Easily manage Solana validators El Soul Lab “solv Ver.3” released[Original interview]

9 months ago 43

Solana client for Japanese “solv”

El Soul Lab BV and the decentralized development community “Epics DAO” released Ver. 3, a new version of the management tool “solv” for Solana validators, in late January.

This tool aims to simplify the setup, operation, monitoring, notification, and updating of Solana validators and make these processes more efficient. In particular, users who are interested in becoming Solana validators but have been held back by advanced server requirements or complex configuration tasks, or even experienced developers who are interested in becoming a Solana validator, may find that administration can be time-consuming. The target is people who have had difficult times.

solv is designed to reduce the burden of validator work and make it easier for more users to join the Solana network. This is expected to improve the decentralization of Solana and facilitate the creation of a sustainable open source development environment.

Ver.3 supports almost all cloud services that can meet the hardware requirements required by Solana validators. Additionally, a new dashboard has been introduced to make it easier for even beginners to get up and running a validator. Furthermore, in addition to validator operations on the test mainnet, support for RPC servers has also been strengthened, making the tool available to a wider range of users.

RPC nodes contribute to rapid transaction processing and are especially useful for improving the performance of dApps and high-speed trading. Mr. Kishi of El Soul Lab said, “We believe that making fundamental technologies like this easily accessible to everyone will foster further innovation.''

What is the focus of Solana in the future, according to El Soul Lab?

Last year, the market capitalization of the crypto asset (virtual currency) Solana (SOL) recorded an astonishing 940% growth, demonstrating the establishment of a community and development capabilities through the stability of its network, progress in decentralization, and evolution of product development. It was done. CoinPost had an exclusive interview with Mr. Kishi of ELSOUL LABO BV.

1.Solana has the impression of being a European-centered community, but does it have a presence in Japan and other Asian regions? What is the goal of solv Ver.3?

shore:solv matches these needs because it allows you to easily and quickly set up Solana validators. I think being a validator will become more of a side job than a main job. For this purpose, it is difficult to invest a large amount of time, but solv is a tool that makes it possible to operate while securing time.

Active stake in the US and Canada combined is 34.3%. A snapshot of the network's geographic distribution and each country's ownership ratio Source (Last updated 9/7/23 Source: Solana Foundation

shore:Currently, Solana's presence in Asia may be slightly lower than in Europe or America due to server costs and language issues. In particular, the high cost of servers in Asia is an issue. For example, server costs in Tokyo and Singapore tend to be higher than in other regions (maintenance costs are high due to the high number of disasters and hot weather).

Furthermore, there is also the issue of language. There are updates two or three times a week, but there are not enough explanations in Japanese, so the barrier to participation is high. However, because solv supports Japanese, the number of Japanese users is increasing. Updates can be completed with a single command, so there are many users who switch between them. There are also many entrants from Europe and America.

2. Regarding solv's Solana-compatible clients, in addition to those made by Solana Labs, are there any plans to support third-party Jito-solana and Firedance (currently under development)?

shore:At this time, our products are only compatible with clients made by Solana Labs. However, there are plans to support Jito-Solana, and it is expected to be released soon. We also have high expectations for Firedancer, and plan to support it after Jito-Solana is supported.

Rust is a great language, perfect for developing Solana, and I think it has a great ability to safely create things. It is reasonable to replace Solana with the C language once the specifications of Solana have been solidified to some extent. Software that is created in line with the purpose is extremely efficient.

Frequent specification changes in the C language slow down the development speed, so it was impossible to achieve innovation like Solana in the C language from the beginning. However, it is a very good choice for new tuning at this stage. Even though it's a test environment, the numbers are impressive, so I have high hopes for it.

What is Firedancer?

The project is expected to completely rebuild the current client code base in C, reducing bottlenecks and improving performance depending on the hardware (number of CPU cores). It is scheduled to be introduced to the mainnet as “Franken Dancer” in the first half of 2024. In early demo testing, Firedancer showed the ability to process more than 1 million transactions per second.

Virtual currency glossary

3.I have heard the opinion that the rise of modular chains and the diversification of clients like Ethereum have the disadvantage of delaying development. Solana is progressing with client decentralization, how do you evaluate this situation?

shore:I view the attitude of trying various approaches and pursuing the ideal as positive, but it is also difficult to see projects becoming too decentralized.

With the modular chain approach, everything seems to be independent at first glance, but everything is tied to a broad set of specifications. Because the underlying technology cannot be changed at will, I think that constraints can cross teams and make comprehensive innovation difficult.

Some may point out that Solana is not currently “decentralized.'' From our perspective, we get the impression that the company is steadily making preparations to advance decentralization in the future. In terms of client decentralization, Jito and Firedancer will definitely increase the value of Solana, especially if it leads to improved performance and stability.

Ethereum has already been decentralized in various ways. From an early stage, he took on the challenge of accomplishing many things. We're grateful for that, and Solana is following suit, so I think they're emulating what's good and working to do even more.

4. Future points of interest for the Solana network

Mr. Kishi: When Firedancer becomes mainnet compatible, the performance of the chain is expected to further improve. As the Solana chain continues to grow, it will also need to become more decentralized. As this ecosystem continues to expand, we would like to continue creating infrastructure that anyone who wants to participate can participate in.

Editor's note:Through design improvements introduced a year ago, Solana successfully protects the network from spam attacks by malicious actors, including the introduction of local fee markets to improve network hotspots. . Network outages, which used to occur frequently, have become rare these days. In this context, Mr. Kishi said that Solana's “mainnet-beta'' status “might not be long before the beta status is removed.''

Five. How we got involved in the Solana community and about Epics DAO

shore:We started a software company in Yokohama 10 years ago. After working in offshore app development for the lodging industry, he first encountered the Solana chain during a development training camp in California in 2020.

After learning that Solana could be used to complete remittances in an instant, he thought that with this speed, it would be possible to partially replace the database. With Solana, there are no fees and you can send money anywhere in the world, so we thought it would perfectly match the way we work over the Internet.

Solana, Ethereum, and Bitcoin are also open source software, but since this open source software is primarily developed by volunteers, even projects used by 97% of companies are suffering from funding problems. However, in today's software development field, development cannot proceed without open source. Epics DAO is an initiative that aims to solve this problem through token incentives.

What is ELSOUL LABO and Epics DAO?

ELSOUL LABO BV is a company based in Amsterdam, Netherlands and headed by Fumitake Kawasaki who aims to create a unique brand by creating a community that is attractive and valuable to users. There is.

Development of solv originally began with the goal of improving operational efficiency for development teams and the community, but it was later open sourced to benefit Solana validators and the open source development community as a whole.

Epics Platform Overview Source: El Soul Lab

El Soul Labs is launching Epics DAO to bring together three critical resources for projects, including development, funding, and PR, in a new way and foster collaboration among community members. The purpose of the Epics DAO is to strengthen support and provide incentives for open source software development to enable sustainable development and improve global software security and quality.

Epics is implementing a new economic system that provides users with different coin rewards based on different contribution methods such as development, investment, and publicity. Epics DAO develops the Web3 card game and bounty platform “Epics” on the Solana chain and won 5th place at the 2022 Solana Summer Camp hackathon.

IDO will celebrate its one-year anniversary on the 31st of this month, and plans to continue contributing to the open source community as a whole.