Solana is a programmable blockchain that aims to perform high-speed transactions without losing its main feature: decentralization.
Solana, the new trending blockchain for the crypto industry, is no shortage of innovations, and many expect it to shake up the industry. Indeed, its platform incorporates innovative features allowing it to manage up to 50,000 transactions per second.
How is this feat possible and above all, how does Solana work? In this article, we will present this project and how it could revolutionize the future of blockchain.
Contents :
- Solana (SOL), history and development
- First of all, what is Solana?
- What is proof of history (PoH)?
- The BFT tower system: practical Byzantine fault tolerance optimized for PoH
- Turbine: the protocol for the preparation of the blocks
- Sealevel: simultaneous smart contracts
- Gulf Stream: Solana's mempool management solution
- Pipelining: a transaction processing unit to achieve the efficiency of a single node
- Cloudbreak: Solana’s horizontal state architecture
- The “archivers”: the distributed register of Solana
- How does Solana work?
- What are the applications managed by Solana?
- Who are Solana's competitors?
- Solana and its more than 250 partners
- What are the predictions for the price of the crypto SOL?
- The distribution of the Solana token
- How to buy SOL crypto?
- Solana, a potential market disruptor?
Solana (SOL), The history and development.
Announced at the end of 2017, Solana (SOL) is a new cryptocurrency that has undergone three years of development before an official launch in 2020. Its token is native to the blockchain of the same name, which is a direct competitor to Ethereum. The SOL is a creation of the company Solana Labs made up of American engineers from large digital companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Intel). At its head is Anatoly Yakovenko, former engineer of Qualcomm and Dropbox, and expert in mobile technology.
The (open source) Solana project is presented as a solution for democratizing financial systems, and its mission is to become the default option for all decentralized applications. Focusing on the speed and scalability of services to facilitate cryptocurrency transactions and their generalization to the general public, the Solana project allows for a large number of operations per second, and provides for commissions of only 0.000001 dollar per transaction. Security on Solana is also enhanced by the addition of Proof of History (PoH) consensus and Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus, two major innovations.
What is Solana (SOL), and how did this project come about?
Anatoly Yakovenko, former Qualcomm and Dropbox collaborator, founded and announced the Solana platform in 2017 when the project's white paper was published. Mr. Yakovenko is a software engineer experienced in compression algorithms and distributed systems. Together with Eric Williams and Solana's CTO, Greg Fitzgerald, the team aims to make this project a distributed, trustless protocol to address common issues present on Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains.
Solana's white paper is the first written reference to the concept of proof of history, described as a new system for keeping track of time for distributed systems on the blockchain.
The team released the Solana platform testnet in February 2018. The company behind this platform, Solana Labs, was originally called Loom. The name later changed to avoid confusion with Loom Network, a multi-chain interoperability solution.
Solana raised over $ 5 million through two seed rounds ahead of its Series A funding. In 2019, Solana Labs completed a $ 20 million Series A funding round led by Multicoin Capital. After her launch auction on CoinList, Solana raised an additional $ 1.76 million.
The mainnet beta launched in March 2020, and offered basic transaction functionality and smart contracts.
The current Solana team has gained experience working for the world's largest companies (Apple, Qualcomm, Intel, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Dropbox and others). So far, Solana has received the attention of many investors, including Multicoin Capital, Foundation Capital, SLOW Capital, CMCC Global, and Abstract Ventures, among others.
At this time, Solana Labs is the main contributor to the network. The Solana Foundation, a non-profit foundation, is actively involved in the funding and development of community initiatives.
First of all, what is Solana?
Decentralized transactions are possible thanks to blockchain technology. That said, the technology we use to transfer cryptocurrency has one major problem: It is slow. To put it in perspective, let's take the Ethereum network, which can process around 15 transactions per second, while the Visa network processes tens of thousands of them every second.
And this is exactly the problem Solana wants to solve. But then, what does Solana really consist of?
Solana is a programmable blockchain that aims to perform high-speed transactions without losing its main feature: decentralization. The network uses a new mechanism called “proof of history”.
SOL, the native blockchain token, is used for transaction fees and can also be staked. Solana is a direct competitor of the Ethereum network.
What exactly is a programmable blockchain?
Unlike Bitcoin, which mainly consists of a huge immutable large ledger, Solana uses smart contracts. These smart contracts are pieces of code that trigger actions when certain conditions are met.
Ethereum also uses this smart contract feature to deploy decentralized applications (dApps). However, the sheer volume of these self-executing contracts has congested the network.
Consider Ethereum's relatively low transfer speed and the large number of smart contracts; the network is slow, the transfer costs are very high, and the carbon footprint is significant, as it still operates on the principle of proof of work consensus.
Until Ethereum 2.0 is fully deployed (which is slated for 2022), the network is expected to leave a share of the dApp market to next-gen blockchains. So far, Solana is the fastest programmable blockchain.
Solana operates on an adapted proof-of-stake consensus model, and on which cutting-edge basic innovations have been deployed.
The speed of execution of Solana is due to 8 functions:
- Proof of History (PoH)
- Tower BFT
- Gulf Stream
- Turbine
- Sealevel
- Pipelining
- Cloudbreak
- The “archivers” (or Archivers)
What is proof of history (PoH)?
Pipelining: a transaction processing unit to achieve the efficiency of a single node
How does Solana work?
- Solana uses a proof of stake consensus mechanism, assisted by the Tower BFT consensus.
- Tower BFT enables the network to achieve consensus by enforcing a universal time source, called proof of history. This creates a permanent baseline for all nodes in the network. It is important not to confuse Proof of History (PoH), a clock without network permission, with a consensus mechanism.
- The proof of history is a decentralized clock that helps secure the blockchain and is one of the eight foundational innovations of the Solana network. Tower BFT uses the permissionless clock to speed up transactions.
- Likewise, the transaction parallelization system, Sealevel, allows smart contracts to run simultaneously, using available GPUs and SSDs.
- Gulf Stream functionality is the memory pool system, often referred to as a mempool. This allows transactions to be passed to validators before previous transactions are finalized, thereby maximizing transaction speed.
- Receipt of the translation entry in the registry (also called a ledger)
- The registry sequences and categorizes messages so that they can be processed by other nodes efficiently.
- The same register executes the transactions of the current state and stores them in RAM.
- The registry publishes the end state transactions and signature to the auditors (these are the replication nodes).
- Auditors perform the same transactions on the copy of the report and publish their report signature when they receive a confirmation.
- The published confirmations will serve as a vote for the consensus mechanism.
What are the applications managed by Solana?
Who are Solana's competitors?
Solana and more than 250 partners
What are the predictions for the price of the crypto SOL?
The distribution of the Solana token
- The tokens from the seed sale represent 16.23% of the total supply.
- Tokens from founders' sales represent 12.92% of the total supply.
- Tokens from the sale of validators represent 5.18% of the total supply.
- Tokens from strategic sales represent 1.88% of the total supply.
- Tokens from the sale of CoinList Auction represent 1.64% of the total supply.
- Team tokens represent 12.79% of the total supply.
- The Foundation's tokens represent 10.46% of the total supply.
- Community tokens represent 38.89% of the total supply.
- 3.00% - partnerships
- 3.00% - marketing
- 35.00% - team
- 35.00% - development
- 12.00% - professional and legal services
- 3.00% - taxes
- 6.00% - office rent
- 3.00% - other