New in v0.5.0

Solana's TPS Report: now processing 250,000 transactions per second on a single-node testnet

This release once again increases transaction throughput by 700%, from 35ktps to 250ktps (with peaks up to 400ktps), over the prior release. A big thanks to @sakridge for his GPU implementation of signature verification, which can verify signatures at 870 thousand signatures per second, roughly 20% faster than what’s required for a gigabit network at full-throttle. While we applaud Stephen’s efforts, the team is now heartbroken that we won’t be able to 7x throughput again until we move to a 40 gigabit network.

Introducing Avalanche replication

We created a new ledger replication architecture that minimizes bandwidth usage, allowing the network to scale 10’s of thousands of nodes with only a small bump in finality times. We call the architecture Avalanche and while you might guess it’s named after the way data flows downward to an increasingly large set of validators, the truth is we named it after the surf break in Ocean Beach, California where back in 2005, @aeyakovenko and @garious learned to...crash.

What’s next?

We’ll continue to optimize for transaction throughput, but now that it is approaching its theoretical maximum, the Solana engineering team is turning its attention towards smart contracts and scaling the multi-node testnet. Avalanche replication is under active development and we look forward to publishing transaction rates and finality times as the network scales from 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 nodes.

Contributions

Thanks to those that contributed code since v0.4.0
@rleungx for improving the error handling of all the command-line executables
@rlkelly for helping us move towards an asynchronous client API
@djKooks for cleaning up compiler warnings

And thanks so much to the Rust team and to the community for a fantastic language and impressive libraries (especially Rayon!). We are standing on the shoulders of giants and have never felt so productive writing systems software.