Solana Changelog: Web3.js v3.1 Ships, CU Limits Up for Debate After 200ms Slots, Alpenglow Prep Continues
This week's Solana engineering roundup: Web3.js v3.1 tightens interop across the dev stack, new Agave and Firedancer releases land, and SIMD discussions turn to compute limits and consensus after Alpenglow.
The weekly Solana Developers changelog is out. The headline is a new Web3.js release, while client teams, the SIMD process and tooling maintainers keep preparing the network for shorter slots and Alpenglow consensus.
Announcement: Web3.js v3.1
Solana Web3.js v3.1 is out, with tighter interoperability across Solana Kit, Wallet Adapter, Surfpool, Anchor, Codama and the SPL interfaces. Developers are encouraged to upgrade with npm install @solana/web3.js@3. A follow-up change will have Web3.js use a Solana Kit client to handle connections.
Releases
- Agave: v4.5.0-alpha.2, v4.4.0-beta.1, v4.3.1
- Firedancer: v26.10.2 (mainnet), v26.10.1 (testnet)
- RPC: Superbank v0.8.0, Shipstern v0.12.0
- Clients and SDKs: Solana Kit v8.5.0, Solana Go v0.1.11, Program Metadata JS SDK v0.10.1, ZK ElGamal Proof Rust SDK v8.1.0 and WASM JS SDK v0.5.4
- Testing: LiteSVM v0.18.0, Mollusk 0.16.2, Surfpool v1.6.1
SIMDs and Proposals
- CU limits after 200ms slots: a proposal to raise compute-unit limits back to their previous levels now that slot times have been reduced to 200ms.
- Post-Alpenglow consensus: improvements that include preparing for minCP, a multiple-proposers algorithm.
- Secp256r1 syscall costs: proposed compute-unit costs for the Secp256r1 syscalls.
Validator Clients
- Agave is building its own events system as an alternative to Geyser, is exploring an in-protocol transaction execution time limit, and is cutting sigverify shred batches from 1024 to 128.
- Firedancer improved memory use in its Votor implementation.
RPC, Clients and Frameworks
- Shipstern will read Alpenglow vote certificates from block footers.
- Solana Go (FluxRPC) is adding a
getMultipleAccountsImmutablemethod with a caching layer. - Anchor's AVM CLI will use the latest locally installed cargo-build-sbf, so Anchor programs compile to sBPFv3. The team is also exploring sbpf-linker and upstream BPF compilers.
- Surfpool will let users snapshot account state inside its scenarios feature.
Around the Ecosystem
- Solana Mobile named Ledger its first hardware expansion partner.
- Anza announced the Alpenglow mainnet launch date.
- Raiku released a sidecar validator service.
- Builders showed post-quantum signing with Falcon-512, a pull-payments primitive, and a Pinocchio counter program built with the upstream BPF compiler.
- Triton One published an interactive guide to Superbank.
- The Durable Nonce deprecation announcement is live. Teams that rely on durable nonces should read it.
- Helius is hiring a developer advocate for its data platform.
What This Means
Most of this week's work points at the same goal: getting the stack ready for faster slots and Alpenglow. The CU-limit discussion, minCP prep, Shipstern parsing Alpenglow vote certificates and Agave's smaller shred batches all fit that picture. For app developers, the practical news is Web3.js v3.1 and its move onto a Solana Kit connection client, Anchor's switch to sBPFv3 builds, and the Durable Nonce deprecation, which may require code changes.