What is Solana?

Introduction

Solana is an open source decentralised blockchain platform which is considered as a long-term rival for Ethereum and Bitcoin. It was founded by a software engineer named Anatoly Yakovenko in 2017 and is currently run by Geneva based Solana Foundation. It was developed in Solana Labs which is situated in San Francisco.

Solana was introduced to solve the problems that currently popular blockchains such as Ethereum and Bitcoin have – Low transaction speed and High transaction cost. Currently Solana can deploy transaction speed up to 50000 TPS (Transactions Per Second) around 10000 times faster than Bitcoin with transaction cost as low as $0.01 TPS.

Mechanism Of Working

As one of the most performing permissionless blockchain in the world Solana uses combination of Proof of History (PoH) and Proof of Stakes (PoS) as its consensus algorithm. Think of Proof of History (PoH) as an algorithm which can organise each and every event of our history books according to the time of occurring in history. Proof of Stake is a process where individuals stake cryptocurrencies for validating transactions.

Solana uses a high frequency Verifiable delay function, which provides a unique hash and count to each and every transaction that can be used to publicly and effectively verify particular event. The count allows us to know when each transaction or event occurred functioning like a cryptographic time – stamp. Within every node there is also a cryptographic clock that keep tracks of the networks time and the ordering of events.

PoH works on a simple formula: it assigns a given node, “leader position”, any given node with the leader position, has to generate the entire “proof of history” statement. After receiving the responsibility, the leader node of the blockchain network, arranges other nodes on the blockchain network to generate a proof of history statement.

The leader node also pushes the execution of the current transactions, it finally publishes the transactions in their final nodes with “verifiers”. Verifiers execute the same transactions again in order to “verify” them. Verifiers also create copies of the transactions, and publish the same.

Every Solana network has one leader. The verifier node is also smart in its performance and has the same capabilities like a leader node, later the verifier node can also be elected as a leader through “proof of stake” elections.

Advantages

   • Solana can process high throughput with very low transaction fees (less than $.01).

   • Solana has achieved high levels of scalability by leveraging the Proof of History and several other breakthrough innovations such as Sea-level , Gulf Stream etc .

   • With billions of users on board, Solana has achieved economies of scale and kept the application fees extremely low.

   • Solana ensures composability between projects. Users do not need to deal with multiple shards or layer-2 systems.

Disadvantages

   • Many implementations still await their launch on the Mainnet Beta version.

   • Satisfactory hardware setup for Solana is relatively costlier.

   • Solana has been criticized for not being decentralized enough.

Solana Cluster

A Solana cluster is a set of validators working together to serve client transactions and maintain the integrity of the ledger. Many clusters may coexist. When two clusters share a common genesis block, they attempt to converge. Otherwise, they simply ignore the existence of the other. Transactions sent to the wrong one is quietly rejected.

Some use cases of the technology is to track which computers did work that was meaningful in keeping the cluster running. Another may be to track the possession of real-world assets. One good thing about this is that as long as someone has a copy of the ledger, the output of its programs will always be able to be reproduced and will be independent of the organization that issued it.

SOL Token

The SOL token is the native currency in Solana’s ecosystem. So, the token can pass to nodes within the Solana cluster in exchange for running on-chain programs or validating its output. Another use for SOL, is to perform micropayments known as lamports. The current circulating supply of SOL is 26 million. The maximum supply of SOL caps at 489 million SOL. SOL also has additional use cases, you can stake the token to earn additional rewards. So Staking is a good way for users to earn profit if they are just looking to hold their tokens. The process of staking is quite simple, it is as follows:

   1. Transfer tokens to a wallet that supports staking

   2. Create a staking account

   3. Select a validator from Solana’s validators

   4. Delegate your stake to the validator

Solana Vs Other Cryptocurrency

The major difference that makes Solana stand out from the crowd is Solana’s ability to process transactions quickly, this one reason has hugely contributed to the success of Solana. When compared with other cryptocurrencies Solana stands tall with no competition in terms of its transaction speed and transaction confirmation time.

Bitcoin and Ethereum are the slowest blockchain networks and take 60 minutes (Bitcoin) 6 minutes (Ethereum) to add a new block to their existing networks. Their speed of making transactions is also quite slow. While bitcoin’s blockchain network can perform 4.6 transactions per second, Ethereum’s blockchain network can perform 13 transactions in a second.

Cardano and Litecoin also have slow processing speeds and can perform 257 transactions (Cardano) and 56 transactions (Litecoin) in a single second. Solana, the fastest blockchain network, can perform 50,000 transactions in a single second, its average transaction confirmation time is instantly that means Solana can quickly validate transactions and add blocks to its network.

The architecture of Solana allows up to 710,000 transaction per second on a 1-gigabit network without data partitioning. The network allows for maximum throughput and high availability. The Smart contracts bytecode based on Berkeley Packet Filter meets the need for fast execution. Solana’s fast streaming proof of replication enables the storage of a large distributed ledger. The transaction flow is consensus-agnostic and is limited only by hardware.

Where to Buy SOL Tokens?

Some of the popular crypto exchange where you can buy SOL Tokens are:

   • Coinbase

   • Crypto.com

   • Gemini

   • Kraken

   • Binance

   • KuCoin

Solana Partners

Solana (SOL) has quite a few partners in the crypto industry; many are the best and brightest in the crypto industry. These firms include Project Serum, FTX, Terra, Akash, Chainlink, civic, dfuse, Formatic, Stardust, Kin, Tempest, and more.