The Best of Solana Breakpoint 2022
Solana Breakpoint is a long-awaited conference in the Solana community. It was a really special time when most people from the ecosystem visited Lisbon and met offline again. But this year was a bit more special. Look at my list of the best presentations from Solana Breakpoint 2022.
Solana Tooling Ecosystem
Solana Playground
Solana Playground is a web IDE which enables you to start building on Solana without having to install anything to your computer. You can test everything, there is an Anchor support and it’s really fast. Your program is compiled in almost 20 seconds on your local machine but in the playground it’s less than a second! So what are you waiting for? Try it!
npx create-solana-dapp
It helps you to quickly bootstrap your Solana environment — the frontend and also the program. There is support for multiple frameworks such as Next.js, Vue, Svelte or Anchor. It also creates a basic page with web3.js and wallet integration. You can find it on GitHub.
Metaboss
Metaboss is a way to create a metadata account and display the data. For example, you can fetch and display the data from Metaplex, create a token account or mint tokens to your token account with a single line of code / command. It takes almost a second which is 30 times faster than the spl-token and create-token option. Check the docs.
Geyser
It allows you to read data from Solana as fast as possible. For example, if you have gRPC, Kafka or postgres applications, you can access the data from these applications in your Solana program since you install the Geyser plugin. You can also use Indexers which are like Geysers as a service. Check the plugin information in Solana documentation.
Future improvement is a breakpoint tool which enables you to debug your Solana program, simulate transactions and so on. It is still under development and will be available for VSCode.
If you want, you can check the video on YouTube.
Google ❤️ Solana
Google is not new in the Web3 world. In 2019 they started indexing Bitcoin data in BigQuery so you are able to query it via SQL. In 2020 they started operating their first validator and in 2021 YouTube started issuing NFTs to their creators. Finally, in 2022 they created a new Web3 team in Google Cloud. They also partner with Coinbase so you can pay for Google Cloud in crypto. Last week they announced the first Web3 product called Blockchain Node Engine which is a fully managed dedicated RPC node service.
Ok but what about Solana? Google is running a Solana validator which helps them understand all the data. Solana data will be available soon in BigQuery so you can easily access them via SQL. Finally, there is a credits program — you can apply for up to $100k in cloud credits as an early stage startup.
Listen to the discussion between Nalin Mittal (Google) and Anatoly on YouTube.
Lessons Learned From Auditing Solana
On average, there are 8 vulnerabilities or findings in every project. Users are impacted more than protocols. The most problematic parts are:
- missing account owner or type validation
- business logic bypass
- unenforceable restrictions
- implementation errors
- poor feature design
- missing signature or identity checks
- value out of the expected range
The interesting fact is that the vulnerability ratio between Anchor programs and native programs are pretty much the same. The problem may be that developers don’t really understand how to use the framework. Check the Anchor constraints to make your programs more secure.
See full presentation on YouTube.
Instagram ❤️ Solana
Solana users are able to share their digital collectibles on Instagram. The feature is available in 40 countries in Europe. So how to do it?
- Open your Instagram app and make sure you have the latest version
- Click on your profile picture at the bottom right corner and go to your profile page
- Click on the menu button at the top right corner
- Click on the “Digital Collectibles” option
- After you finish the guide, select Phantom wallet and start sharing your collectibles 🎉
See full video for more details on YouTube.
Conclusion
For me, Breakpoint was full of great talks and networking. I got to know a lot of amazing and inspiring people and I hope I will meet the other next year. What was your Breakpoint? What are your thoughts? Let’s connect on Twitter and let me know what you enjoyed the most (except the parties 😃).
