nick | helius.dev
@nick_pennie
Followers
5K
Following
5K
Media
176
Statuses
1K
co-founder & chief compression officer @heliuslabs – powering solano summer, ex: @awscloud
Canada
Joined November 2019
bank just rejected my mortgage (after already approving) because. I work in crypto?. truly impressed with this level of brain damage – even the down payment funds are in fiat . thanks @scotiabank, can't wait to provide RPCs to the next-gen banks that put you out of business.
324
175
4K
AirShip is now live on mainnet! . The easiest, fastest, and cheapest way to mass airdrop tokens. Distribute tokens to:.1. Solana mobile holders.2. NFT collections.3. Token holders.4. CSV of addresses. Powered by ZK Compression. PS – We also offer a CLI for the devs out there!
72
153
737
12
34
591
Life in a start-up:. me: never touched dns in my life.*makes one dns change*.co-workers: hey dns guy, can you set this up?.
14
13
153
Why are we still storing off-chain data for NFTs when we have compression tech?. Traits are valuable for more than just rarity. Think of the use cases for DePIN, tickets, accreditations, etc. They should be securely managed on the ledger. Otherwise why use a blockchain?.
29
11
145
Token extensions are taking over Solana. Token22 "native" NFTs are tokens with metadata extensions, decimals set to zero, and their supply fixed at 1. No metadata program is required. Today, @heliuslabs is introducing ownership and off-chain indexing support for T22-native
18
19
130
Dear @solanalabs and @aeyakovenko,. Please stop making Solana so fast. There's too much data. Thank you for your consideration. Sincerely,.The people working on indexers.
6
3
127
How does SPL-20 work under-the-hood? Here's a "quick" crash course. An inscription is a PDA associated with an NFT. It's similar to the token metadata account, except it stores arbitrary binary data in an array. Due to transaction size limits, the array might need to be
18
21
116
Took a break from @SolanaConf to check out the @heliuslabs RPC nodes. Thanks @Teraswitch for showing me around! The work that goes into data centers and server management is absolutely incredible.
10
14
122
At Breakpoint @aeyakovenko asked me how long it would take to insert 100M cNFTs into Postgres. Well, today I got bored and did the math. Indexing a single cNFT mint consumes ~220ms of CPU time. Given that Postgres inserts serially (by default), it would take ~6 hours to insert.
7
14
115
Last night at @heliuslabs we released the Fungible Token Extension for the DAS API. SPL, Token22, compressed NFT, you name it – it's there. It's not surprising that this was a significant engineering effort. Let's dive into the data 🧵.
7
18
108
record breaking post-breakpoint energy this year. @heliuslabs will move faster than ever. anything less than 10x improvements in Solana dev ex by next breakpoint will be considered failure. accelerate.
7
10
97
honestly I'm shocked how easy it is to use zk compression – the implementation details are completely abstracted away from the user. first time using the sdk and in 15min I had a full example working in devnet. if you don't believe me, try it for yourself:
9
22
108
As Solana/firedancer scales, it will become increasingly difficult to serve historical (archival) data. From the existing Solana API, getSignaturesByAddress is by far the hardest to support. Thinking out loud: . We could significantly offset the difficulty by leveraging a similar.
14
10
90
This is big. The most frequently requested compressed NFT feature is finally live: Updatable Metadata. Yep, you can now fix your typos or remove your cofounder from the creator's array (and hoard those juicy royalties). Choice is yours! . Come and try to break the Helius
15
14
96
confession: between the mascots and girls on jetskis I always thought @berachain was more of a marketing company than an L1. but I must admit, their proof of liquidity is promising, docs are solid, and testnet launched this year.
12
2
96
@weremeow @buffalu__ @0xEdgar @Austin_Federa @0xMert_ @liamvovk @apfitzge @brianlong @linuskendall @SimkinStepan ready for take off
1
5
91
CT is complaining solana is centralized. meanwhile I'm chasing down dozens of validators to debug their firewall rules and networking to improve transaction confirmation times. max pain.
7
7
98
landing rates and slot latencies holding steady despite the barrage on the network. we've come a long way in the past year. check it out for yourself at
me looking at the QUIC threads in agave being mostly idle while ingesting 200k TPS
7
17
99
Super excited about this one. Bull case: An interoperable ecosystem is built for compressed tokens and you got airdropped directly into it. Bear case: You claim the airdrop by decompressing the token. Big improvement over existing claim experiences. No reason not to use it.
