Beacons v0.12.0

Major Features And Improvements

• New Rust crate, solana-runtime, allows for smart contract development without needing to spin up a testnet
• Improved leader rotation algorithm using the validators' VDFs as ...beacons!
• Added a high-throughput, streaming block explorer
• Scalable account storage and reduced RAM usage via memory-mapping
• Avalanche fully-implemented; simulation indicates promising scale to 10's of thousands of nodes
• Improved support for BPF-compiled smart contracts written in Rust

TPS Report

The codebase is undergoing a large rewrite. Performance is awful at the moment and was not a focus of this release cycle. We'll report TPS, node counts, and confirmation times again soon!

Additional Features and Improvements

• New TransactionBuilder Rust library in the SDK to trivialize creation of multi-instruction transactions
• Fullnodes now fork-aware and implement rudimentary fork selection
• New fork-aware Bank now supports checkpointing, rollback and squashing
• New Blocktree ledger format with builtin support for forks
• Improved security via signed control plane messages
• Solana's equivalent of Bitcoin's satoshis named lamports. All code and documentation updated. The term "token" is now reserved for fungible currencies implementing the ERC20 interface.
• solana_erc20 crate renamed to solana_token
• Budget smart contract DSL now recurses to support nested expressions
• New compressed transaction format encodes 64-bit integers with 1 to 9 bytes
• Preview release of KvStore, a high-speed Key-Value Store to replace RocksDB

Breaking Changes

• Transaction format is incompatible with previous releases. Expect this in all releases until mainnet launch.

Known Issues

• Low TPS; not a focus of this release
• Cluster stalls; fullnodes can't find each other
• Rust crates not published to crates.io; circular dependencies