Solana And My First Smart Contract
I built my first smart contract on Solana!
When I started looking at fintech I knew sooner or later I would cross paths with DeFi and blockchain technology. And this happened last week.
Now I’m an engineer at heart so I had to look into the tech and build it. Mainly because I understand things better this way and I find it makes conversations with devs, tech etc easier.
Let me start off by saying I actually had fun with this even though I was using a command line interface (been a while since I did this) and I really appreciated the OG “hello world’’ as the introduction to Solana.
What is Solana?
Solana is a blockchain platform designed to host decentralised applications. It is an open source platform founded in 2017. Compared to other blockchain platforms, Solana is faster and has lower fees.
The cryptocurrency for the platform also named Solana and with the ticker symbol SOL has risen in value by multiples over 2021 and with a market capitalisation of over $66 billion, it is the fifth-largest cryptocurrency.
Some Pros Of The Solana Blockchain Platform
Ok let’s talk about some pros, here are the three things I like about the platform.
- Transactions costs are lower than other platforms
- Processing times are quick
- The user experience is really nice
I also dropped by their ecosystem, I saw projects from DeFi and nft marketplaces to Web3 apps (ecommerce will be an interesting one to watch) so lots happening there. Plus data analytics is being developed for the platform.
I don’t currently have any cons about the platform.
Building On The Solana Blockchain
You can create programs or smart contracts on Solana using Rust (I think C and C++ is mentioned online as well but I used Rust). If you are used to the higher level languages like python or javascript, you will find some differences as this is a lower level language but I think the general rules are pretty similar across programming languages.
A good place to start learning about how to build on the Solana blockchain is here. This gives a great overview of the different components of the system like the anchor framework.
Quick side note, anchor is a framework for quickly building secure Solana programs. It writes various boilerplate for you such as (de)serialization of accounts and instruction data and handles certain security checks for you. Basically you can be up and running quicker and spend more time building your product. See more information on anchor here.
Also I just discovered Solana now has a dev course for people just getting started on web3. Click here to check it out! It looks really good so I will be scheduling some time to look through it and give my review in a couple of weeks.
Ok I shall stop here for now and head back into the world of web2.
