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Authored by: @hetty-rowan



SOLANA

Yes who thought I was going to sing is wrong. Today I decided to check out a happy note in crypto, and that has become SOLANA, simply because I think it is a cheerful name, but also, and not least, because Solana has been on the rise on the crypto charts lately. And I wanted to know WHAT could be the reason for that. Until now, I really had no idea what Solana really is, what it does, what it can do and why this crypto is becoming so popular.

To understand what Solana excels at, I must first ask you another question. And that is, do you know what the Blockchain Trilemma is? Have you ever heard of it at all?

Yes, not even a dilemma, but a trilemma… that's quite something, isn't it? It is a word with an economic background, and the well-known Vitalik Buterin came up with the concept for the Blockchain Trilemma. And this relates to the scalability of the blockchain technology!

This trilemma states that a blockchain can have one or at most two of these functions, but never all three!

Solana claims all three!

And then suddenly there is a do-re-mi-fa-SOLANA, which claims to have all three. That is quite a claim they are making with this. So they claim that they have "Scalability", and "Security" and "Decentralization". If this is the case, this would make Solana unique in the blockchain world, and if this is, they possess something that, according to Vitalik Butering, is not considered possible in blockchain technology.

But is it true what Solana says about herself? Of course I wanted to know ... Join me if you want to know this too!

What is Solana?

Solana is a web-scale blockchain that provides fast, secure, scalable, decentralized apps and marketplaces. Web-scale IT architectures describes computing environments that allow applications to be dissected into web services. Systems that claim to be web-scale can handle rapid growth efficiently and have no bottlenecks that need to be redesigned at critical times. Large internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon use web-scale architecture.

Named after a beach

Solana is named after Solana Beach, California, a beach and surfer spot about 30 minutes north of San Diego. The creator of the entire Solana project, Anatoly Yakovenko worked there almost all his life and probably lived there.

Quite dizzying

The system currently supports 70,000 TPS (transactions per second) and 400 ms block times (that's just under half a second). And that is fast! A new block is added to the blockchain every 400 ms. Now you also immediately understand why Solana calls itself the fastest blockchain in the world, right? I mean, Hive is fast, but Hive isn't that fast ...

No sharding used

And Solana doesn't even use sharding for this. You probably remember what sharding is. But again very briefly, sharding is a method of splitting and storing a single logical data set in multiple databases. By distributing the data across multiple machines, a cluster of database systems can store larger data sets and handle additional requests. Sharding is required when a dataset is too large to be stored in a single database. Solana does NOT use this!

How Solana can achieve this tremendous speed?

They do this by combining new protocols that interact and execute transactions in a complementary style. Solana is proud that they are still the fastest when we consider the highest transaction volumes they enable.

Bitcoin has 7 TPS and Ethereum 15TPS. Just to add some perspective when it comes to the tremendous dizzying Solana speed.

Unlike many other blockchains, certainly the newer blockchains… Solana has NO second layer. Opinions are divided on whether this is smart or not. So far no reason for Solana to change this.

Whitepaper dates back to 2017

The Mainnet Beta was launched in March 2020. But their whitepaper dates back to 2017 and was made by Solana Labs. The Solana Foundation was established in April 2020. The Solana Foundation now owns all intellectual property and rights owned by Solana Labs.

In the process, 167 million SOL tokens were transferred from Solana Labs to Solana Foundation, to "promote the adoption of decentralized technologies as a public good." A small portion SOL tokens will remain available to Solana Labs for financing operations.

What makes Solana different?

What makes Solana different is that it looks like they've solved the blockchain trilemma. The project has come up with eight innovative protocols, each of which works seamlessly to provide a solution to this trilemma.

Here the explanation of every protocol. This way you can see why the Solana blockchain is the fastest, safest, decentralized blockchain on a web scale at the moment!

  • Proof of History This Proof of History is the protocol that gave Solana the exposure they now enjoy. With this groundbreaking innovation, Solana uses a verifiable delay function in conjunction with the SHA256 Bitcoin mining algorithm. This timestamps all transactions on the Solana blockchain.