11/ We’re excited to announce Airship by @heliuslabs, a ZK-compression tool that makes airdrops 4,000x cheaper. Airdrops to the Solana Mobile preorder community that once cost $40k now cost as little as $100—and they can auto-allocate to Chapter 2 Preorder Token holders 😉
5
17
75
I've been following @FamousFoxFed ever since I got into the Solano NFT space – huge fan of projects with strong developer ethos. Stoked to finally pick one up myself!. Let's go builders 🫡🟠
14
10
85
I put off learning SQL (beyond the basics) for too long because I mostly used NoSQL DBs and thought "SQL doesn't scale". If you're a dev, don't be me. Learn SQL. You won't regret it.
21
7
88
Solana's ecosystem is so much more exciting right now than during last year's boom. Way less noise and a lot more potential:. * Firedancer.* Nft compression.* Typed bytecode.* Startups like @saydialect, @helium, @xNFT_Backpack, etc. If that doesn't get you excited, idk what will.
7
15
89
solana core devs (@0x_febo) have been playing CU golf so you don't have to. in other words: it's now easier than ever to write efficient, low-cost programs. also shout out to @cavemanloverboy for ranting about zero-copy since the beginning of time.
0
16
86
i'm back and i'm talking about compression (again). is zk compression a validium? is it a rollup? no one actually knows. instead, i'll talk about how it works and why it matters . (hint: cheaper, composable accounts & non-inclusion proofs)
8
9
83
Trying to parse the entire solana blockchain is absolutely insane but we're gonna do it anyways.
8
4
84
Part of me doesn't want the price of SOL to go up. The bear market might have been the best thing that happened to Solana. The tourists left and the dedicated teams kept on building. We still have a long way to go.
13
7
80
By popular demand, Helius ping test and transaction landing metrics are now public at . We measure slot latency between ourselves, Triton, and Quicknode. Our method is documented on the dashboard (including the code). You'll notice all RPCs follow the
11
10
78
We've heavily optimized our system at @heliuslabs in the past week, and we're going to continue doing so. A primer on maximizing your landing rates (and minimizing confirmation times):. 1. Use a paid plan (any tier works).2. Set the *total* priority fee to 10k lamports or higher.
13
10
78
name a better feeling than finally untangling a gigantic circular dependency
7
2
64
also:.- 2x senior/principal platform engineers.- 1x principal-level distributed database expert. requirements:
I'm hiring 4 sr. backend engineers for @heliuslabs . (15k prize for successful referrals). you get:. - to work on low-latency, high scale distributed systems, databases, bare metal, indexers, developer tools etc.- to shape the future of solana and hence all of crypto.- real.
6
5
67
compressed assets are akin to emails: cheap distribution & susceptible to spam. email spam was solved prior to modern LLMs. And now there's a huge opportunity to solve compression spam. DM me if you're working on this – I will help with intros, advice, & funding.
Feedback on compressed tokens and nfts is consistently negative. My sense is that it doesn't really work without really good spam filtering. Should we just hide all compressed assets by default and require and advanced setting to turn them on?.
7
9
67
when you're 14+ straight days in the coding dungeon improving transaction landing. and then realize people are out partying mid-week in NYC and mining ore. I chose the wrong profession
3
0
63
Been a while, here's an update on the state of DAS:. DB size: 4.1 TB.DB rows: 4.23 billion.DB write throughput: ~25k QPS (avg). Up about 3x since a year ago.
8
5
61
Landing rates remained at (effectively) 100% for well-priced txns, throughout the PENGU airdrop. Validator delivery rates remained above 90% across the network. The supermajority remained above 98%, despite transaction spam increasing by up to 34x. TLDR – Fee markets & the
8
10
60
To whoever is complaining about the use of the "zk" in zk compression (because the zkp is only used to reduce the Merkle proof size). it's a dumb thing to complain about, but regardless:. 1. Zk compression allows you to write your own circuits (for advanced users). 2. It lays the.
7
5
57
Helius' compressed NFT audit table has exceeded 1.1B rows 🤯.
7
5
59
solana priority fees hitting ATH right now. by a 10x margin. insane
4
2
60
Over the past few months, @heliuslabs has shipped multiple new endpoints, quality-of-life improvements, and bug-fixes for the DAS API. Here are some of the highlights! 🧵
7
13
59
come learn about ZK Compression at our @mtndao workshop!. fun fact: the @heliuslabs x @LightProtocol zk compression collaboration begun at mtndao v5, last winter. @swen_sjn, @ananas_light and I locked ourselves in a room and debated until we agreed on today's design
8
12
54
Get started at today!. Prefer a CLI? Check out for download instructions.
4
4
54
PSA for compression enjoooyers:. cNFT updatable metadata is coming!. Indexer support is now live on @heliuslabs devnet and mainnet. We're ready. Are you?.
9
9
53
In today's edition of solana drama: MagicEden "exploit" allows "attacker" to sell fake high-value NFTs. But what happened? And how can you tell if an NFT is fake? 🧵👇
8
10
52
New @heliuslabs NFT API releases tomorrow 👀. Countless hours of work. 250M+ records indexed. 100TB+ of data processed. Proud of this one. Let's go.
