Develop and Deploy Solana Smart Contracts

Solana is a high-performance blockchain capable of processing thousands of transactions per second with sub-second block times. It achieves this through a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus mechanism that utilizes an innovative cryptographic function called Proof of History (PoH).

Historical proof

Proof of History (PoH) establishes a cryptographically verifiable sequence of events (in this case, transactions) over time by using a high-frequency Verifiable Delay Function (VDF). Essentially, this means that PoH acts like a cryptographic clock that helps the network agree on time and order of events without waiting for messages from other nodes. Just as an ancient water clock could keep track of the passage of time by watching the water level rise, smart contract audit services the successive output of a proven blockchain state hash gives a verifiable sequence of events.

This allows for parallel processing of ordered events to help improve the performance of the network, whereas in traditional blockchain scenarios a single process verifies and packages all transactions to be included in the next block.

A simple analogy is to imagine a large puzzle of 100 pieces. Under normal circumstances, it takes one or more people a certain amount of time to complete the puzzle. But imagine if beforehand all the puzzle pieces were printed with numbers corresponding to their positions, from the top left corner of the puzzle piece to the bottom right corner, and arranged in a row in that order. Because the exact order of the puzzle pieces and their location in the puzzle is known in advance, allowing multiple people to focus on each part can solve the puzzle faster. This is the effect of having a verifiable sequence of events relative to time on the consensus mechanism; it makes it possible to break up a transaction into multiple parallel processes.

Smart Contract Architecture

Solana provides a smart contract model that differs from traditional EVM-based blockchains. In traditional EVM-based chains, contract code/logic and state are combined into a single contract deployed on the chain. Smart contracts (or programs) in Solana are read-only or stateless and contain only program logic. Once deployed, smart contracts can interact through external accounts. Accounts in Solana that interact with programs store data related to program interactions. This creates a logical separation of state (account) and contract logic (program). This is the key difference between Solana and EVM-based smart contracts. Accounts on Ethereum are different from accounts on Solana, smart contract audit where Solana accounts can store data (including wallet information), while Ethereum accounts do not.

In addition to this, Solana also provides CLI (command line) and JSON RPC API, which can be used by decentralized applications to interact with the Solana blockchain. It is also possible to use existing SDKs for clients to talk to the blockchain and Solana programs.

High-level representation of the Solana development workflow. Source: Solana documentation

An abstract representation of a Solana development workflow. Source: Solana Documentation

Deploy the first Solana smart contract

In this section, you’ll create and deploy a “hello world” Solana program, written in Rust.

Require

• Before proceeding, the following tools should be installed:
• NodeJS v14 or higher & NPM
• The latest stable version of Rust
• Solana CLI v1.7.11 or later
• Git

HelloWorld program

The HelloWorld program is a smart contract that prints output to the console, bsc smart contract audit counts the number of times the program is called by a given account, and stores that number on-chain. We will break down the code into different parts to explain.

The first part defines some standard Solana program parameters and defines the program entry (the “process_instruction” function). Additionally, it uses borsh to serialize and deserialize parameters to and from the deployer.