So, this last week has been… interesting.

I finished the last issue of this newsletter just as everything was hitting the proverbial fan. I’m not going to rehash it all here since it’s old news by now anyways.

I just want to say it’s OK to take a pause pause, catch your breath, go touch some grass. Just do whatever you need to do.

You're still reading this, so you’re not giving up!

The price crash and uncertain future of SOL as a token hasn't scared you away.

None of that impacts the fundamental architecture of Solana, or what it offers developers.

We build. We ship. We repeat!

⚓ Anchors Away!

Anchor has a new version: 0.28.0!

Everyone's favorite Solana development framework just got even better with the latest release. Along with various improvements and fixes, some notable features in this release include:

Events CPI - You can now emit events with emit_cpi! to allow programs to store logs in CPI data, the same way Metaplex's compressed NFTs do.

Support for Solidity Programs - anchor init and anchor new take an option --solidity which creates solidity code rather than rust, making it even more accessible for developers coming from an Ethereum background.

The aim is to make Solidity also a supported language so that solidity programs can live side by side with Rust programs when a new solidity compiler (which will compile Solidity to BPF and produce an IDL file) is released by Solana Labs.

Keys sync - A new command to sync Program ID declarations and create new programs with correct Program IDs. No more build, deploy, build, deploy!

Update Solana toolchain and dependencies - If you've been running into conflicts when using Anchor with Solana 1.16.0, this release should fix many of the incompatibility issues.

Benchmarks for CU Usage - This will help developers optimize their code and enhance performance by providing a set of benchmarks to profile compute units for Anchor boilerplate, so developers can understand the cost of all the macro generated code.

This is done by creating a program to measure the results and comparing the current results with the previous version's results. Any change over 1% needs to be noted in /bench or CI will fail.

Anchor 0.28.0 Release Notes

🔨 Ironforge Serverless Solana Development

With the launch of Ironforge serverless Solana development, Solana developers have access to the tools and abstraction layers they need to do what they do best: creating innovative applications.

Building a killer app requires time and resources wasted on undifferentiated backend integrations, unoptimized data retrieval, dealing with cloud providers, creating indexers, building out failover support, and more.

Ironforge aims to solve this by offering a comprehensive suite of tools tailored for Solana developers with the ability to:

• Cache and Parse account data

• Utilize memcmp, MongoDB, or SQL to filter data

• Manage transaction retries and state confirmation

• Handle RPC providers connections and failover

Ironforge abstracts away complexity and helps developers build applications on Solana quicker and more efficiently.

If you’re interested in giving Ironforge a spin you can sign up for the public beta.

Your Gateway to Serverless Solana Development

🪄 “Only Possible on Solana” Hackathon

Mert (Helius) proposed the idea for a community led hackathon for projects that would only be possible on Solana.

Themes could include:

• Solana Mobile

• DePIN

• Compression

• Payments

• xNFTs

• DeFi comeback

• Onboarding

While at the time I’m writing this it’s just a suggestion, some teams have already reached out about sponsoring one of the tracks, so stay tuned!

Only Possible on Solana Hackathon

💎 Solana Developer News

How to use Pyth Network Price Feeds Safely and Correctly - Tweet

The BLOKC partners with Solana Foundation to foster Solana Developers in the Philippines. - Article

Superteam Security: A Detailed Handbook of Solana Hacks - Website

web3.js Roadmap for May 2023 - GitHub

The Solana Token-22 standard is now live in Backpack - Tweet

All You Need to Know About Solana’s New Digital Asset Standard (DAS) API - Article

Drift Introduces Cross-Chain Swaps to Let You Bridge to Solana Directly on Drift - Article

How GooseFX used Helius Webhooks to upgrade their NFT Exchange - Tweet

⚙️ Tools & Resources

Builderz Solana xNFT Scaffold is an open source xNFT Backpack Scaffold for the Solana community to use it as a starting point. Built with Nextjs13, Typescript, TailwindCSS, MaterialUI, Daisy UI, and web3.js.

DiagramGPT generates technical diagrams from code or plain language prompts.

Unreal Engine Tooling F-KIT from Star Atlas provides developers with free, state-of-the-art technology that makee it easier and faster to bring Unreal Engine 5 games, products, and tools to Solana.

UMI SDK is a modular framework from Metaplex for building and using JavaScript clients for Solana programs. It provides a zero-dependency library that defines a set of core interfaces that libraries can rely on without being tied to a specific implementation.

solana-zig-helloworld is a simple hello world example program for Solana using Zig.

🎊 New Hires!

@CryptoMagellan joins the Solana Foundation as as Social Media Strategist.

@PratikSaria joined the engineering team at Solarplex.

🎙️ Listen to This…

New Podcast Alert: Y-Axis

Y-Axis is a new podcast hosted by Tristan Yver, co-founder of Backpack wallet.

in Y-Axis, Tristan interviews the cryptocurrency and blockchain space's best entrepreneurs to understand how they built their companies. In these episodes, founders reveal their stories and lessons that led to their eventual success.

The first episode of Y-Axiz features his Backpack co-founder Armani Ferrante.

In this episode Armani shares his journey through school to becoming an engineer, what it was like working at Apple and transitioning to building on the blockchain. There’s lots to pick up for inspiring software engineers, entrepreneurs, well-cultured degens & fellow Mad Lads!

Armani Ferrante: Computer Science, Blockchains & Company Building

🗓️ Events

Solana Weekend Hacks

Berlin
June 24-25th and July 15-16th

Weekend Hacks is a series of hackathons in Berlin this June and July. The mission of these events is to ignite the next generation of consumer crypto applications.

Apply to join

Thanks for reading ✌️

I hope you found something useful here! If you have any suggestions or feedback just let me know what you think.