🌞 Solana Solstice 2023 Report

2023 was a turnaround year for Solana! 

The Solana Solstice 2023 report by Solana Foundation reflects on the progress and events within the Solana ecosystem during the past year

Some of the key highlights from 2023 are:

Community-Led Resurgence - The introduction of BONK sparked a community-led revival with new community members and projects becoming leaders. This resurgence was led by the success of the Saga phone and Helium’s migration to Solana.

Solana DeFi 2.0 -  There was major growth in the DeFi sector including Maple Finance's return, Pyth's community governance, TBTC bringing BTC to Solana, and the launch of new DEX platforms. Solana's 24-hour DEX volume surpassed Ethereum's for the first time.

Validator Infrastructure - Solana continues to be one of the most decentralized chains with developments in validator clients like Firedancer, Jito Labs, and Tinydancer.

Developer Innovations - Highlights included state compression technology and AI plugins. Developer engagement was high with several hackathons. New developer resources and tooling has enabled thousands of developers to build powerful decentralized apps. 

Institutional Engagement - Major companies like Mastercard, Visa, and Shopify all showed interest in Solana. Google Cloud integrated Solana on-chain data into BigQuery, unlocking new use cases. Amazon Web Services also announced that support for Solana network nodes were available for deployment.

Solana has a lot of momentum heading into 2024 with the community's collaborative spirit leading the success of the Solana ecosystem 

2023: The Year of the Solana Community

📛 Super-Token22-2022 Gets a New Name

Token Extensions is the new name of Token2022, which was dangerously close to being known as "SuperToken" 🤦 

Aside from being just a terrible name (IMHO), some other issues with "SuperToken" were potential confusion with SuperteamDAO, and since the functionality is targeted at advanced developers and institutions it would be a challenge for the name to be taken seriously. 

The original name of Token-2022 came from the specification being finalized in 2022. Some developer docs and on-chain programs may still refer to token-2022 in some places.

Token-2022 Program

💎 Solana Developer News

Deanslist DecentraGrants Program
DecentraGrants is a new governance & DAO-focused, milestones-based grant pool of $60,000 with an initial focus on supporting development of open-source DAO governance tools and increasing decentralization in the Solana DAO space.

Unleashing the Power of Instruction Chaining
A comprehensive overview of Introspecting Instruction, a highly effective but often underused technique to chain multiple instructions in a single transaction while respecting atomicity.

SolDev Validator
The SolDev Validator is a new way to incentivize open-source development in the Solana ecosystem by providing grants to developers who are contributing to open source or creating high-quality developer content (once it reaches profitability).

Guacamole v2 Launch Campaigns
Guacamole is launching new ecosystem growth initiatives and opening their platform up to grow Solana together. They’re looking for teams that are interested in improving visibility, marketing tactics, brand awareness, traffic, onboarding, use cases and community rewards.

⚡Quick Hits

List of open-source programs available on Solana Playground environment - Solana Playground

Case Study: How Pyth is Catalyzing a New Era of Permissioned Environments - Solana

WINR decentralized Gaming infrastructure is expanding to Solana - @WINRProtocol

What would a Solana-enabled Amazon look like? - @kru_tweets

Superteam India 2023 UNWRAP - Superteam

Priority Fees: Understanding Solana's Transaction Fee Mechanics - Helius

Soda team has open sourced all the code for the Soda Machine - @use_soda

Solana’s first Validator in Africa is up and running - @mtromp

⚙️ Tools & Resources

create-solana-dapp is a CLI for generating a flexible Solana React or Next app with a single command vs. fighting to get boilerplate code working.

backpack wallet is once again fully open source with a GPLv3 license, after having been temporarily closed in June 2023.

Web3 Storage Cost is a tool to compare the storage costs for Arweave (through Irys), Shadow Drive by Genesys Go, and IPFS.

bpx-api-client is an example Rust client for the Backpack Exchange.

AnchorExampleContracts is a collection of example Anchor smart contracts for Solana, including DepositContract, WithdrawContract, PlayerInstanceContract and CreateGameLobby.

🎧 Listen to This

Bankless

Anatoly Yakovenko, creator of Solana and the Co-founder of Solana Labs joins Bankless to reflect on Solana in 2023 and its future in the New Year and beyond.

Anatoly Reflects on Solana In 2023 & 2024

Thanks for reading ✌️

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

Solana