The PoH system integrates historical data from blockchain transactions to prove that transactions have indeed occurred before entering the distributed ledger.

  • Tower BFT Tower BFT is Solana's powerful iteration (iteration) of the PBFT consensus algorithm optimized by Proof-of-History (PoH). The consensus mechanism uses PoH to reach consensus across the network without possible latency (delay) of transactions due to massive amount of message traffic.

  • Turbine This is a block propagation protocol (dissemination) The Turbine protocol makes it easier to send data to the blockchain nodes. Turbine can do this by splitting the data into smaller packages. This allows Solana to address bandwidth issues and also increase its overall capacity to process transactions faster.

  • Gulf Stream This is a forwarding protocol without mempools. In the mempool you can see how many transactions are in the queue and how much miner's fee other people offer.

Solana can achieve a network throughput of 50,000 transactions per second by simplifying the block confirmation process. Gulf Stream facilitates the process of capturing and forwarding transactions even before the next set of confirmation blocks is complete. This is Solana's backbone.

  • Sealevel This regulates the duration of parallel smart contracts. Sealevel is a transaction processing engine to achieve a more efficient runtime with the parallel processing of smart contracts. Using creative horizontal scaling solutions, thousands of smart contracts can work side by side in parallel. In addition, smart contracts that are in the same state on the blockchain will also be processed simultaneously.

  • Pipeline We are now talking about a Transaction Processing Unit for validation optimization. These are a set of blocks containing transaction information, which are quickly validated and replicated to all nodes in the network. Solana does this by assigning a stream of input data to different hardware responsible for each of them.

  • Cloudbreak This is a horizontally scaled account database. To achieve network scalability without sharding, Solana uses Cloudbreak as a horizontal scaling solution. Solana's design principle is to create software that reduces the dependence on use of hardware. In addition, Cloudbreak is a data structure that simultaneously reads and writes transaction entries from all over the network.

  • Archivers The distributed ledger store. Solana's network allows each node to replicate information from the blockchain based on the space available on their hardware. Archivers download their respective data from validators and this data is accessible to the network.

What is a Solana Cluster?

Solana clusters are dedicated groups of computer networks committed to serving customer transactions and maintaining the integrity of the Solana ledger.

Different Solana clusters coexist and are used when users want to keep certain events or records on the blockchain. You can also go back to track previous blockchain activity.

Solana now maintains three different clusters for different purposes.

  • Devnet cluster The Devnet cluster is for anyone who wants to use the Solana blockchain as some sort of playground for building decentralized applications (dApps) or familiarize themselves with the process of becoming a validator node. Devnet tokens are not real, but the users can access tokens for application testing and familiarization with the platform.
  • Testnet cluster The Testnet cluster is the next phase, in which clusters apply stress tests that focus on stability, network performance, and validator behavior. Tokens issued on the testnet are also not real. Holders of early SOL tokens and partners at the time of launch can access Solana's Mainnet Beta.

Mainnet cluster

Tokens issued on the Mainnet are real SOL with real token value. Solana is now rewarding users for testing their Mainnet Beta, but currently rewards and inflation are turned off. As soon as the Mainnet goes live, it will be switched on.

What are the Solana bridges?

With the help of the Solana bridges, different blockchains can communicate with each other. Two bridges are currently in use, but there are more bridges planned.

The Solana Wormhole

The Solana Wormhole is an Ethereum bridge that helps transfer assets from the Ethereum blockchain to the Solana blockchain. It also helps to transfer liquidity between the Ethereum ERC-20 token standard to the Solana SPL token standard.

One of the problems Solana's Wormhole Ethereum Gateway solves is poor performance due to congestion and high gas costs.

Projects can now use Solana's cheap and fast transactions, even if their base code is still on the Ethereum blockchain. For projects that need to be scaled, but cannot or do not want to wait a few minutes, but also cannot or do not want to pay USD 5 and more for a gas fee, the use of the Solana-Wormhole is an attractive alternative.

