Descriptions:
This weekly Solana developer changelog covers significant updates across three key ecosystem tools — Surfpool, Yellowstone, and the Helius SDK — alongside important upcoming changes to the Solana core toolchain and two newly accepted Solana Improvement Documents (SIMDs).
Surfpool V1 is the headline release, introducing persistent simulation environments that let developers maintain long-running local mainnet state, native out-of-the-box support for major DeFi protocols including Jupiter, Radium, Drift, Meteora, and Switchboard, and improved account snapshot loading via websockets. Previously, developers testing against DeFi protocols had to manually clone and deploy each protocol’s state to a local validator; native protocol support eliminates that friction entirely. Yellowstone, a Geyser plugin for real-time blockchain data streaming over gRPC, has been updated for compatibility with Solana SDK 3.1, with all three packages — gRPC client, Geyser, and Proto — bumped to version 11. The Helius TypeScript/JavaScript SDK adds token account support for the `getTokenAccountsByFungibleTokenAmount` call and expands the data retrievable in a single query.
On the Solana core roadmap, the hosts discuss the planned removal of the internal Rust toolchain fork, which will require on-chain programs to be built with `no_std` once BPF linker improvements land — targeting the Solana 4.1 release, tentatively around July 2026. Two accepted SIMDs are reviewed in detail: EVPF ISA compatibility, which ensures consistent BPF program execution across all Solana client implementations, and an incremental rent reduction schedule that will bring storage costs down from 6,900 lamports per byte to a final target of 696 lamports per byte in staged decrements.
📺 Source: bri · Published January 29, 2026
🏷️ Format: Roundup
