Developer Story 04 | Solana Foundation Matt Sorg & OKX Web3: Solana Brings Huge Innovations

The Solana network and its ecological trading tools have become an important foundation for driving the current "Memecoin Super Cycle." The Solana network was created by Anatoly Yakovenko and Greg Fitzgerald in 2017 and officially launched its mainnet in March 2020. It has rapidly risen to become one of the leaders in the blockchain field through its unique technical architecture, achieving high throughput, low latency, and low fees. This has not only attracted the attention of numerous developers and traders but has also gained widespread community attention, making significant contributions to the popularization of Web3.0.

This issue is the 04th episode of the "Developer Stories" column, which aims to better understand and comprehend the Solana world from the perspectives of Matt Sorg and the OKX Web3 technical team. The questions in this episode cover various themes, including market hotspots of the Solana network, technological innovations, ecological development, community governance, and developer construction, aiming to gain in-depth insights into the views and plans of Solana developers.

How do you view Solana and the Memecoin craze?

Matt Sorg: There is no doubt that Memecoins are a zero-sum competition. In traditional zero-sum competitive games, platform providers take a high cut. However, most Memecoin platforms have very low transaction fees, and anyone can participate freely. This may mean that DeFi projects can customize services based on user preferences, or individual users can find ways to contribute to projects. I am not entirely sure how Memecoins will develop, but I do not think it is correct to dismiss them.

OKX Web3: Many users are currently trading Meme tokens on Solana, which raises higher demands for the basic performance of wallets. We have also made many product optimizations:

1) For Meme trading, OKX Web3 wallet users can choose a fast trading mode to execute transactions. The underlying principle is the same as that of mainstream trading bots, which connect to third-party trading channels like Jito. Currently, among the wallets on the market, OKX Web3 wallet is the only one that has integrated Jito, meeting the needs of Meme users for trading speed.

2) Regarding Meme prices, we have made special arrangements for Meme-type token assets because the prices of Meme coins fluctuate wildly, and Meme users are very sensitive to the price changes of Meme assets. Therefore, OKX Web3 wallet displays the most real-time on-chain prices for Meme-type assets, allowing users to perceive the changes in Meme token prices in real-time within the OKX Web3 wallet.

From the perspective of long-term industry development, we believe that Solana and Memecoins need to be viewed neutrally. Currently, Solana has gained a massive user base and trading volume through the Memecoin wave, closely related to its high performance, low fees, and vibrant Meme community atmosphere. However, Memecoins still lack practical applications and resemble high-volatility games. Looking at the long-term development of Web3, while supporting Memecoins, Solana should still focus on more valuable technological innovations and applications to ensure the sustainable development of its ecosystem.

What is the underlying technology that has led to significant growth in Solana network data in Q2 and the emergence of numerous innovative applications?

Matt Sorg: Solana is a truly differentiated technology. Each component in the network optimizes performance while maintaining decentralization. We currently have thousands of validation nodes globally. Many organizations contribute to the Solana protocol through multiple client teams, and many commercial entities are interested in the Solana network, including RPC services, infrastructure, DeFi, etc. The culture of Solana is to continuously improve every part of the tech stack; even if they maintain a lead today, they will eventually become a bottleneck. Other ecosystems are just beginning to discuss some of the efficiency-focused ideas that Solana has proposed since its inception. This approach ensures that all parts of the tech stack are optimized, with Solana's system processing an average daily transaction volume that exceeds the total of all other public chains.

OKX Web3: We highly recognize Solana's underlying technology. From the perspective of our wallet, there are several differences in OKX Web3's support for the Solana network compared to other networks:

• In trading modes, users can choose to use third-party trading channel providers like Jito to package their transactions onto the chain faster; other networks currently do not offer this service.
• In asset parsing, Solana is currently the only network that can achieve real-time asset parsing and display all assets. As long as users have new token assets, the OKX Web3 wallet can display them in real-time.

