Upgrading smart-contracts on Solana
Why is Solana so different from Ethereum? By far the biggest reason the development experience between Solana and Ethereum is so different is due to their account model designs. Before we dig into those, it’s helpful to understand why Solana’s account model was designed so differently from Ethereum. Unlike Ethereum, which is designed to run on consumer grade hardware, Solana was designed to optimize transaction throughput on high-end multi-core machines. The Solana team noticed a trend that the number of cores in computers is growing exponentially. In order to take advantage of all these cores and future-proof the protocol, the Solana team designed transactions to be easily parallelized with each other. Account model design So what is actually meant by the “account model” of a blockchain? Well, when an on-chain program is called on a blockchain like Solana or Ethereum, the smart contract needs a way to track certain state like token balances, who owns an NFT, or who the curre...