Solana Has Had a Whirlwind Year. Here's What's Next.

With most investor attention focused on the price action and memecoin markets catching fire on Solana, the most bullish development for the L1 has been just that

Solana had a whirlwind of a year.

With most investor attention focused on the price action and memecoin markets catching fire on Solana, the most bullish development for the L1 has been just that – actual development.

In this article, we’ll dive into a series of different technologies being employed and developed to advance the chain, from a burgeoning L2 ecosystem to ZK compression to new validator clients, all of which could spell a bright, lasting future for Solana.

Let's dig in 👇

Solana L2s and Rollups

While Solana’s 1.18.15 software update could mark a significant improvement for the network thanks to a new central scheduler, this is by no means the only upgrade in the works to help Solana manage high transaction volumes and scale as it continues to see success.

Months of congestion from memecoin trading and anticipated airdrops have tested Solana's monolithic architecture, sparking a debate about staying monolithic or adopting a modular approach.

Solana's monolithic design, where all activity occurs on one chain, offers benefits like rapid transaction speeds and ease of composability, but as the chain matures, infrastructure costs have risen. Earlier this year, we saw plenty of discussions around Solana needing L2s and rollups to address rising costs and congestion.

Momentum for L2s and modularizing the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) has grown with the development of appchains and L2s for gaming, AI, banking, and trading. This is driven by scalability needs and the success of appchains like Pyth, which moved off mainnet to handle high-frequency price updates while maintaining the SVM for high transaction volumes.

Others are following Pyth's lead, building appchains and rollups for specific use cases with their own SVMs.

Wild Prediction –– The next $1 billion token launch on Solana will be an SVM stack/infra play. Watch out 👀 pic.twitter.com/ijPCN7WZFj

ZK Compression

Beyond L2s, Helius, a Solana developer platform, and Light Protocol, a ZK layer for Solana, have introduced a technology called ZK compression to scale the network.

ZK compression aims to enhance scalability by addressing state bloat, which is the continuous data growth each node must store. State bloat increases hardware requirements for full nodes, making historical data maintenance costly. Consequently, network costs rise, decentralization decreases, and application interoperability becomes harder.

While ZK compression, like traditional file compression, reduces the data size, it also optimizes how Solana stores its ledger data by grouping multiple accounts into a single, verifiable summary called a Merkle root. This approach reduces storage costs while maintaining data security and integrity. This happens at the RPC level, which facilitates communication between different parts of the network rather than directly on Solana.

ZK compression can vastly improve Solana's scalability. It mitigates state bloat, reduces full node requirements, and enhances historical state access, improving ledger efficiency, reducing transaction costs, and maintaining decentralization.

seeing @LightProtocol @heliuslabs build this together has been an absolute pleasurewe have a real opportunity on @solana to address the needs of millions, but not if basic economics aren’t in our favorzk compression makes that a reality, today! https://t.co/P65vuUI7vA

New Node Clients

Solana is evolving to meet the high demands of blockchain performance and reliability. Two major developments are the new node clients, Firedancer and Mithril. These aim to enhance Solana's scalability, efficiency, and robustness through upgraded technology. 

Firedancer

Developed by trading firm Jump Crypto, the upcoming Firedancer validator client aims to enhance Solana's performance with modular architecture, low latency, and high throughput.

With Firedancer currently live on testnet, let’s examine how it achieves these improvements.

Solana Firedancer GitHub contributions are at an all-time high pic.twitter.com/GI3GkduSKG

Mithril

Written in the simplicity-focused coding language Golang and developed by validator Overclock, Mithril is an upcoming new full-node client designed to lower hardware requirements and improve accessibility for running Solana nodes, enhancing scalability and decentralization.

Mithril's development is structured into several milestones:

The State of Client Diversity on Solana:- Solana Core by @solanalabs (live)- Jito by @jito_labs (live)- Firedancer by @jump_firedancer (soon)- Agave by @anza_xyz (soon)- Sig by @Syndica_io (soon)- Mithril by @OverclockSol (soon)It’s remarkable to see Solana maturing well.

Building Ahead

As Solana continues to evolve and address the challenges posed by high transaction volumes and network congestion, the latest software update and the introduction of new technologies like L2s, ZK compression, and advanced node clients mark significant strides toward handling the scale Solana aspires to.

The future