According to general market conditions, the transaction failure rate on the Solana chain is generally higher than that on EVM chains. The OKX Web3 team has made significant efforts to reduce the transaction failure rate for users using Solana:

• In terms of priority fees, OKX adopts a dynamic pricing approach. To elaborate, since the priority fee on Solana is determined by Unit Price and Unit Limit, we analyze nearly 1,000 on-chain transactions to recommend the optimal Unit Price to users without blindly paying more SOL. At the same time, when calculating Unit Limit, we do not set excessively high limits, as this is not conducive to transaction packaging on-chain. Therefore, we calculate the estimated limit consumption for the transaction as a reference, saving priority fees while ensuring that transactions are packaged onto the chain faster and more successfully.
• In terms of broadcasting strategy, we adopt a multi-node broadcasting solution, selecting the top node service providers on Solana for multi-node broadcasting. We have also integrated third-party trading channel providers like Jito to broadcast transactions onto the chain faster and with a higher success rate.

The transaction failure rate has been reduced from a maximum of 70% to a minimum of 0.8%. Compared to the on-chain transaction failure rate data, we maintain a leading position.

Will the Blinks protocol and Solana ecological phone drive large-scale adoption of Solana?

Matt Sorg: Good products start by meeting urgent user needs and iterating from there. One of the main benefits of decentralization is not just the ideology but enabling businesses to operate in a self-serving manner without permission. Blinks integrates this permissionless approach into Web2. Users do not have to wait for other platforms—Solana wallets and applications can continuously iterate to create products that users love.

The beauty of Blinks is that its infrastructure was initially launched as part of Solana Pay. This API specification receives wallet public keys and returns serialized transactions, but due to its name, its prototype was limited to payment scenarios. Solana Actions officially expanded the application scenarios of this specification, not limited to payment functions but with more capabilities. Through Actions, blockchain protocols can be transformed into services, making them operations that can be shared anywhere (via Blinks). On Solana, Actions and Blinks allow any website and application on the internet to become a distribution point for on-chain interactions, further driving mainstream user adoption. When combined with all of Solana's advantages, it creates a new economic model.

In summary, Solana has achieved a diversified economy in a shared state in a unique way. Payments, DePIN, gaming, RWA, etc., all operate within the same shared state and are interconnected through highly liquid DeFi protocols. I believe that as time goes on and the network effects of Solana continue to grow, large-scale user adoption will gradually be realized, bringing an experience that closed Web2 applications find difficult to rival.

OKX Web3: Solana has burst forth with enough creativity in ecological expansion, enriching native Web3 use cases and increasing the exposure of Solana and even Web3 technology in Web2, which will undoubtedly promote the flourishing of Solana's ecosystem. From the perspective of the three parties, whether it is the Blinks protocol or the Solana ecological phone, the emergence of these new applications will greatly lower the technical threshold, attracting more mainstream users, especially those unfamiliar with Web3 technology and applications to enter Solana. At the same time, these new tools, platforms, and possibilities will also attract more developers to participate in building the Solana ecosystem, ultimately driving long-term growth in the number of users and transaction volume in the Solana ecosystem.

Solana Development Environment, Network Security, and Cutting-edge Technology

Matt Sorg: In terms of the development environment, SVM (Solana Virtual Machine) separates executable code and state, allowing programs to be easily reused in different configurations. Many applications do not need to deploy code on-chain, creating an environment where front-end developers and on-chain developers can each play their roles and contribute significantly at the DApp layer. There are many incentives for other application developers to build code in a vast interconnected ecosystem. In addition to the basic execution environment, developers can collaborate extensively in hackathons, Hacker Houses, boot camps, and even lengthy Twitter/X discussions. The first hackathon "Renaissance" held on the Colosseum platform in the first half of 2024 attracted over 8,300 participants and received 1,071 project submissions. The second hackathon "Radar" saw a 36% increase in registrations compared to "Renaissance," with over 11,000 registered participants. The upcoming "Electric Capital" report will showcase the significant growth of Solana developers.

In terms of network security, Solana has maintained extensive audits and active security programs, including a bug bounty program. As the blockchain industry matures, many professional security organizations have emerged, such as the Crypto-ISAC, Security Alliance (SEAL), and Immunefi. The Solana Foundation actively collaborates with these organizations to strengthen the security of the ecosystem. Good engineering design requires attention to detail, along with gradual improvements and continuous learning. Although Solana is referred to as a monolithic chain, its codebase is quite modular, driven by the Solana Foundation. Additionally, as mentioned above, there is also a lot of redundancy between clients and various parts of the stack, with the Solana Foundation playing a coordinating role, including the Solana Improvement Documentation (SIMD) process.