4
8
52
14 coffees & permanent retina burn, but we got it done. As always, give us a shout on discord or DM me directly if you have any issues. Feedback/suggestions very much appreciated!.
Announcing: Inscription & SPL-20 support for DAS API. Save yourself the hassle of writing your own parsers and source-diving the new programs. You can now see inscription & SPL-20 data directly from the DAS API!
2
5
46
there's a zk boom brewing on Solana and I am so here for it.
8
3
53
@empirikal @scotiabank They researched Helius because I'm a founder and drew their own conclusions lmao.
3
0
54
confession: i get charged ~75 cents/month on my AWS personal account because i can't figure out what un-killable resource is still running.
7
1
52
It's been less than 48h since launch and we've shipped three (!) feature requests from our customers. @heliuslabs now supports native balances for both getAssetsByOwner and searchAssets. Get everything, all one in place. Happy Thanksgiving!
5
8
49
and so it begins
RPC providers seeing devs filling up SOL global state with monke pictures
7
3
49
Excited to announce that I'll be speaking at @SolanaConf this year!. I'll be giving a behind-the-scenes look into what we do at @heliuslabs to run NFT compression in production, at scale. Come chat!
4
10
49
Come watch me crash and burn in front of a live audience tomorrow morning. I might talk a bit about scaling NFT compression indexing while I'm at it, too!
2
7
45
the truth is that none of it would have mattered without distribution and reach. thankfully Mert does it on our behalf. as an engineer, I want to believe that your work speaks for itself – but it simply doesn't. so my advice to technical founders (and engineers): don't ignore it.
Everyone falsely credits me for helping Solana during the dark days. This is not correct. Who you really need to thank (and follow) are my co-founders @liamvovk and @nick_pennie who make more than half of the eco infra run and work 18 hours a day for over 2 years.
0
3
43
Interesting, priority fees have steadily been going up this week and reached new highs:. P50: 20-50k.P75: 200-335k. Compared to around 10k and 80k (respectively) a week ago. PSA: Do not hardcode your priority fees. Use a fee estimator. It's dead simple with the @heliuslabs
7
4
43
4
1
42
@fusionatra @scotiabank Yeah I did, thankfully they dealt with it. But we almost missed conditions because of it.
2
0
43
People are starting to catch on, don't get left behind 😉. Friendly reminder that @heliuslabs has 100% compression support and more: .- Compression APIs (digital asset standard).- RPCs for minting.- Parsed Bubblegum transactions (NFT compression program).
4
5
41
Releasing something for the NFT art developers on @heliuslabs tomorrow. I'll give you a hint:. To achieve this today, you need to:.- compute and lookup a PDA.- call gPA on the token program(s) to find N accounts.- query txn history and find the first txn for each of these N.
3
3
40
Human-readable support for cNFT metadata (updates) is now live at @heliuslabs and XRAY explorer! 🧵.
2
7
36
Running backfill jobs for the new @heliuslabs nft api and absolutely destroying our infra:. ~40,000 nft events / s.~700 slots / s. The best part is that future backfills will be ~20 times faster due to our caching layer. Who's ready for fast apis? ⚡️
9
6
40
bittersweet feeling tearing down infra for a large feature I built almost a year ago. feels odd destroying something that consumed so much time, but it also feels fantastic to improve pmf and reduce scope/tech-debt. startups are weird.
3
0
41
@hmalviya9 Can't tell if this is @0xMert_ bait or not. "Solana's design cannot predict future issues".Yes, Solana is not the Oracle of Delphi. And?. Network halts happen by design to avoid forking. It can happen to any chain, but what's more important is how Solana (and the community).
2
1
36
DAS enjoyers, today is the day: getSignaturesForAsset was finally merged. As a bonus, we also reduced the storage reqs for Merkle tree history from ~800GB to only 46GB. If you aren't already using @heliuslabs, ask your RPC provider to pull in the latest code.
8
8
38
0
1
36
Day 1 of Breakpoint and CloudFlare goes down. Never leaving the coding dungeon again.
3
3
34
Let's do something about it. Gonna cook something up at @heliuslabs after we're done turbocharging these RPCs 🚀.
3
0
35
i didn't have "surprise feature gate activation forking my devnet DAS geyser nodes" on my rpc provider bingo card today. but hey, here we are
4
3
34
always been a fan of the @tensor_hq team – ship it!. also, damn that was a buttery smooth mint, wonder who handles their infra 🤔
1
4
33
Getting the balances of my fungible tokens in 118ms is absolutely insane. No request caching. Fantastic work by @niks3089, who implemented this new feature.
1
5
32
12h of coding in a day? No problem. 2h of Christmas shopping? Exhausted.
