New Update Released for Solana: There Are Some Important Changes

The Solana (SOL) network has successfully adopted the latest update to the Solana Labs validator client, version 1.16, following an extensive audit process and the efforts of volunteers and lead nodes.

v1.16 has been put to the test over the past few months. The v1.16 version has been running on the testnet since June 7, 2023 and has passed numerous stress tests. In addition, a small subset of volunteer nodes had been updated to v1.16 as of August 23, 2023. The update mostly includes changes for Solana validators.

Here are the changes that come with the update:

It should be noted that some of the features mentioned below are not yet available and will be rolled out gradually using a feature gateway system.

• Private Transfers: Introduced at the Token2022 event, this feature uses zero-knowledge proofs to encrypt balances and transaction amounts of SPL tokens and focuses on increasing user privacy through anonymity rather than anonymity.
• Improved Support for Zero-Knowledge Proofs: The v1.16 release enhances Solana’s zero-knowledge capabilities with improved runtime support for zero-knowledge calculations, specifically 128-bit elliptic curve operations. It introduces alt_bn128 syscalls, which are necessary to efficiently generate proofs.
• Validators: The v1.16 update significantly reduces RAM usage for validators by reconfiguring the system to index accounts on disk by default, rather than relying on RAM.
• Support for Resizable Accounts: v1.16 allows programs to be deployed with resizable data accounts in Solana; This means that a program can be deployed with a smaller computational size and then expanded to accommodate the memory difference.

*This is not investment advice.