Nowadays, the Solana developer ecosystem has more than 2500 monthly active open-source repository developers. With the continuous addition of professional developers, the developer environment is becoming more mature. This article is sourced from the Solana Foundation’s article “The 2023 State of the Solana Developer Ecosystem” translated by Gen3.
Part 1: Understanding the Solana Developer Ecosystem
1. Monthly Active Developers
2. Developer Retention Rate
3. Developer Experience Distribution
4. Growth of Developers and Hackathon Teams
Part 2: Developing on Solana
1. Developer Experience
2. Developer Documentation and Implementation Examples
3. Education Courses and Training Programs
4. SDK and Development Frameworks
5. Local Development Tools
6. Tooling Parity with various EVM Development Tools
7. Post-Maintenance
8. Testing and Debugging
9. Security
10. Data Analysis
11. Future Outlook
12. References
In 2023, the Solana ecosystem has made significant progress in development tools, developer experience, and programming language diversity. As of now, there are still over 2,500 active developers contributing to Solana’s open-source code on a monthly basis, making Solana’s development environment more mature.
Let’s review the key indicators and the latest developments in development tools in 2023:
Developer ecosystem stability is an important criterion for assessing the health of various public chains. Solana uses the following four key indicators as references:
1. Monthly Active Developers
2. Developer Retention Rate
3. Developer Experience Distribution
4. Growth of Developers and Hackathon Teams
Monthly Active Developers:
One of the most intuitive ways to measure the growth of a public chain is to observe the number of active developers developing on the chain. The Solana Foundation uses an open-source service to collect developer data, and there are public documents available 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 in the past year.
It is worth mentioning that this indicator only counts developers who contribute to public repositories (Repos), and development activities in private repositories are not included in this data. Therefore, the actual number of active developers is higher than the displayed data.
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 for developer communities to achieve sustainable growth. In this report, the retention rate is defined as “having at least one development record within three months of joining, indicating successful retention.”
In 2023, the developer retention rate in the Solana ecosystem increased from 31% to over 50%, indicating that more new developers have been retained compared to previous years.
The increase in retention rate may be attributed to the following reasons:
1. Continuously optimizing the onboarding process for developers.
2. Solana has become a better option in the minds of developers.
3. Increased opportunities within the ecosystem.
In the past year, the Solana Foundation has published multiple guides to guide developers on how to get started. Additionally, by hosting various developer training camps with different themes and levels, an average of 400-500 advanced developers willing to continue developing on Solana are produced every six months. According to recent Solana Hyperdrive Hackathon data, about 50% of the top 150 submissions were from these trainees, and about 50% of the final winners also came from these training camps.
Furthermore, the teams in the Solana ecosystem have provided great assistance, with a focus on Helius publishing an introduction article on why developers should choose to develop on Solana.
We can also observe an increase in job positions on Jobs Solana, from 15 positions in January 2023 to 95 positions at the time of writing, with an additional 41 positions added in December. Although the increase in job positions is not directly related to the retention rate, providing job opportunities to retain talent is considered an important phenomenon.
Developer Experience Distribution:
Projects built by experienced developers usually perform better in acquiring new users, indicating that development experience directly affects the overall success of a public chain. According to statistics, more than half of the developers in the Solana developer ecosystem have at least 3 years of experience, bringing strong development momentum to Solana.
Solana Hacker House, a one-week event organized by the Solana Foundation, provides 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 more than three years of development experience.
Growth of Developers 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. Through proper resource allocation, the Solana Foundation has been operating and funding various types of ecosystem development projects, including Solana Hackathon, Solana Hacker House, Breakpoint, educational training camps, and student activities. In addition to the official initiatives, many regional communities have made significant contributions to the ecosystem, such as SuperteamDAO, mtnDAO, Metacamp, and Gen3 from Taiwan.
Since its inception, the Solana Foundation has regarded the Solana Hackathon as an important indicator of the health of the developer ecosystem. To provide substantial assistance to developers, the Solana Foundation has raised over $6 billion in funding since 2020, sponsored eight Hackathons, and successfully launched over 3,000 projects. It is worth noting that the total number of project submissions has been increasing with each Hackathon, with the recent Solana Hyperdrive receiving over 900 project submissions, breaking previous records.