4
1
33
solana dapps are getting so fast, i can't imagine using another chain after UX like this.
gm. We're super excited to announce that Zeta v2 is now live!. We built a completely new UI from scratch & made a ton of backend improvements - including cross margin 🎉. And it's fast. Really really fast. Only possible on @solana
4
2
35
spam wars are coming to an end. transaction landing will improve. we're all gonna make it. (no, I will not explain).
2
1
34
if only we could have accounts, not pay rent, and use zkps for verifying state. oh wait.
5
2
35
When we launched Helius, no one else offered self-serve plans via crypto subscriptions. We quickly learned the reason: It's not easy. We ended up building an in-house house system, where customers would pre-pay and renew their plans. Thanks to @loopcrypto_xyz, you don't need.
Thrilled to announce @loopcrypto_xyz is live on @solana!. Couldn’t ask for a better launch partner than @heliuslabs. Shoutout to @integral_xyz_ @ChainEDGE_io @privy_io @lever_io @neynarxyz @DrakkarsOctoBot who joined our beta launch on Solana. Few thoughts on the launch 🧵
3
3
32
mfw when reading the debates in solana's network protocols discord
3
1
34
The Solana NFT market values hype over results. Friendly reminder that OG projects like @skeletoncrewrip have done nothing but deliver:. - Open-sourced airdrop tools 🪂.- Launched @TreatToolbox 🍬.- Launched ✋.- And more!. This should be the standard.
1
7
31
@aeyakovenko @0xMert_ @phantom @solflare_wallet It's a bit confusing to have cNFTs representing tokens imo (e.g. every token has a different mint reference). It would be better to compress token accounts instead and reduce the bloat. We could also allow the indexer to eject closed token accounts.
5
2
30
confession: I use the plain old solana explorer. I spent so much time reverse-engineering programs when building the @heliuslabs parsing apis that now it just feels natural, kind of ironic. i still recommend xray by default though.
3
1
32
if you're not on-call, .in a car, .in a parking garage surrounded by crackheads,.trying to debug why a geyser node fell behind.are you really a solana dev?.
3
1
31
Who else will be at @SolanaConf for the first time?. For those who have been before:.What events/talks are must-do's? What are you going to do differently this time?.
8
3
31
Full support on the @heliuslabs DAS cluster, along with 24/7 support on discord/telegram. No better way to spend your Friday night. (i will regret this tweet).
Bubblegum has been deployed to devnet with support for the Update Metadata instruction. Rust client 1.2.0, JS Solita 0.10.0, and JS Umi package 3.1.0 have all been published. See the developer hub to start updating metadata with Umi:.
8
5
30
The early days of @heliuslabs (pre funding) were pretty wild. It was a really cool experience. Felt like a hackathon on crack, except it went on for months. @liamvovk and I built the system in parallel, hardly talking – just shipping. No PR reviews.
7
2
29
QoL upgrade just shipped for @heliuslabs customer dashboards:. - Historical, network-wide priority fees (!!).- Transactions landed & not landed, grouped by connection type (regular/staked).- Transactions sent, grouped by priority fee.- Transactions sent, grouped by CU. Now its
8
7
29
Looking back, it's absolutely insane that getProgramAccounts (gPA) was the norm for fetching NFTs on Solana (before DAS). How come?.
4
3
28
My 2c on the cNFT indexing debate is that it's premature. Today, you can index a subset of cNFTs using DAS. We'll run the geyser plugin for you if you're interested. Otherwise, you can call Helius or Triton who index everything. Spamming cNFTs costs the writer more than it.
2
1
29
@brianlong Yes, absolutely would love to exchange endpoints!. Make a plan at and shoot me the project ID and I'll waive the 500 credits for our staked endpoint.
2
0
28
- learn rust because it was supposed to fix all my problems.- get memory leak.- question everything
2
1
29
My cold take: . Off-chain metadata should (almost) always be immutable. Mutations should happen via URI updates. Why?.- On-chain. - Verifiable and composable. - Easy to index.
11
1
30
"What happens when someone actually mints billions compressed NFTs?" is the most common FUD I see against (nft) compression. This is a valid point – The existing indexer cannot scale to serve billions of cNFTs. But this actually isn't a problem!. DAS (the main cNFT indexer.
6
4
23
@brianlong That's certainly a way to blow it out of proportion. A faux-pas on our part, sure. But obviously not malicious – just look at the data in your screenshot. Happy to remove you from the tool and stop using the endpoint, as I said privately. I reached out to the friend and will let.
4
1
29
Recently I've been seeing a lot of chain vs chain rhetoric, which is concerning because parallel streams of innovation is necessary for web3 to really take off. Bitcoin is good. Ethereum is good. Solana is good. Avalanche is good. Cardano. let's not talk about that.
2
4
25