SevenLabs

SevenLabs is a Solana-focused development agency founded in 2023 and operating out of Dubai. The studio works exclusively within the Solana ecosystem, delivering production-grade infrastructure across four core disciplines: smart contract development, custom on-chain indexing, high-performance Rust backends, and node and RPC infrastructure. With 15 clients served, SevenLabs has established itself as one of the more technically deep specialist shops building on Solana, counting the Solana Foundation itself among its clients alongside projects including Ergonia, Bags, Eco, Caldera, Glyde, Hype, Lightcone, and Clicker.

Four Disciplines, One Chain

SevenLabs' deliberate decision to build exclusively on Solana shapes how it approaches every engagement. Rather than maintaining generic web3 tooling across multiple chains, the team has accumulated deep familiarity with Solana's account model, transaction processing, and low-level runtime behavior. That focus shows up most visibly in the agency's four service lines.

Smart contract development at SevenLabs concentrates on programs that are optimized for both computation efficiency and security — the combination that matters most on a network where every compute unit and instruction constraint is a potential bottleneck or exploit surface.

Custom indexing reflects one of Solana's most persistent infrastructure challenges: getting reliable, structured, real-time data out of the chain. Raw RPC access is often inadequate for applications that need historical state, cross-program event correlation, or sub-second latency on account updates. SevenLabs builds custom indexing infrastructure for exactly this problem, which directly informed the creation of Carbon.

Rust backends round out the server-side picture. Solana applications often need high-throughput APIs that can keep pace with the chain's transaction velocity, and SevenLabs builds those backends in Rust to match the performance profile of the programs they're indexing.

Node and RPC infrastructure completes the stack with systems optimized for transaction sending and chain data access — the layer that underpins everything else.

Carbon: Open-Source Indexing for the Ecosystem

The most significant artifact SevenLabs has released publicly is Carbon, an open-source Rust framework for building Solana indexers and data pipelines. Carbon emerged from the agency's own indexing work and has become a meaningful piece of Solana's developer infrastructure.

The framework is built around a three-stage pipeline. Datasources stream Solana updates into the runtime — from Geyser plugins for low-latency event delivery, to standard RPC connections, to provider APIs like Helius. Decoders transform raw account data and transaction instructions into typed Rust structures. Processors consume those typed structures to power whatever application logic sits downstream — database writes, API updates, alerting, analytics.

The pipeline design is modular by intention. Developers can mix and match datasources (combining real-time Geyser streams with historical snapshot data, for instance), swap in different decoders as programs upgrade, and wire processors together into composite pipelines. This composability reduces the amount of custom glue code a Solana indexer project typically requires.

carbon-cli and IDL-Driven Decoder Generation

One of Carbon's most practically useful features is its CLI tool for generating decoders directly from IDL files. Using a single command against an Anchor or Codama IDL, developers get a complete, typed decoder crate ready to plug into a Carbon pipeline:

npx @sevenlabs-hq/carbon-cli parse --idl ./idl.json --out-dir ./my-program-decoder --name my-program

The CLI also supports fetching on-chain PDA IDLs by program address, which means developers can generate decoders for any verified program without having to locate the IDL file manually. The generated crates include optional Postgres integration: enabling a feature flag adds pre-built Postgres processors and auto-generated database migrations, so a complete indexing solution for a given program can be up and running in a few lines of code.

Official Decoders and Ecosystem Coverage

Alongside the framework itself, SevenLabs maintains a library of pre-built decoders for widely used Solana programs across core SPL programs, DeFi protocols, NFT infrastructure, and more. These official decoders mean developers working with common programs don't need to generate their own — they can pull a maintained, tested crate and wire it into their pipeline directly. The library also demonstrates Carbon's breadth: the framework handles not just simple token programs but complex, frequently upgraded DeFi programs where decoder versioning matters.

Traction and Adoption

Carbon has attracted significant adoption across Solana's developer community. As of September 2026, the repository holds 615 GitHub stars and 193 forks, with 1,440 commits on the main branch and a most-recent commit on September 2, 2026 — reflecting consistent, active maintenance rather than a project that shipped and stalled. The framework has surpassed 100,000 downloads, and its reach extends beyond the GitHub community: Carbon is referenced in official Solana documentation, placing it among a small number of community-built tools that the Foundation has formally recognized as part of the ecosystem's developer stack.

SevenLabs presented Carbon on the Developer Stage at SolanaConf, where they previewed V1's architecture and a reported 5x performance improvement for historical backfills. V1 brought stable API semantics and proper semantic versioning — addressing one of the earlier pain points of building against a rapidly evolving pre-release library. The V1 release also introduced a Postgres integration path significant enough that a developer can, in the team's own words, "in a few lines of code index all of your accounts and instructions inside Postgres."

The roadmap beyond V1 includes Clickhouse and Kafka processors, expanding the set of storage and streaming backends Carbon pipelines can target, along with further optimized decoders for SPL programs and versioned decoder support to handle program upgrades more gracefully.

Solana-Exclusive by Design

SevenLabs' chain-specific focus is a deliberate positioning choice rather than an accident of origin. By staying on Solana, the team maintains deep familiarity with the chain's actual behavior — not abstracted away behind multichain compatibility layers — which shows up in both the quality of client work and the design decisions in Carbon. The framework's datasource options, for instance, map directly onto the ways Solana actually delivers data (Geyser, RPC, snapshot), rather than onto a generic blockchain data model that fits every chain equally poorly.

With 15 clients served, an open-source framework with more than 100,000 downloads and ecosystem-level recognition, and continued active development across both their client work and Carbon, SevenLabs occupies a distinct and useful position in Solana's builder landscape: a studio that understands the chain deeply enough to build the tools others rely on.