What Solana Devs Can Look Forward to in 2024

If 2023 was the year of building foundations, 2024 could be the year of Solana.

At least that’s what a series of reports that have come out over the last few months have said. And despite a worldwide industry downturn, developers have stuck around the Solana ecosystem throughout 2023 and stayed busy building. Now, businesses and users are starting to take notice.

There are currently 2,500+ developers in the Solana ecosystem, according to the Solana Foundation’s open source service measuring developer activity.
The same report found that of those 2,500+ devs, 52.5% are more senior developers with more than three years of experience.
According to Messari’s State of Solana report, there was an average of 40.7m daily user transactions in Q4 2023, with a high of 405k daily unique fee payers.
An external deep dive from Visa found that “low and predictable costs helped drive payments efficiencies.”
Developers from across the ecosystem and beyond have been working hard at building the foundations for the next generation of blockchain projects. The infrastructure is here, and devs have a lot to get excited about when it comes to new tooling.

Here’s just some of the things that developers can look forward to in the coming year.

Token extensions
The long wait is almost over! In early 2024, token extensions will bring new features to make token creation on Solana more flexible.

Token extensions, which were built in collaboration with large institutions, bring functionality to the token program level, without having to use any third-party programs. This makes it much easier to build an open and customizable token program while maintaining compatibility. Some early token extensions you can look forward to:

Confidential transfers: Enable confidential token transfers on transparent blockchains, with opt-in confidentiality and optional auditability.
Transfer hooks: Invoke custom programs to control token transfers.
Metadata pointer: Designate canonical sources of truth for token metadata, which could allow for authoritative verification of genuine metadata
Combined with future runtime upgrades, the Solana ecosystem is building an open and customizable token platform. Find more information in the documentation here.