💳 Visa’s Deep Dive on Solana

In Mar 2021, Visa became one of the first major payment networks to explore USDC settlement on Ethereum with Crypto.com.

Now they’ve expanded that pilot to Solana after seeing the network’s potential for powering mainstream payment flows.

40% of credit card transactions go through Visa worth billions of dollars every day.

When you swipe your credit card a complex process runs in the background. This settlement is the step where Visa ensures your payment is processed correctly and sent to the merchant bank

Visa selected Solana to settle transactions because of the advantages that the Solana blockchain offers for payments.

These advantages include high transaction throughput, scalability at low cost, and fast transaction finality.

Parallel Transaction Processing

Solana averages 400 user-generated TPS and can surge to more than 2,000 during periods of high demand. Its parallel transaction processing allows multiple transactions to be executed simultaneously, while blockchains like ETH process transactions in sequence.

This parallel processing prevents congestion in a specific part of the network or demand for accounts from slowing down the entire chain.

Cost predictability through localized fee markets

Solana's fees are typically less than $0.001 and have remained consistent thanks to its localized fee market, ensuring that congestion in one transaction doesn't spike costs for others.

Compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum where costs can spike dramtaically, transaction fees on Solana are more affordable and consistent.

Transaction finality expected by consumers

Transaction Finality is a measure of how quickly users can expect to have their action confirmed.

Solana uses optimistic confirmation for finality, meaning that finality can be achieved without having to wait for every validator to vote on a block keeping Solana's slot time as fast as 400-600ms

Large number of nodes and multiple validator clients

As of July 2023 Solana had almost 1900 validators across 40 countries, and almost 1000 RPC nodes that maintain a record of transactions.

More nodes means more resilience, because the network can still function if some go offline, and make malicious transactions nearly impossible.

Network resilience is exponentially increased due to the variety of validator clients like Solana Labs client and Jito and several more already in development.

Because of these reasons, Solana's technological advancements make it a promising solution for efficient and secure credit card payment settlements.

A deep dive on Solana, a high performance blockchain network

💎 Solana Developer News

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SuperteamDAO compiled a list of resources for Hyperdrive Hackathon participants including 200+ project ideas, 50+ developer tools, team finder, events calendar, pitch deck template, and a whole lot more.

Calyptus Web3 Course for Senior Developers
Calyptus' new curriculum aimed at senior builders launches Oct 11. You’ll learn how to create your first token, airdrop Compressed NFTs, and integrate OpenAI into your programs.

OPOS Hackathon Recap
The OPOS Hackathon has come to an end, and in this mega-thread you’ll get an introduction to the winners across all the tracks. Remember that you can look at the source code of the projects to learn from too!

⚡Quick Hits

11 new solutions and use case pages on solana.com - Tweet

Metaplex Bubblegum Substream on The Graph - Tweet

Magicblock redeploys Session Keys program after Gum’s shutdown - Tweet

Serialize and Deserialize JSON in Rust with Serde - YouTube

Ironforge free Pro subscriptions for Hyperdive developers with code: SOLANAHYPERDRIVE - Tweet

MetaMask adds Solana support with Solflare - Tweet

Solana change log for Sept. 12 - YouTube

⚙️ Tools & Resources

smol-client is an example of a minimal code version of Solana.

solana-arborist provides a CLI for easy access to Solana programs leveraging the spl-account-compression program and interacting with the Metaplex bubblegum program.

Solana Playground updates include file sharing, import any GitHub program repository (including tests), importing a local program workspace with drag & drop, and exporting with framework layout.

🎙️ Listen to This

The Defiant

Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, unravels the intricacies of the recent integration between Visa and Solana, and the potential it spells for the future of digital dollar transactions and the convenience of USDC in making digital money more accessible and user-friendly.

Anatoly advocates for open, permissionless systems that are faster, cheaper, and more reliable than centralized ones. Delving into the visionary approaches of decentralized crypto startups, from Helium’s unique 5G towers slashing data costs to Hivemapper’s efficient use of crypto for mapping roads.

Anatoly also discusses the burgeoning DeFi space and sheds light on Solana's enhanced stability and how it's breaking barriers in network improvement.

Exploring The State Of Solana With Anatoly Yakovenko

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