The growth of the Solana ecosystem largely comes from newly joined regions. The global developer ecosystem develops in a bottom-up and inside-out manner, not solely driven by official efforts. A classic example is the developer community SuperteamDAO centered in India, which expanded to other countries in early 2023 and now has branches in eight countries. Other groups with similar concepts include Gen3 from Taiwan, MetacampDAO from Singapore, and mtnDAO from the United States.
The Solana Foundation does not track regional development data on a daily basis but observes the growth rate of each region through the Solana Hackathon held every six months. The recent Hackathon called Hyperdrive had participants from 151 countries, with submissions from participants from 65 different countries.
In the past, the United States has always had the highest number of participants in the Solana Hackathon, followed closely by India. In recent years, the proportion of teams outside the United States submitting projects has increased significantly, 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 always been the focus of developer communities. In the coming year, countries worth paying attention to include Brazil and Latin America, Japan, France, Nigeria, Israel (including Taiwan, of course).
As the most mature region in the Solana ecosystem, teams from the United States still dominate the Hackathon awards ratio, but these numbers are changing quietly, and the balance is shifting.
Developing on Solana
The adoption of blockchain technology requires strong infrastructure and developer tools support. When developers choose an ecosystem, they are mainly influenced by two factors:
1. Developer Experience: How difficult is it to learn and develop products on this public chain?
2. Post-Maintenance: How much time and effort are required to maintain and monitor products in a production environment?
Developer Experience:
Any developer considering developing on Solana may ask the following questions:
1. Developer Documentation and Implementation Examples: The ease of reference and resources in the development process.
2. Education Courses and Training Programs: What learning resources are available for developers?
3. SDK and Development Frameworks: Are there user-friendly SDKs and development frameworks to accelerate product development?
4. Local Development Tools: Are there flexible tools for quickly prototyping products?
5. Tooling Parity: Are there equivalent tools in the Solana development tools compared to other ecosystems like EVM (e.g., Hardhat)?
Documentation and Implementation Examples:
The current Solana documentation mainly consists of conceptual content, including an introductory guide to help new developers get started. In the past year, Solana has released a large number of sample codes to assist anyone developing applications on the Solana chain, which helps drive the launch of the on-chain developer ecosystem.
The Solana Cookbook contains a wealth of client code examples, with hundreds of code snippets in at least three different programming languages for each example.
Due to the fast pace of protocol updates in Solana, there is still a lack of real-time information for developers who need to access the latest workings and information of the protocol. Solana Optimization Documents and Protocol Specifications aim to fill these gaps. As Solana continues to mature, unofficial research entities such as Umbra Research have begun writing articles about the internal workings of Solana.
Education Courses and Training Programs:
There are currently multiple comprehensive education courses and training programs available to help developers integrate into the Solana ecosystem. This includes self-paced courses and instructor-led learning group programs. The diverse structure of educational programs helps developers learn in ways that suit their preferences, increasing the likelihood of participants completing the learning process.
Here are the courses and training programs in the past 12 months:
– Self-paced Courses and Training Programs
– Unboxed Solana Course
– Freecode
These developments indicate the growth and progress of the Solana developer ecosystem in terms of the number of active developers, retention rate, developer experience distribution, and the increase in developers and hackathon teams globally. Solana has made significant strides in providing a conducive environment for developers to build on the platform.Solana possesses a powerful SDK, while it primarily uses React and Next.js tools for UI frameworks. We can evaluate the availability of Solana in various programming languages using the following three indicators:
Solana SDK: Does an SDK exist for the language?
Program Framework: Is there a corresponding development framework?
Developer Impact: What percentage of developers have used this language?
Developers who have just joined the Solana ecosystem can now develop Solana using only TypeScript, without the need to learn Rust or develop Solana smart contracts. Additionally, developers from different technical fields have new tools to use. Game developers can utilize the full-featured Unity SDK, Godot SDK, and Unreal Engine SDK, while fintech developers can quickly get started with SolanaPay.
The most popular frontend frameworks currently are React and Next.js. To enhance the development experience, Solana provides scaffold and wallet-adapter for these frameworks.
Scaffold: A tool that allows developers to quickly create templates.
Wallet-adapter: A tool that facilitates integration with Solana wallets.
The local development environment is an integration of various tools designed to reduce resistance when developing new applications. Developers can conduct development on their local machines, which speeds up development and reduces costs.
Solana’s local development tool is the Solana Tools Suite. This suite enables developers to run and test nodes, send transactions, airdrop, deploy smart contracts, and test different environments from start to finish in a production environment on their local machines.
