Interacting with Solana via Python

Submission to Solana Scribes

Introduction

Developing on the Solana blockchain offers a unique and rewarding experience for developers. Solana is a high-performance blockchain that is designed from the ground up for speed and scalability. It boasts a high throughput and low transaction costs, making it an attractive platform for developers looking to build decentralized applications. These dApps can range from DeFi platforms to NFT marketplaces, all requiring high performance and scalability that Solana provides.

The primary language for smart contract development on Solana is Rust. Rust is a modern system programming language known for its safety, speed, and concurrency. It allows developers to write high-performance applications without the risk of null pointer dereferencing, double free, or data races. Developers can also use C/C++ for on-chain programs, providing more flexibility in choosing a language that they are comfortable with.

For interacting with the blockchain and Solana programs, JavaScript or TypeScript is commonly used via the solana-web3.js SDK. This SDK provides a familiar and intuitive interface for developers, making it feel like interacting with any other API. It provides functions for key pair generation, transaction signing, and sending, making it easier for developers to focus on their dApp logic rather than the intricacies of blockchain interaction.

Now, let’s talk about Python. Python has seen a significant growth in popularity over the past decade. According to the 2022 Octoverse report, Python remains the second most-used programming language on GitHub, with its use growing more than 22 percent year over year. With the rise of artificial intelligence, its growth shows no signs of stopping. This growth is attributed to Python’s simplicity, readability, and versatility, making it a popular choice among developers across various skill levels and industries. It is also ubiquitous in data analysis and machine learning, making it a desirable choice for developers who want to analyze blockchain data and interact with the blockchain with data-driven decisions. Python’s extensive standard library and numerous third-party libraries make it a versatile tool for data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) tasks.

While it’s true that Python is often criticized for its slower runtime compared to languages like C++ or Java, it’s important to note that in the context of interacting with the blockchain, the bottlenecks of speed are typically not due to the programming language itself. Instead, they are more often related to network-based factors such as the speed at which validators pick up the transaction or the delay in the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) service. These factors are independent of the language used to write the code. Therefore, the slower runtime of Python becomes negligible in this context.

Tools

This post will dive into the tools and repositories available for the Python developer to interact with the Solana blockchain. Although there are many tools available, I will cover the most important ones in my opinion.

Solders

The Solders repository is a high-performance Python toolkit for the Solana blockchain, written in Rust. It provides robust solutions to several problems including core SDK functionalities like keypairs, pubkeys, signing and serializing transactions, and building requests and parsing responses for RPC.

This repository provides the basic blocks needed for interacting with the Solana blockchain. By abstracting away the complexities of how keypairs work, how they are used to sign transactions, and how transactions are serialized before being submitted to the blockchain, developers don’t have to worry about cryptographic and data serialization techniques. Instead, they can focus on the logic of their applications.

The Solders repository is also extremely useful for parsing RPC responses. RPC methods are a set of protocols that provide a way for developers to interact with the Solana blockchain. They allow developers to send requests and receive responses from the Solana network, enabling them to query the state of the blockchain, submit transactions, and more.

Solana.py

The Solana.py repository is a Python SDK for the Solana blockchain, and can be seen as the Python counterpart of the solana-web3.js SDK. This SDK is built on top of Solders to introduce networking functionalities and provide a more user-friendly way of interacting with the blockchain. It also covers the SPL Token Program, which is essential for working with token contracts on Solana. Therefore, this repository would probably be the most useful for getting started with Python.

The repository also provides a quickstart guide for installation and general usage, along with examples of using both the synchronous and asynchronous API clients. Users can directly call built-in methods of the API client to send RPC requests, abstracting away the complexities of serializing parameters and parsing responses.

The repository even includes a guide on using the websockets client for subscribing to and receiving updates from the Solana network. Websockets provide a persistent, two-way communication channel between the client and the server, allowing real-time data exchange, which is particularly useful for live updates and real-time applications. Moreover, subscribing to websockets can have lower data transfer latency and uses fewer RPC service credits than periodically sending RPC requests.

AnchorPy

Anchor, written in Rust, is a framework for Solana’s Sealevel runtime that provides a range of developer tools for writing smart contracts (called programs on Solana). It is designed to simplify the process of building secure programs on Solana. With Anchor, developers can quickly build programs as it handles various boilerplate tasks such as (de)serialization of accounts and instruction data. Since a large portion of Solana programs use Anchor, AnchorPy is invaluable in serving as a gateway for Python developers to interact with Anchor programs.

AnchorPy can generate Python clients based on Anchor IDL (Interface Definition Language), enabling developers to interact with on-chain programs in a type-safe manner. Importantly AnchorPy, allows Python developers to use the IDL to create instructions that can interact with programs on the Solana blockchain. When used in conjunction with Solana.py to send the instructions in transactions, these Python tools allow users to interact with Solana programs in a very clean way.

Conclusion

Although Python is not mainstream when it comes to interacting with the Solana blockchain and its programs, there are a number of tools available that provide the basic infrastructure for Python to be effective. Currently, the main use cases are likely related to data processing and analysis, such as fetching blockchain data and visualizing data in dashboards. However, with the rise of artificial intelligence, where Python is the dominant language, one can imagine a world where Python is not only used to fetch data for analysis, but also to make data-driven decisions and to submit these decisions to the chain in the form of program instructions.