In 2023, the Solana ecosystem made significant progress in developing tools, enhancing developer experience, and diversifying programming languages. As of now, there are still over 2,500 active developers contributing to Solana’s open-source code every month, making the development environment more mature.
Let’s now review the key indicators and the latest developments in development tools in 2023:
Part 1: Understanding the Solana Developer Ecosystem
Monthly active developers
Developer retention rate
Developer experience distribution
Growth in developer numbers and hackathon teams
Part 2: Developing on Solana
Developer experience
Developer documentation and sample implementations
Educational courses and training programs
SDKs and development frameworks
Local development tools
Tooling parity with various EVM development tools
Maintenance, testing, debugging, security, and data analysis
Future outlook
The robustness of the developer ecosystem serves as a benchmark for assessing the health of various public chains. Solana considers the following four key indicators as reference points:
Monthly active developers
Developer retention rate
Developer experience distribution
Growth in developer numbers and hackathon teams
Monthly active developers:
Measuring the growth of a public chain can be done by observing the number of active developers involved in development on that chain. The Solana Foundation uses an open-source service to collect developer data, and there are publicly available documents to verify the data collection method and authenticity. According to this research method, Solana has consistently maintained 2,500 to 3,000 monthly active developers throughout the past year.
It is worth mentioning that this indicator only counts developers contributing to public repositories (Repo), and development activities in private repositories are not included in this data. Therefore, the actual number of active developers is higher than the data indicates.
Developer retention rate:
In addition to observing the number of monthly active developers, the retention rate of developers also plays an important role as a low retention rate makes it difficult to achieve sustainable growth. In 2023, the developer retention rate in the Solana ecosystem increased from 31% to over 50%, indicating that more new developers are being retained compared to previous years.
The increase in retention rate can be attributed to the following reasons: optimized onboarding process for developers, Solana becoming a better option in developers’ minds, and increased opportunities within the ecosystem. Solana Foundation’s various guides and developer training camps have contributed to improving the retention rate. Additionally, the availability of job opportunities also plays a significant role in retaining talent.
Developer experience distribution:
Projects built by experienced developers tend to perform better in attracting new users, indicating that developer experience directly impacts the overall success of a public chain. According to statistics, over half of the developers in the Solana ecosystem have at least three years of experience, bringing strong development momentum to Solana.
Solana Hacker House, organized by the Solana Foundation, is a one-week event held globally to provide a learning and networking platform for developers and entrepreneurs. Among the 1,059 developers who participated in the 2023 Solana Hacker House, 52.5% had over three years of development experience.
Growth in developer numbers and hackathon teams:
Since its launch in March 2020, Solana has become the second-largest ecosystem in terms of monthly active developers globally, despite being relatively young compared to other public chains. The Solana Foundation has been operating and funding various ecosystem development projects, including Solana Hackathons, Solana Hacker House, Breakpoint, educational training camps, and student activities. Regional communities such as SuperteamDAO, mtnDAO, Metacamp, and Gen3 from Taiwan have also made significant contributions to the ecosystem.
The Solana Foundation considers Solana Hackathons as an important indicator for evaluating the health of the developer ecosystem. Over the years, the foundation has raised over $6 billion and sponsored eight Hackathons, resulting in over 3,000 projects. The number of project submissions has been increasing with each Hackathon, with Solana Hyperdrive receiving over 900 project submissions, breaking previous records.
The growth of the Solana ecosystem is largely driven by new entrants. The global developer ecosystem develops from the bottom up and inside out, not solely through official initiatives. Classic examples include SuperteamDAO, an India-based developer community that expanded to other countries in early 2023, and regional groups such as Gen3 from Taiwan, MetacampDAO from Singapore, and mtnDAO from the United States.
The Solana Foundation tracks regional development data through the Solana Hackathon held every six months. The recent Hyperdrive Hackathon had participants from 151 countries, with submissions from 65 different countries.
