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Howdy!

It’s a good day to be a Buffalo Bills fan: New York’s only football team romped the Jacksonville Jaguars 47-10 last night, and handsome Josh Allen played like a human polar bear. 

Now here’s your daily dose of Solana news, from the Josh Allen of crypto journalism:

Solana devs weigh fee change to juice validator revenue

In an attempt to pack Solana blocks more efficiently, Anza engineer Tao Zhu is proposing a core change to the Solana protocol. The amendment — laid out in Solana Improvement Document (SIMD) 0172 — takes aim at Solana’s “compute budget” program, which was put in as a safeguard against computational waste. Zhu argues this leads to an inefficient use of Solana blockspace. 

While there seems to be reasonably broad agreement that the compute budget program should be changed, some Solana developers have argued that SIMD-0172 doesn’t go far enough. At its core, the proposal strikes a familiar chord in Solana engineering — the problem of handling data while building a blockchain that is fast, cheap and shares state across an entire network. 

The compute budget is a line of code that dictates how many compute units — a Solana-native measure of computational resources — a transaction can use. Different transactions do different things, so they take up different amounts of CUs. But Solana doesn’t want wasteful transactions adding to the massive amount of data it already needs to keep track of, so transactions are given a limit of 200,000 CUs by default. 

This means every Solana block — which contains a maximum of 48 million CUs — will save 200,000 CUs worth of space for transactions with the default compute budget.

The problem, in Zhu’s view, is that 200,000 is often an overestimation. Often, transaction creators don’t ask for a more precise compute budget, so blocks are essentially reserving empty space. (For what it’s worth, I glanced at my most recent SOL transfer, and it used 86,000 CUs).

Instead, Zhu wants to ramp the default of 200,000 down to zero CUs over 10 epochs, or roughly 20 days. Then, transactors will need to request a more exact amount of compute. 

As a result, the 48 million CUs in a Solana block would be able to include more transactions, which means more fees would be paid to validators. This will be a welcome sight for validators who — as we’ve covered before — aren’t having the easiest go of things recently.

Not everyone is thrilled with Zhu’s proposed fix. Basically, even if the compute budget is defaulted to zero, transactions would still need to include instructions for the compute budget.

These instructions count against the maximum of 1232 bytes (a measure of data) that can be included in a transaction. Compute budget instructions take up 4% of the total, by one developer’s estimate.

This side would favor moving the compute budget to the transaction header, which is separate from instructions and could take up fewer bytes. 

Solana could get rid of the compute budget program entirely, Zhu has said, but that’s for down the road. Not everyone was thrilled.

“Adding an interim fix just adds more pain for developers,” one Solana dev wrote.

— Jack Kubinec

Blockworks and the Solana Foundation are hosting Solana Founders Summit at Permissionless. Join a curated group of ~60 Solana industry leaders and founders for a day of workshops and off-the-record conversations.

Just one more active addresses chart bro, I swear.

If you wanted to bait some good engagement on X, you could post this chart and point out how Solana is near an all-time high in active addresses using the blockchain. 

But as Lightspeed podcast hosts of the past and present have rightly pointed out, active addresses don’t mean much in the context of blockchains. It’s trying to make a similar measurement to daily active users on social media platforms, but a blockchain’s success should be measured in economic value or fees, rather than how many addresses (which does not mean people) use it.

Consider this: You could spin up a blockchain with 10 million bot addresses moving a few bucks between themselves, and you’d have the world’s most active blockchain. Economic value, at least, represents assets moving from one entity to another.

— Jack Kubinec

Are Solana’s feral parties a sign of a thriving, unstoppable community or a cautionary tale reminiscent of the fall of Rome? As videos from Breakpoint’s after-parties flood social media, opinions are divided — vibrant celebration or chaotic bacchanal? Bull and bear, here we go.

BULL

• @IGGYAZALEA

A lot of yall online are VERY boring [...] Let people let loose and have fun for a night. I don’t complain about watching you all mumble around on conference stages singing songs about crypto or other loser shit I’d be embarrassed as fuck to post.

• @imbisol

Iggy put on a professional-grade event, filled it with people that were ecstatic to be there (including me) and made being bullish fun again. Anyone that wasn't there is speaking out of their ass.

• @JLudman

The Iggy Azalea party was charity for nerds, redpills & incels. Pre 2020 these ppl would never been invited/allowed into a party like that.

• @solanasteve_

To anyone that felt the need to publicly apologize because they were having fun, I feel sorry for you - truly. We let scammers and ruggers walk around conferences like saints but we patronize people for having fun?

• @Cypherj_sol

All I saw was adults in the room cutting loose and having fun and enjoying some very mild hedonism with bull riding thrown in. Either enjoy the party and the vibe or stfu. I mean cmon guys… this is crypto.

BEAR

• @notscp1715

Is the level of degradation we are seeing at @SolanaConf something we want associated with Crypto? Maybe it's time to stop behaving like rich spoiled kids and do better.

• @divine_economy

Look, I'm glad you’re all supporting sex workers, but sometimes I think every horrible thing people say about this space is true.

• @degenghosty

I think it’s important that we hold these men accountable, they are representing a portion of Solana… we can totally have fun without objectifying and dry humping dancers like animals.

• @BaseNFTMaxi

Solana is a sewer and it reflects poorly on our entire industry as a whole. Very rough crowd with those people.

• @0xiamnico

Anyone who thinks @Solana will make a meaningful impact for the world has never been to Breakpoint.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from jac0xb, engineer at TipLink: