Solana: The Developer Network

Described as an “Ethereum killer”, Solana is a layer one decentralized blockchain protocol built to enable scalability and the direct development of user-friendly DApps. Its features its own coin SOL.

Although one could claim that other blockchains such as Cardano and Ethereum offer the same benefits, Solana is hailed as the fastest blockchain in the world, putting it ahead of the game.

The network, which is now home to thousands of projects including DeFi, Web3 and NFTs among others is also hailed as being low cost and censorship-resistant. 

Number of Contributors

Solana enjoys a war chest of on-the-ready contributors who are constantly contributing to the network’s 96 repositories, developing and dealing with problems such as occasional congestion caused by surging traffic.

Contributing to Solana’s projects requires one to put in a pull request or tackle any “good first issue” listed on a repository of their choice. Alternatively, Solana Labs hold occasional hackathons where developers can explore the network’s vulnerabilities for bounties.

According to Github data, there are 100 direct contributors to Master aimed at scaling the Blockchain for fast, secure, scalable, decentralized apps and marketplaces. 

There is also a list of other repositories including the recently launched “Solana Pay”, a new standard for decentralized payments, which has 16 listed contributors. 

Number of Issues

As of writing, devs at Solana have managed to close 2,979 issues since the network’s debut and are currently faced with a workload of 657 open issues across 18 separate projects.

Currently, devs are also comparing notes on some 216 pull requests before eventually integrating them into the official project 

Number of Commits

Excluding merges, 34 authors have pushed 63 commits to master and 108 commits to all branches between February 7 and February 14. On master, 130 files have changed and there have been 5,923 additions and 2,016 deletions.

Number of Releases

Solana has had a ton of releases aimed at improving the network’s functionalities. Repository collaborators and people with write access to a repository can create and deliver iterations of a release to users. 

One of the most important releases has been the 1.8 version which was specifically aimed at improving issues of program cache exhaustion, which are largely responsible for recent performance degradations. Currently, the Solana network is running on the 1.8.14 mainnet beta version which aims at preventing excessive duplicate transactions.  

Number of Forks

Ideally, forks on Solana occur whenever a leader changes, which can be regular. Nodes on the network take turns being leader and generating the Proof of History (PoH) that encodes state changes. Forking requires at least 66% of the votes for at least one branch failure to which the network halts.

To date, 1600 forks have been clinched on the network. 

Track the latest developments on the Polygon Network HERE

PN: “This data is not final and may be updated from time to time”