Compared to mature tools like Foundry in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the Solana Tools Suite lacks the ability to easily fetch accounts due to the stateless nature of smart contracts on Solana. This means that when running tests locally, developers need to collect or create state in many different places, lacking the scalability of EVM. Additionally, the Solana protocol provides users with serialization options when interacting with smart contracts, resulting in a lack of unified standards in communication. However, both of these issues are expected to be resolved in the near future.
Almost every developer who first encounters Web3 chooses Solidity as their first blockchain programming language. This initial exposure to the EVM makes it more challenging for developers to transition to the Solana ecosystem, as they need to abandon their knowledge of the EVM when developing with the Solana account model. Among the 5,800 active Solidity developers per month, only 7% have tried developing on Solana.
There are already some tools available to accelerate Solana adoption and facilitate developers familiar with EVM. The following are projects that support Solidity development:
Neon: An EVM-compatible developer environment.
Hyperledger Solang: A Solidity compiler on Solana.
Most major tools available in the EVM ecosystem have equivalent tools on Solana. Considering Solana’s emerging position compared to the EVM, the developer ecosystem of Solana is actively constructing all the necessary tools to enhance the developer experience. Although it has not yet reached the high standards of Foundry, the Solana ecosystem is continuously improving and optimizing its development tools.
Convenience in maintenance mainly involves the following aspects:
Testing and debugging: The methods and difficulties of testing smart contracts.
Security: Ensuring the security of smart contracts.
Analytics: Monitoring applications running in production environments.
Testing and debugging play a crucial role in the development cycle as they help teams discover issues faster and reduce potential risks in production environments. Solana already has a range of tools to make testing and debugging processes easier:
Debugger: Bokken and ledger-tool. With these tools, developers can step through Solana-based smart contracts and understand the account states of each line of code.
Testing: Mocha, part of the Anchor framework, is the most commonly used testing framework for Solana smart contracts. The newly launched Solana Bankrun allows faster and more extensive testing.
Code coverage: Solana currently lacks code coverage tools for smart contracts. While general Rust code coverage tools can be used, most of them cannot accurately measure smart contracts.
Logging: solana-program is the most commonly used Solana logger in most cases. This logger can be extracted through smart contract logs and imported for analysis using Geyser or sologger. Additionally, there are SaaS tools like Ironforge that assist in monitoring application logs in production environments. Anchor framework has made improvements to basic logging in the past year to avoid many early limitations.
Events: The Anchor framework currently provides basic functionality for handling events. However, support from infrastructure is still required to implement real-time event queues. There are proposals expected to improve this aspect.
Security: How can developers ensure the safety of their smart contracts?
CI scanning: Developers can use Github Actions to perform basic scans and quickly identify vulnerabilities in smart contracts before any deployment.
Auditing: Legitimate smart contract developers often engage third-party companies within the ecosystem for auditing. Solana already has multiple companies dedicated to auditing.
Fuzz testing: Proper fuzz testing against common known vulnerabilities is a good method to maintain smart contract security. There are fuzz testing frameworks like trdelnik that can quickly test smart contracts and determine susceptibility to attacks.
Real-time scanning: It is best to scan for transaction anomalies in real-time when running in a production environment to proactively address potential threats. Riverguard provides high-level scanning services on the mainnet to monitor the vulnerability of applications on the chain.
Solana’s ecosystem has established a considerable number of tools to ensure the security of on-chain applications in production environments. However, as developer skills improve, more sophisticated attacks may arise. Solana will continue to optimize security and evolve its tools.
Data analysis: To observe market trends more quickly, developers need to understand the performance data of their applications and competitors. Currently, numerous mainstream analytics platforms support Solana. However, the lack of widespread interface definition language (IDL) in deployed Solana smart contracts limits the availability and depth of data, preventing comprehensive account insights. Nevertheless, with the gradual adoption of the Anchor IDL framework, we can expect improvements in smart contract analytics.
Looking ahead, although Solana’s developer ecosystem has only existed for four years, it has gradually cultivated a robust ecosystem. There are still many opportunities in the Solana ecosystem, such as further optimization of the local development environment, a more powerful event system, and more examples of complete product lifecycles.
The Solana Foundation will continue to develop the Solana developer ecosystem, encourage contributions from new developers, and improve development tools to create an ultimate developer experience.