Solana is a community-based blockchain protocol that prepares for sustainability. Its goal is to provide a platform that enables developers to create decentralized applications (dApps) without having to design performance barriers. Solana incorporates a new timestamp system called Proof of History (PoH) that enables automatically ordered actions. It also uses the Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm to make the network more secure. Additional design terms include short-term debt repayment times, low operating costs, and support for all LLVM-enabled contract languages.
The founder and the most crucial person who started Solana was Anatoly Yakovenko. His professional career began at Qualcomm. Later, Yakovenko took up a new position as a software engineer at Dropbox. In 2017, he published a whitepaper draft outlining a new time-keeping approach for distributed systems called Proof of History (PoH). For blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, one of the limitations is measuring the time required to reach an agreement on a transaction order. Anatoly believed that his new approach could automatically streamline the blockchains' transaction order process, providing an important piece that would enable crypto networks to exceed their potential at that moment.
He teamed up with his Qualcomm colleagues, and they launched a project called Solana Labs. By bringing more Qualcomm's other former partners into the process, the Solana protocol and the SOL token were released to the public in 2020 after it raised $1.76 million in a public token auction that was hosted on Coinlist.
The reason to build Solana was to support smart contracts and for the creation of decentralized applications, or dapps. The blockchain works on both Proof of History (PoH) and Proof of Stake (PoS). PoS allows guarantors to verify transactions based on how many coins they carry, while PoH allows the transaction to be timed and verified immediately, Yakovenko wrote in the Solana white paper.
The transaction speed and cost were much higher in Ethereum, it was roughly 30 transactions per second, so Solana saw this as an opportunity and now at present in Solana, the transaction speed is more than 50,000 transactions per second.
Solana's highly functional blockchain is built using innovations highlighted below:
· Proof of History: A clock before consensus
· Tower Byzantine Fault Tolerance: A PoH-optimized version of PBFT.
· Turbine: A block propagation control
· Gulf Stream: A Mempool-less transaction forwarding protocol.
· Sealevel: The world’s first parallel smart contracts run-time
· Pipelining: A transaction processing unit for validation.
· Cloudbreak: A horizontally-scaled accounts database.
· Archivers: For distributed ledger storage.
The use cases of Solana are:
· Paying for transaction fees incurred when using the network or smart contracts.
· Staking tokens as part of the Proof of Stake consensus mechanism.
· Making smart contracts.
· Creating NFTs.
· Building dApps
Solana has helped make more than 350 live projects. Many of these projects focus on hot spots in the market, including DeFi, blockchain games, and NFTs. Some of Solana's top projects are:
| Serum | SolFarm (Tulip) |
| Mango | ORCA |
| Solarians | Star Atlas |
| DATE | NEWS/EVENTS | IMPACT |
| 07/11/2022 | The FTX Crash causes a collapse in the Solana Ecosystem | -57% Decrease |
| 07/05/2022 | TerraUSD and LUNA both collapsed and as a result, a number of crypto platforms folded in the aftermath | -45% Decrease |
| 30/03/2022 | OpenSea will integrate Solana in April, increasing the NFT ecosystem even further | +23% Increase |
| 24/01/2022 | Solana faced a major outage due to which it was down for 48 hrs, and many duplicate transactions were also noticed | -35% Decrease |
| 16/12/2021 | Solana suffered from a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that slowed its performance | -20% Decrease |
| 12/08/2021 | Solana’s Mango Markets DEX raises $70M in MNGO Token Sale | +80% Increase |
| 10/05/2021 | The MATH Global Foundation and Solana have announced a $20 million investment partnership to support new companies, groups, and projects operating in Solana's ecosystem | +30% Increase |
Solana solves many of the traditional problems experienced before blockchain technology. Solana is showcasing a new performance-enhancing structure and a more efficient compliance algorithm. The platform will be a strong competitor to Bitcoin and Ethereum. Solana shows rapid progress in the crypto industry in just 10 years. The stadium will be something to look forward to as it progresses!
Solana