational bootcamps, and sponsored university events

    • Ecosystem-led Groups such as SuperteamDAO, LamportDAO, helius.dev, mtnDAO, Metacamp, Gen3, Solana Collective etc also contributed towards the growth of Solana Developer Ecosystem

Solana Hackathons: The Solana foundations states that Solana Hackathons are top indicator for the health of the developer ecosystem.

  • There have been 8 major Solana Sponsered Hackathons since 2023. Over the past 3 years, more than 3000 projects have launched and over $600 million in funding has been raised for projects submitted to the hackathons. With each hackathon the number of submissions kept on increasing and the Solana Hyperdrive received more than 900 submissions.

Global Growth: As the ecosystem is evolving as a whole,a meaningful amount of that growth is coming regions around the world.

  • SuperTeamDAO a comunity of builders focued on India, expanded over to other countries in 2023 and now has branches in eight countries.

  • The most recent "Hyperdrive " Hackathon from Solana Foundation has seen participants from 151 countries, out which particpants from 65 countries made the final submissions

    • In the past, United States has been the most-represented nation in Solana Hackthons, with India close behind, but in the recent years the share of hackathon submissions outside of the United States has grown, from 76% in 2021 to 91% in Hyperdrive

Building on Solana 2024:

Developer communities:

There are many communites that are open for developers to join and these communities are extremely welcoming towards new developers who want to build on Solana.

  • These developer communites also provide valuable contributions to the system by hosting events, conducting hackathons on Solana, creating high quality guides, improving developer exeperience and always welcoming new users to onboard on Solana and some of these communities are:

  1. SuperteamDAO: A community of builders focused on India. SuperteamDAO began to expand to other countries in early 2023 and now has branches in Eight other countries. They created a platform where users can find oppurtunities to contribute toward solana ecosytem by creating technical guides, memes, education videos etc while earning along the way.

  2. Lamport DAO: The mission of Lamport DAO is onboard and train developers into the Solana ecosystem and give them the resources to succeed. They are building a hub where developers can come and lounge and they also want to develop some awesome projects for Solana ecosystem.

  3. Solana Collective: The Solana Collective provides various networking opportunities and initiatives to a global group of contributors and content creators in the Solana Ecosystem.

  4. heliuslabs: Ensures the ultimate developer experience on Solana. Helius was founded to help users build better,cheaper, and faster on Solana. Helius offers services such as Solana RPCs, Enhanced APIs and Indexers, Webhooks and Websockets and 24/7 Developer Support.

  5. mntdao: is a thriving community that brings together forward-thinking developers to pioneer blockchain solutions and has produced a long list of successful blockchain projects. Our collaborative summit fosters learning and innovation, providing a space for developers to build upon existing projects or turn ideas into reality.

    • You can follow them on twitter from here: @mtndao

  6. Gen3: is creating Web3 Hub for Creators, Founders and Everyone. There mission is create an open blockchain technology learning environment and provide developers with opportunities to learn and communicate, promoete unique culture of speed, monility and deversity and grow togehter with everyone and finally help more people create practical applications and provide value ot the blockchain.

  7. MetacampDao: Based from Singapore, creating educational courses that allows individuals to achieve their goals in the AI or Web3.0 industry.

  8. Solana Stack Exchange: Is a question and answer site created for solana software users and developers.

Tools, frameworks, and Languages:

SDKs :

The solana developer ecosystem offers strong foundation of SDKs impacting the majority of developers. React and Next.js are highly concentrated in UI-frameworks.

Solana provides the below SDKs to interact with the RPCs and create Transactions to interact with solana blockchain:

  1. Rust: You can find all the information about the Solana RUST SDK here: https://docs.rs/solana-sdk/latest/solana_sdk/

  2. TS/JS: Allow users to interact with solana blockchain easily. You read data from solana, build transactions etc.

    • You can find all the information about the Solana Typescript/Javascript SDK here: solana-web3.js

  3. Python: Solana.py is a python library that you can use to interact with solana blockchain. You can use it for building transactions and interacting with Solana JSON RPC API.

