Solana is a high-performing public blockchain designed to support the development of scalable and user-friendly dApp. Anatoly Yakavenko proposed the Solana project to introduce the world to another blockchain with smart contract functionality like Ethereum. However, Solana provides stand out due to its ability to offer faster transaction time and lower transaction cost. But you should always learn about Solana tax reporting before you fall into a crypto tax trap.
This blockchain achieves consensus using “proof-of-stake” and “proof-of-history” algorithms, improving the decentralization and security aspects of the protocol. Developers worldwide leverage the unique ecosystem of Solana to build their specific dApps. With that, smart contract development continues to grow in demand. Through this post, we will discuss the step-by-step method of how to build smart contracts on Solana and further deployment.
Why should you choose Solana for smart contract development?
Solana is ideal for smart contracts as its model differs from most EVM-enabled blockchains. Instead of combining code/logic into a single contract and deploying the contract on-chain, Solana prefers to keep smart contracts in stateless mode, commonly known as read-only mode. Once you deploy the smart contracts, the external account can access these contracts, and these accounts interact with the program to store and manage interaction-related data.
The ecosystem of Solana currently regulates more than thousands of projects spanning NFTs, DeFi, Web3, Crypto, and more. Enterprises seek to leverage Solana’s unique decentralized technology and the scalability benefits to ensure robustness in their project without compromising security. Solana supports diverse dApps and project-specific dApps to regulate these dApps.
How to build your smart contract on Solana?
This section explains the process of smart contract development and deployment on the SOLANA Blockchain. Before starting the development, we first need to set up the Solana environment.
Setting up Solana development environment
Running the smart contract in windows is often confusing. Therefore, it’s recommended to set up a Ubuntu version of the Window subsystem for Linux (WSL). It allows you to write code in Windows conveniently and later compile the smart contract into a .so file. Following are steps to set up the Solana development environment.
- Run the command for setting up the Solana environment.
- Test the command to ensure the reliability of codes
Now that you have successfully set up the development environment let’s begin the development of the smart contract on Solana-
Write Solana smart contract in Rust.
To write your project-specific smart contract in the Rust programming language. For that, you need the following Prerequisites:
- NodJS v14 or greater and NPM
- Solana CLI v1.7.11 or later
- The latest stable Rust build
- Git
Deploy the smart contract
You can test the robustness of your smart contract by deploying it on the testnet to test the codes and ensure that the features are working as expected. Once testing is done, switch to the Devnet and proceed to deployment. This way, you can deploy the smart contract to Solana Devnet along with an assigned program Id.
Conclusion
Solana continues to grow as a high-speed, scalable, and low-cost ecosystem, with more industries backing blockchain to automate their business processes. Witnessing such overwhelming response, Solana empowers the developer community by offering them a collection of core learning resources, a variety of developers tools, SDKs, and technical documentation, facilitating better smart contract development experiences.