While the United States has traditionally had the highest number of participants in Solana Hackathons, followed by India, the percentage of project submissions from teams outside the United States has significantly increased, from 76% in 2021 to 91% in Hyperdrive. Countries with abundant software engineering resources, such as India, Germany, China, the UK, Turkey, and Vietnam, have been the focus of attention. In the coming year, countries like Brazil and Latin America, Japan, France, Nigeria, Israel, and Taiwan are also worth watching.
As the most mature region in the Solana ecosystem, teams from the United States still dominate the Hackathon awards, but these numbers are constantly changing, indicating a shift in the landscape.
Developing on Solana:
The adoption of blockchain technology requires strong infrastructure and developer tools. Developers are primarily influenced by two factors when choosing an ecosystem: developer experience and maintenance requirements.
Developer experience:
When deciding whether to develop on Solana, developers may consider the following:
Developer documentation and sample implementations
Educational courses and training programs
SDKs and development frameworks
Local development tools
Equivalent tools to those used in other ecosystems (such as EVM)
Solana’s current documentation mainly consists of conceptual content, including beginner’s guides to assist new developers. Over the past year, Solana has published numerous example programs to help anyone developing applications on the Solana chain, contributing to the launch of the on-chain developer ecosystem.
The Solana Cookbook contains a wealth of client code examples, with each example including hundreds of code snippets in at least three different programming languages.
Solana has been actively working on improving the developer experience and providing resources to facilitate development on the platform.The speed of agreement updates is fast, and developers who need the latest operating methods and information on agreements currently lack real-time internal information. The Solana Optimization Document and Protocol Specification aim to fill these gaps. As Solana continues to mature, unofficial research units such as Umbra Research have started writing articles on the internal workings of Solana.
There are currently several complete education courses and training programs available to help developers integrate into the Solana ecosystem. These include self-paced courses and instructor-led learning group programs. The diverse structure of these educational programs helps developers learn in their preferred way and increases the chances of completing the learning process.
Courses and training programs in the past 12 months include:
Self-paced courses and training programs:
– Unboxed Solana Course
– Freecodecamp
– EasyA
– IdeaSoft
Instructor-led programs:
– Web3BuildersAllianace
– Encode Club
– Ackee Blockchain
– Narr8ative
– Calyptus
– DevsNest
– RiseIn
– Nas Academy
Solana has a powerful SDK, and in terms of UI frameworks, Solana primarily uses React and Next.js tools. We can evaluate various programming languages based on three indicators:
Solana SDK: Does the language have an SDK for Solana?
Program Framework: Is there a corresponding program framework?
Developer Impact: What percentage of developers have used this language?
Developers who have just joined the Solana ecosystem can now develop Solana using TypeScript alone, without the need to learn Rust or develop Solana smart contracts. In addition, developers in different technical fields have new tools available for use: game developers can use the full-featured Unity SDK, Godot SDK, and Unreal Engine SDK; fintech developers can quickly get started and use SolanaPay.
The currently most popular frontend frameworks are React and Next.js. To make the development experience easier, Solana also provides scaffold and wallet-adapter for these frameworks.
Scaffold: A tool that allows developers to quickly create templates.
Wallet-adapter: A tool that provides easy integration with Solana wallets.
The local development environment is an integration of tools designed to reduce resistance when developing new applications. Developers can develop on their local machines, which speeds up development and reduces costs.
Solana’s local development tools are the Solana Tool Suite. The Solana Tool Suite allows developers to run and test on the production environment from start to finish, run test nodes on local machines, send transactions, airdrop, deploy smart contracts, and test in different environments.
Compared to mature tools like Foundry in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), although the Solana Tool Suite has the ability to send transactions through CLI and easily replicate accounts on the mainnet, the process of fetching accounts requires more manual operations due to the stateless nature of smart contracts on Solana. This also means that when running tests locally, developers need to collect or create states in many different locations, unlike the scalability of EVM. In addition, the Solana protocol provides users with serialization options when interacting with smart contracts, leading to a lack of unified standards in communication. However, both of these issues mentioned above can be solved in the near future.