    • You can find all the information about the Solana python SDK here: solana-py

  4. Java: SolanaJ is blockchain client in written in java.

    • You can find all the information about the Solana JAVA SDK here: solanaj

  5. PHP: A PHP SDK implementation on Solana.

  6. C++: Is C++ based SDK to interact with solana and mango markets.

    • You can find all the information about the Solana C++ SDK here: solcpp

  7. C#: Solnet is Solana's .NET SDK to integrate with the .NET ecosystem.

    • You can find all the information about the Solana .NET SDK here: Solnet

  8. GoLang: Go Library for Solana JSON RPC and Websocket Interfaces

    • You can find all the information about the Solana GO SDK here: solana-go

  9. Kotlin: Open-source libray on Kotlin for interacting with Solana

    • You can find all the information about the Solana Kotlin SDK here: SolanaKT

  10. Dart: Dart library for solana and provides many functionalities such as complete implementation of the JSON RPC api, complete implementation of System Program, Token Program, Memo Program etc

    • You can find all the information about the Solana DART SDK here: DART SDK

UI Frameworks:

Both a scaffold and a wallet-daptor exists to make developer’s experience easier for each UI framework. Currently the most supported frameworks are React and Next.js, covering a large number of developers.

  1. Wallet-adapter: Tooling that supports easy integration with Solana wallets.

  2. Scaffold: A tool that allows developers to quickly get setup with a boilerplate website.

    • You can access the Wallet-adaptor Github repo from here: dapp-scaffold

Frameworks

  1. Anchor: is a framework for building solana programs in RUST. Anchor speeds ups the development process on solana significantly by taking up most of the boilerplate code.You can access Anchor Documentation from here:

  2. Seahorse: this framework allows you write Solana programs using Python. This framework is built on Anchor.

    • You can check the Seahorse Docs here: seahorse.dev

    • You can go through this example available on Solana Plyground that teaches how to build hello world program with Seahorse Framework: Seahorse: HelloWorld Tutorial

  3. Solang: Allows developers to convert smart contracts written in Solidity f.or Solana. It uses the llvm compiler framework to produce WebAssembly (WASM) or Solana SBF contract code.

  4. Golana: This framework allows you to write programs on Solana in GO language.

Tools in Solana Ecosystem:

There are different types of tooling available in Solana Ecosystem so that developers can quickly start building projects on Solana.

  • There is also tooling available for developers coming from EVM chain and trying out solana or want to build full-felged projects on Solana

  • Any developer who deploys the projects into Production, will also need to maintain them later and solana also helps in this by providing tools that helps in Testing and Debugging, Security and Analytics.

Tools enabling Solidity Development:

Tools for Solana Development:

  1. Solana Test Validator: launches a full-featured, single-node cluster on the developer's workstation which provides a testing framework locally or we can on local network.

  2. Program-test,BankRun.js: Framework for Testing Solana Programs

    • You find more information about this here: Program-test

    • You find more information about this here: BankRun.js

  3. solana/web3.js: The web3.js library is a package that has coverage over the Solana JSON RPC API.

  4. Solana Playground : Provides a web based IDE

  5. Bokken,Ledger Tool Debugger: Provide funcitonalites for debugging solana programs

  6. Anchor Framework's IDL: Allows to generate clients for a program using nothing but the program ID.

  7. Solana Playground Extension: This helps in speeding up with Solana Development

    • You find more information about this here: Solana Playground VS Code Extension

  8. Blockchain Explorer's: There are several blockchain explorer available on Solana such as SolScan, Solana Explorer, Solana FM and XRay:

    • You can access Solana Explorer from here: Solana Explorer

    • You can access Solscan from here: solscan.io

    • You can access SolanaFM from here: SolanaFM,

    • You can access XRay from here: XRay

  9. Lava Suite (Beta): Provides UI-based developer environment

  10. Dapp Scaffold: This takes away most of the boilerplate code and provides with front-end application so you can start building quickly

  11. Ironforge: Ironforge revolutionizes Solana development by integrating observability, incident management, and more into a tool suite, resulting in unparalleled efficiency and reliability.

    • You find more information about this here: Ironforge

  12. Clippy: is a collection of lints to catch mistakes and improve your Rust code.

    • You find more information about this here: rust-clippy

Docs and Resources:

There are many high quality guides and resources available on solana that can help new developers to learn about solana ecosystem and start there developing journey on Solana. Below are some High quality guides, Blog Posts, documentation and resources that can help any user get started with the Solana ecosystem:

  • Solana documentation: Its a great resource for all the new users who want learn about Solana ecosystem and this is the official documentation from the solana team.

  • Solana Cookbook: No, blog or roadmap is completed if there is no mention of solana cookbook as this is resource will be your goto resource for developing on solana.

  • SolMeet Book: This is another good resource and consist guides for developing various applications on solana

Some Blogs written by developers on Solana concepts:

Example Programs from Solana:

  1. Program Examples: Many example programs were developed to help anyone building on-chain applications on Solana

  2. Tutorials from Solana Playground: Solana Playground provides different tutorials for building programs on solana.

Courses and cohort-based classes for beginners and intermediate devs:

There are multiple full-length courses, educational programs and bootcamps that can help developers onboard into the solana ecosystem. There are multiple options to choose from whether the user wants to learn frominstructor-led courses or self-serve courses or want to enroll cohort-based classes. All the options are available so that developer can get started on solana ecosystem easily. Lets see some of the best courses available on the Solana ecosystem:

  1. Soldev Course: This course cover everything from very basic concepts to Advanced concepts and explains everything in details. You will learn about Dapp development, Onchain Program Development, Anchor Development, Solana Program Security etc

    • You can access the Soldev course from here: soldev.app

  2. Solana Bootcamp by Nick FrostButter: This bootcamp breaks down solana for the developers that want to understand solana architecture, concepts and build programs on it.

  3. Solana Bootcamp Chicago Jan 2022 by Jarry Xiao: This bootcamp help the beginners get know about core solana concepts such as Client side interaction,Accounts, PDAs, CPIs etc:

  4. Buildspace: Provides a Solana Core Course where you build projects such as NFT collection, Full-stach Anchor App etc.

  5. Encode X Solana Bootcamp: The Encode Team launched Solana bootcamp last year from 4th december to mid-january and it covered all the fundamental concepts such as RUST, Defi Concepts, Metaplex studio, building on-chain programs etc.They launch bootcamps on regular basis so keep an eye out on there platform for the Solana Bootcamp.

  6. FreeCodeCamp Solana Course:

    • This course allows you to learn the Solana blockchain protocol with guided interactive projects.

    • You can access the course from here: web3.freecodecamp.org/solana

  7. Careerbooster.io: This site provide two courses related to Solana:

    1. Beginner Course: careerbooster.io/courses/full-solana-and-rust-programming-course-for-beginners

    2. Advance Course: careerbooster.io/courses/rust-solana-advance-development-course

Other Courses for Solana Development are:

Other support systems for devs in the ecosystem

Apart from all the above mentioned resources there are more resources you that can help developers get started with the Solana ecosystem and these resources includes youtube channels, blogposts etc

  1. Youtube Channel:Solandy

    • Any new developer starting there journey in solana should check out his channel which contains awesome content related to solana concepts, news and development

    • You can also check his walkthrough for Soldev course modules: Soldev Course Modules Walkthrough

      • He explains each module contents in even more detail and in an extremely simple manner

  2. Youtube Channel:JoshsDevBox`

    • This channel provides you with Rust overview for developing programs on Solana, Environment Setup for Solana development, and covers other Solana concepts: JoshDevBox Solana Playlist

  3. Youtube Channel:CodingCrypto

    • This channel teaches you to write programs on Solana using Rust, how to use Solana CLI and also talks about other Solana concepts:
      Rust Solana Playlist

  4. Youtube Channel:@CleverProgrammer

  5. QuickNode Solana Course: This course covers solana fundamentals, building DAPPs, Anchor, NFTs, Solana Pay and so much more.

  6. Devnest: Provides fullstack bootcamp at no costm for all the users who want get started on Development journey can use this resource for learning full-stack development:

    • You can access the website from here: DevsNest

  7. Risein: Provide web3 course for free, any new developer can start learning about web3 from here.

Conclusion:

I trust that you found this guide to be a valuable resource for embarking on your journey within the Solana ecosystem. From developer communities to tools, frameworks, resources, documentation, courses, and bootcamps, the wealth of information shared here is intended to streamline your entry into the Solana ecosystem. By leveraging these resources you will not only gain comprehensive knowledge of Solana but also acquire the tools and expertise needed to launch your projects on Solana ecosystem. Happy Building!

References:

SolanaNFTNFT marketplace development companyNFT development servicesBlockchainBloggingBlockchain technologyWeb3Web Development