In terms of cutting-edge technology, Solana rethinks how blockchain processes and disseminates data, sitting at the forefront of throughput and speed, processing transaction volumes that exceed the total of all other public chains. More detailed data can be found at: https://chainspect.app/dashboard

OKX Web3: Our team has been dedicated to providing a good wallet solution service for Solana developers. We will soon launch support for Solana on OKX OS, providing a complete wallet solution for builders in the Solana ecosystem. Additionally, the OKX Connect product launched on Telegram will soon support links to Solana, helping developers in the Solana ecosystem focus more on building products in their respective fields and co-creating the community.

At the same time, we will regularly invite Solana developers online and offline to discuss the current pain points of community users and the future direction of building the Solana community, aiming to achieve a complete closed loop in supporting the Solana ecosystem. We aim to contribute OKX's own strength to the construction of the Solana ecosystem.

For example, currently, a feature of the Solana chain is that many project parties directly airdrop tokens to users without requiring active claims. This results in ordinary users having a large number of non-proactively acquired tokens or NFTs of varying values on Solana. The OKX Web3 team has made many improvements in asset display: Solana users can now experience the display of all assets and real-time asset parsing on the OKX Web3 wallet. If you are importing your wallet address into the OKX Web3 wallet for the first time, you can view all assets with balances on that address. If you purchase new token assets on Solana, you can see the assets you purchased in real-time on the homepage of the OKX Web3 wallet without needing to add token contracts to view your newly held token assets.

Discussing Applications: The PayFi Narrative on Solana, Re-staking Narrative, and the New Standard for SPL Tokens "Token Extensions"

Matt Sorg: In my view, PayFi is programmable money. Blockchain is used for commercial purposes such as buying, selling, and paying, all of which can be customized and leverage DeFi to reduce friction and improve liquidity. Whether in Web2, Web3, or other systems, Solana is the world's best-performing and lowest-threshold system.

Solana's functionality in the re-staking track is very similar to that of Ethereum. Currently, various applications benefit from Solana's infrastructure, using Solana's economic security to ensure some applications that do not directly rely on consensus. The differences between the two are similar to the aforementioned L2 discussions, with the main technical differences lying in SWQoS.

Token Extensions are fully audited on-chain codes that developers can use to configure tokens according to their preferences without deploying on-chain code. They provide ready-made options to unlock important use cases, such as:

• Confidential transfers that obscure the amount of tokens transferred in a compliant manner, as the sender and recipient addresses are known, and issuers can register as auditors.
• Transfer hooks allow for customizable logic to attach conditions to transfers. Developers can trigger certain processes and even create a permissioned ecosystem around tokens, even in a permissionless blockchain like Solana.
• To learn more, you can visit: https://solana.com/solutions/token-extensions

OKX Web3: Token Extensions allow tokens to come with different functionalities, such as freezing, burning, and transfer restrictions, greatly expanding the complex application scenarios of tokens. This expansion of foundational capabilities provides Solana DApp developers with significant freedom in development. For example, Transfer hooks limit the execution of specific logic during transfers, which has many applications in DeFi, gaming, and other compliance scenarios. For instance, stablecoin developers can ensure that the receiving account meets specific KYC (Know Your Customer) or AML (Anti-Money Laundering) requirements, allowing only qualified accounts to receive tokens.

ZK Compression technology sparks community discussion: Does the Solana network need L2?

Matt Sorg: To achieve Solana's goal of synchronizing global states at near-light speed, it needs to flexibly adapt to various configurations. ZK Compression allows for the verification of any amount of data on the mainnet with minimal memory usage, which is data expansion. Entities like Light Protocol and Helius are developing technologies like ZK Compression, enabling expansion from multiple dimensions. Other projects focus on tasks with high computational demands, including machine learning (ML), where some off-chain computations will be embedded in blocks, while others may resemble L2 solutions.

• The Solana mainnet does not care about the naming of submitted transactions; its responsibility is to connect these transactions as frictionlessly and permissionlessly as possible.
• Solana demonstrates extreme on-chain performance while maintaining sufficient decentralization. Typically, the existence of solutions arises from certain configurations being incompatible with the mainnet.
• Examples of potential configuration differences include geolocked validation, KYC, and localized performance (not attempting to synchronize global states).

