BIG news in the Solana space with week with two major announcements!

Neon EVM and Solang are making it easier to bring Ethereum’s Solidity developers into Solana by leveraging the skills and toolsets they already have.

These two releases work in slightly different ways. Neon EVM lets you run Solidity apps on Solana, and Solang lets you compile Solidity to native Solana bytecode.

Developers will have to decide which approach works best for them, native Solana with Solang or a port using Neon EVM.

This doesn’t mean you can just port or build a complex Solidity app on Solana (yet), but it’s a huge step forward to giving Ethereum developers access to the performance and cost benefits of running on Solana.

Here’s some more details…

💡 Neon EVM

Neon EVM has released a solution to let developers start building Ethereum-native applications on Solana.

Neon's EVM is implemented as a native Solana program, using existing account abstraction, and is able to execute multiple EVM transactions in parallel just like native Solana programs.

The development team released the tooling for Ethereum developers to transition their projects to Solana to potentially reduce the operational costs of their applications.

If you want to check it out, Neon EVM provides ample documentation and a Quick Start.

Neon EVM is also looking for builders to be part of its Early Builders Program to accelerate the rapid growth of the Neon Ecosystem, increase usability of the platform, and generate value for users.

Neon EVM launches to support Ethereum apps on Solana

🔀 Solang

Not to be outdone, Solana Labs announced the release of Solang, a compiler enabling developers to write smart contracts on Solana with Solidity to bring Ethereum developers into the Solana ecosystem.

Solang compiler ships with support for:

• Compatibility with Ethereum Solidity 0.8

• Support for SPL tokens

• Support for program derived addresses

• Ability to call other Solana smart contracts

• Development with Anchor

• Access to native Solana built-in functionality

Solana’s main language is Rust, but it’s also possible to develop Solana programs with C, Python, Zig, Move (coming soon) and now Solidity.

Check out the Getting Started guide to write your first Solana program with Solidity.

Solang opens Solana to Ethereum’s Solidity developers

💎 Solana Developer News

Helius Pyre
Pyre is an open-source learning platform that helps you learn about Helius APIs and Solana through bite-sized questions. By completing tracks you’ll earn compressed NFTs that make you eligible for merch, discounts, and other exclusive opportunities!

How to use SolanaFM Explorer
A complete starter’s guide on how to use SolanaFM to get full visibility into the data stored on the blockchain with the help of a block explorer.

GameShift
Gameshift is a unified web3 game development API designed to provide tools to build high-quality game experiences on Solana. The goal is to offer game developers an easy way to offer NFTs, marketplaces, inventory management, and credit card payments.

⚡Quick Hits

Gum and Magicblock integrate Session Keys into Solana Unity SDK - Tweet

Token2022 transfer fees with FluxBeam explained - Tweet 

Twitter roundup of top-notch Solana devs - Tweet

MadNews interview with 0xMert - Article

Solana Labs is looking for a new steward for Solana app on Ledger - Forum

🤣 How to upgrade to Anchor 0.28.0, Solana 1.16 - Tweet

⚙️ Tools & Resources

anchor-gen generates a crate for cross-program invocations to an Anchor program from a JSON IDL. This will generate a fully functional Rust CPI client for your IDL.

RFP for the development of alternative open-source archival storage solutions for the Solana blockchain. Deliverables include open source code that can be used to implement an archival node that services incoming requests for archival data back to genesis.

A call for Solana to use Semantic Versioning to prevent dependency issues like the ones when upgrading to 1.16.

🎙️ Listen to This

🚨 NEW PODCAST ALERT!🚨

Lightspeed

Lightspeed is a new podcast hosted by @0xMert_ (Helius) and @GarrettHarper_ (Blockworks) I mentioned back in Issue #8, and now they’ve released their first episode!

In this first episode they sit with down with Armani Ferrante (Anchor, Backpack, xNFTs and Mad Lads) to cover the innovations behind Backpack and xNFTs, why demand generation is everything, if projects should go multichain, how to build a community, why Armani decided to build on Solana, why most apps will launch their own chain and more!

What Crypto Wallets Get Wrong

Thanks for reading ✌️

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