The Solana development team has put forth a groundbreaking proposal that could potentially revolutionize the way its blockchain manages billions of user accounts, thus addressing one of the most significant barriers to broader adoption.
The proposal introduces what is referred to as a “lattice-based” hashing system, a fundamental shift in how the blockchain tracks and verifies the status of user accounts. Upon approval, this proposal could establish a new benchmark for blockchain scalability, potentially inspiring other networks to adopt similar approaches in tackling scaling challenges.
The proposal states, “The main goal is to scale Solana to billions [of] accounts and compute a “hash of all accounts” in practical time and space.” This statement outlines a solution to a problem that has been a longstanding issue for high-performance blockchains.
At present, Solana, along with other blockchains, must frequently recalculate the entire state of all user accounts. This process becomes increasingly resource-intensive as the network expands. This issue, known as the “state growth problem,” has been a hot topic among blockchain developers. Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko shed some light on this challenge in May of last year.
Yakovenko explained, “The problem comes down to this simple thing: New account creation has to actually create new accounts. Which means that a new account has to prove that it is new somehow.”
The proposed Accounts Lattice Hash upgrade eradicates this requirement by facilitating immediate verification without the need to recalculate everything.
The proposed system borrows from a sophisticated cryptographic technique called “homomorphic hashing.” This allows the network to update its state verification by only processing the accounts that have changed. Remarkably, this new system maintains the same 128-bit security level while significantly reducing computational overhead.
Preliminary implementations of this new system have shown encouraging results. Two validator clients, Agave and Firedancer, have demonstrated its practical viability, according to the proposal’s authors. Decrypt has reached out to both the authors and Yakovenko for further details.
This upgrade will be executed through Solana’s formal improvement process, which necessitates network-wide activation via validator voting. Developers are advocating for a phased deployment, which would allow nodes to pre-compute the new hashing system before fully implementing it.
The Solana proposal, if implemented, promises to be a game-changer in the world of blockchain, setting a new precedent in managing state growth problem. It’s a development that could influence the scalability of other networks, moving the whole industry forward.
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