Peter Keay | Beyond Anchor—Tools & Techniques for Making Solana Programs Safer, Cheaper, Faster

Peter Keay, formerly of Anza (the team that maintains Solana’s core infrastructure, previously known as Solana Labs), breaks down the tools and techniques that make Solana programs dramatically faster, cheaper, and more efficient, and why your AI agent probably won’t use any of them by default.

His talk covers Pinocchio, a zero-copy, zero-dependency library that’s already powering an upcoming upgrade to Solana’s token program, which is expected to reduce network traffic by 10% on its own. He also covers practical performance tips on compute units, data structure layout, avoiding unnecessary copies, batching CPIs, and optimizing for the happy path, as well as the testing and client-generation tools that replace the aging parts of the Anchor ecosystem.

Whether you’re writing Solana programs yourself or directing an agent to do it, this talk gives you what you need to go from slow-by-default to production-grade.