Almost every developer who first encounters Web3 will choose Solidity as their first blockchain programming language. This initial exposure to the EVM makes it more difficult for developers to switch to the Solana ecosystem. Switching to Solana’s account model for development means that developers have to give up their understanding of the EVM. Among the 5800 active Solidity developers, only 7% have tried developing on Solana.
There are already some tools to accelerate the adoption of Solana and the iteration speed of developers familiar with EVM. The following are some projects that support Solidity development:
Neon: EVM-compatible developer environment.
Hyperledger Solang: Solidity compiler on Solana.
Most of the major tools available in the EVM ecosystem also have equivalent tools in Solana. Considering Solana’s relatively new position compared to EVM, the developer ecosystem of Solana is actively constructing all the necessary tools to improve the developer experience. Although it has not yet reached the high standards of Foundry, the Solana ecosystem continues to improve and optimize its development tools.
Maintenance convenience mainly involves the following points:
Testing and debugging: Methods and difficulty of testing smart contracts.
Security: How to ensure the security of smart contracts?
Analytics: How to monitor running applications in the production environment?
Testing and debugging play a very important role in the development cycle as they help teams quickly identify problems and reduce potential risks in the production environment. Solana already has a range of tools that make testing and debugging easier:
Debugger: Bokken and ledger-tool. With these tools, developers can step through breakpoints on Solana-based smart contracts and understand the account status of each line of code.
Testing: Mocha, part of the Anchor framework, is the most commonly used testing framework in Solana smart contracts. The newly launched Solana Bankrun offers faster testing and more testing features. Solana-program-test also has similar functionality and speed.
Code coverage: Solana currently lacks code coverage tools for smart contracts. Although general Rust code coverage tools can be used, most of them still cannot be accurately measured.
Logging: In most cases, solana-program is the most commonly used Solana logger. This logger can extract logs from smart contracts and import them for analysis using Geyser or sologger. In addition, there are SaaS tools like Ironforge that assist in monitoring application logs in the production environment. In the past year, improvements have been made to basic logging through the Anchor framework to avoid many early limitations.
Events: The Anchor framework currently provides basic event handling capabilities. However, support from infrastructure is still required to implement real-time event queues. There are proposals expected to improve this.
Security
How can developers ensure the security of their smart contracts?
CI Scanning: Developers can use Github Actions for basic scanning to find vulnerabilities in smart contracts before any deployment, helping them quickly discover vulnerabilities.
Auditing: Any legitimate smart contract developer will have third-party companies within the ecosystem conduct audits. Solana already has several companies specializing in auditing.
Fuzz Testing: Proper fuzz testing of common known vulnerabilities is a good way to maintain smart contract security. There are some fuzz testing frameworks like trdelnik that can quickly test smart contracts and determine if they are susceptible to attacks.
Real-time Scanning: It is best to scan for transaction abnormalities in real-time when running in the production environment to actively respond to potential threats. Riverguard provides high-level scanning services on the mainnet to monitor the vulnerability of applications on the chain.
Solana’s ecosystem has built many tools to ensure the security of on-chain applications in the production environment. However, as developer skills improve, more complex attacks also emerge. Solana will continue to optimize security and evolve its tools.
Data Analytics
To quickly observe market trends, developers need to understand the performance data of their applications and competitors. Currently, many mainstream analytics platforms support Solana. Due to the limited adoption of Interface Definition Language (IDL) in deployed Solana smart contracts, the availability and depth of data are restricted, preventing them from providing comprehensive account insights. However, with the gradual adoption of the Anchor IDL framework, we can expect smart contract analytics to be improved.
Future Outlook
Although the Solana developer ecosystem has only existed for four years, during this time, we have gradually cultivated a robust ecosystem. There are still many opportunities in the Solana ecosystem, such as further optimizing the local development environment, a more powerful event system, and more complete examples of product history.
The Solana Foundation will continue to develop the Solana developer ecosystem and encourage new developers to contribute, and will continue to improve development tools to create an ultimate developer experience.
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