Complete guide to deploy smart contracts on Solana

Solana is the leading platform to develop the decentralized application i.e dApps. In this blog, I am going to walk you through Solana and how to deploy smart contracts on Solana ecosystem.

Solana (SOL)

It is a blockchain platform designed to host decentralized applications which can be scalable in their aspects. It was founded in 2017, by Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, they are directly involved with Solana Labs which comes behind Solana.

It is an open-source project currently run by the Solana Foundation. Solana supports proof-of-history i.e (poH) which tracks all the transaction that happened in the blockchain and this method help Solana to achieve speed and performance, unlike others. The ecosystem of Solana is one of the best regarding that enrich features provided by the Solana. People can easily deploy smart contracts on Solana.

Why Solana

There are several good reasons why you should develop your application on the Solana blockchain, here are the top three reasons which I find worth to try it out, Solana has its speed and low cost and it’s a very robust blockchain compared to many other blockchains especially EVM blockchain that’s existent within the market itself.

• Speed
• Low Cost
• Robust

Speed

In terms of speed, Solana blockchain is undoubtedly the faster if not the fastest blockchain out there in existence, with its proof of history system which allows the blockchain to run transaction parallel. It allows 65000 transactions per second throughput which is ten thousand times faster than Bitcoin, four thousand times faster than Ethereum, and even 2.5 times faster than Visa.

Which is actually a traditional banking system and not even a blockchain. So you can see even the decentralized system is much faster than the centralized one that we have at the moment.

Low Cost

The second reason why Solana is better compared to any other blockchain out there is that its low cost and as you know that when you are dealing with blockchain and when you are transferring tokens or making transactions on a blockchain. It cost some gas fees, so in the case of Ethereum you need to pay Eth and in terms of Polygon you need to pay in Matic, like this, there are different coins that need to pay a gas fee, if you are adding in the blockchain.

Solana offers the lowest gas fee per transaction which is insanely less than its competitors. Per transaction the cost is $0.00025 dollars and if you compare it to another blockchain like Ethereum which cost $24.48 per transaction.

Robust

The Solana blockchain is robust and the first thing to remember is that Solana is not an EVM blockchain it is built with Rust instead of Go like Ethereum which results in better performance that can be seen from the first reason i.e speed.

Even the Solana program is synonymous with smart contracts but they don’t call it what needs to be written in rusting as well which overall is a very difficult language to learn but it will result in more high-quality programs, more rigorous programs that guarantee code safety and therefore less prone to hacks.

Especially comparing it to solidity which provides hackers with a lot of loopholes to hack and this provides more security compared to when using solidity on the EVM blockchain overall.

Solana Workflow

Before discussing the workflow of Solana there are concepts you should aware of it like smart contracts and blockchain.

Smart Contracts

Smart contracts are nothing but a set of rules that are being created and everyone should follow the rules in smart contracts. Suppose it is a legal document that cannot be tempered or if someone tries to break the integrity of the smart contracts it is irreplaceable. If you want to make changes in the smart contract, you need to deploy it again because of its integrity feature.

In Solana smart contracts are stored as a BPF bytecode which can read and modify the Solana accounts data. In Solana technology smart contracts are referred to as programs can identify the smart contracts in Solana Explorer as program accounts. This way it is easy to deploy smart contracts on Solana

Each program will have a unique ID to identify and each program will have a unique owner who can modify the program code.

Blockchain

Blockchain is a worldwide computer or it’s a peer-to-peer network of nodes that all talk to one another. Consider it like a web server in the sense that each of the nodes on the network is a computer but each node keeps a redundant copy of all the information and all the programs on the blockchain.

Create Smart Contracts

To create your Solana decentralized application you need to first create some smart contracts but in the Solana case, you need to use any of the following ones. Essentially Solana does support languages like C, and C++ but the most preferable is Rust.

• Rust– It is a programming language and is used to make smart contracts on the Solana environment
• Anchor– It is a framework that is similar to hardhat and truffle, it’s also going to be in rust language but the patterns are going to be pretty much the same.
• Metaplex– If you want to build an NFT collection, you can use metaplex.

Backend Connection

Solana provides the indexing of multiple things that can help to collect specific information from them

• SOL Balance – Fetch the balance of an address
• SPL Token – Bill token or NFT balance of an address
• NFT Metadata – Getting NFT metadata from a certain NFT that you want to index.

It is really important to make while deploying smart contracts on Solana, a user-friendly applications that require a knowledge of Frontend Development too. This is usually integrated by writing using SDK or abstraction. The most typical one that you will use is the Solana web3.js library.

So currently for writing Solana programs and how to integrate it into the front-end, it’s not a really big deal for many developers there are tons of tutorials out there where it will give you a complete overview of the development cycle.

Conclusion

Learning Solana development requires knowledge of rust programming and some basic awareness of web3. Codedamn offers a great learning path in web3 development which provide you with a way to learn things in an interactive environment. Check this out! You can easily deploy smart contracts on Solana and make decentralized application after learning and practicing enough.