What is your vision for the future development of Solana? And how long do you think the crypto industry will exist?

Matt Sorg: Within and outside the Solana ecosystem, there is a highly diverse community, and many enterprises are eager to support these communities and developers. The role of the Solana Foundation is to do what no other institution can easily accomplish. We facilitate dialogue, communicate with organizations that wish to interact with more formal ecosystem organizations, and help provide content that anyone can use to introduce outstanding projects coming to the ecosystem to users and developers. In fact, we are excited about the foundation becoming less important over time. Super teams, face-to-face builder communities, community-hosted conferences, etc., have truly gained their own vitality.

Technical development often involves multiple parallel leaderships. Many erroneous assumptions have been made about technological development, especially those related to Solana. The "Blockchain Trilemma" comes from a blog post by Vitalik, describing broad considerations of common trade-offs, but this is not a rule. Some people seem to think that as soon as a bottleneck appears, Solana is at the limit of the "trilemma," meaning that drastic trade-offs must be made. The reality is that even with current hardware, Solana's development may have only completed 2%. This may sound concerning, but remember that Solana has processed more transactions than all other public chains combined. This is impressive, but there is still much room for improvement.

I am confident: applying mathematics at the bits level will far exceed human existence.

OKX Web3: The ecological construction of Solana is one of the core projects of OKX Web3. We hope to create a user-friendly multi-chain wallet for users in the Solana ecosystem. Especially in terms of underlying capabilities and ecological support, we focus more resources on building the Solana ecosystem through the establishment of a dedicated Solana team.

In terms of underlying capabilities, due to the surge in transaction volume on the Solana chain at the beginning of the year, the transaction failure rate suddenly increased. After in-depth research on the characteristics of the Solana chain, we have conducted extensive research and support for optimizing transaction speed and success rates. We became the first wallet on the market to integrate Jito's third-party services and co-built the optimal priority fee solution with the Solana community. Transaction speed has improved from 10 seconds to 2 seconds. The transaction failure rate has been reduced from a maximum of 70% to a minimum of 0.8%. In terms of asset parsing on Solana, OKX has also made significant changes, and currently, all three platforms can support real-time parsing of assets on Solana, eliminating the need to manually add token contracts to view newly acquired assets.

In terms of ecological support, we have deeply supported the parsing and trading of the newly launched Token 2022 protocol since the beginning of the year, and we will continue to explore more features derived from the Token 2022 protocol. With the explosive popularity of Blinks in the middle of the year, the OKX Web3 wallet quickly integrated Blinks, allowing users to purchase Crypto shared by Blinks through the OKX Web3 wallet and also enabling one-click creation of Blinks to share on their Twitter. At the same time, we launched the Meme mode for Meme users, achieving trading speeds that can fully rival the fastest trading bots on the market, and users can view the most real-time token prices in the OKX Web3 wallet. For Sonic, which is currently the hottest on the SVM in the Solana ecosystem, we have recently completed integration, becoming one of the earliest wallets to explore the Solana L2 and Gamefi ecosystem, jointly launching exclusive activities with Sonic and OKX, garnering significant participation and exposure from Solana users.

As an important community in Web3, we hope Solana continues to maintain its technological leadership, expand its ecosystem, drive user growth and community building, and push Web3 towards mainstream users, allowing more Web2 users to enter the blockchain world and experience the innovations brought by crypto technology. We believe that the crypto industry will exist for the long term, which depends not only on the development of crypto technology and application scenarios but also on innovation and integration with the real world.

About the "Developer Stories" Column

Web3 developers have made significant contributions to the development of the crypto industry. Their innovative spirit and technical capabilities inject lasting vitality and momentum into the entire industry's development, not only improving the technology itself but also supporting future application scenarios and business models. However, although they are active, they are rarely noticed. The "Developer Stories" column launched by OKX Web3 and Chain Catcher aims to understand the development context, technical insights, latest trends, market changes, and hot comments of different public chain ecosystems from the perspective of developers through dialogues with core developers and the OKX Web3 technical team, enhancing the voices of Web3 developers and getting closer to these most active and interesting individuals while providing them with maximum support.

Disclaimer

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