The SOLAR bridge

The SOLAR Bridge is a new innovative feature designed, funded and built by Bering Waters, functioning between the Solana and Arweave blockchains.

The SOLAR Bridge has been implemented to help the Solana blockchain maintain and expand its transaction capacity and to meet the needs of global financial networks. While Solana currently facilitates 80 million transactions per day, it has the capacity to facilitate five times as much. All of these transactions add up to a significant amount of data, which is where Arweave comes in.

Arweave is a special storage network for Solana, which allows data to be stored permanently, immutably and reliably. In addition, Arweave's unique approach means that users pay a one-time transaction fee for data storage. Users are rewarded for storing and retrieving data over extended periods of time. There is another Gravity bridge in the works linking to the Waves blockchain and a Terra / Ethereum / Solana PoA bridge linking to the Terra and Ethereum blockchains.

The Solana Token - SOL

The native SOL token is used to pay transaction fees on the Solana network. During this process, Solana tokens are burned with every transaction. This deflation mechanism for SOL distribution encourages more token holders to strike, which in turn leads to increased network security.

Additionally, Solana token holders can deploy their SOL to become a validator node. Both options reduce the circulating supply of SOL, increasing positive price pressure. Validators receive block rewards in SOL tokens and any SOL tokens deducted from bad participants on the network will be added to the block reward pool.

Distribution of tokens

The distribution of the token supply is as follows:

  • Seed Sale Tokens are 16.23% of the total token supply.
  • Founding Sale tokens are 12.92% of the total token supply.
  • Validator Sale Tokens are 5.18% of the total token supply.
  • Strategic Selling Tokens make up 1.88% of the total token supply.
  • CoinList Auction Sale tokens are 1.64% of the total token supply.
  • Team tokens make up 12.79% of the total token supply.
  • Foundation tokens make up 10.46% of the total token supply.
  • Community tokens make up 38.89% of the total token supply.
Currently, 491,773,253 SOL tokens have been released. There are now 268,065,116 tokens in circulation.

### ICO Prior to the ICO listing, Solana Foundation had already received more than $ 29 million from four previous funding rounds since March 2018. The ICO raised another 1.76 million US dollars, 8 million tokens were sold at a price of 0.22 US dollars per token.

Who are the team and partners behind Solana SOL?

A short look at the Solana SOL team and partners.

Anatoly Yakovenko

The founder and CEO of Solana. He is a former Software Engineer at Dropbox and Mesosphere, Senior Engineer Manager at Qualcomm Boulder and Co-Founder of Alescere. He has 4 patents to his name.

Greg Fitzgerald

The CTO. He is a former Senior Software Engineer at Qualcomm Boulder and System Software Engineer at Alescere.

Raj Gokal

The COO. He is a venture investor at General Catalyst, formerly product director at Odama Health, Entrepreneur in Residence at Rock Health and CEO and Co-Founder of Sano.

Serum is interesting to mention. Serum is a new high-speed non-custodial spot and derivatives decentralized exchange (DEX) built on Solana. There is also a collaboration with Chainlink. Here they build a super-fast oracle. This oracle will be cheaper to run and will be able to update pricing data in every Solana block (400 ms).

Solana's Roadmap

Solana's Mainnet was still unplanned in beta phase in March 2021. This has to do with the fact that just about anything that could go wrong has actually gone wrong. In that regard, you can say that Solana has already overcome many problems, from which she may have come out stronger.

Solana plans to upgrade its network from Mainnet Beta to a full mainnet version as soon as they can, it was scheduled to happen in late December 2021 or early 2021. However, this too has been delayed and it is now moment not entirely clear when this upgrade is planned.

Despite all these problems, however, Solana is very popular, and its popularity is growing daily. Since the introduction of the Mainnet Beta in March 2020, the price has been quite stable. Until the beginning of 2021, this suddenly saw a huge increase, and this increase seems to continue for the time being due to the growing popularity of Solana.

They are also active on social media. I have not checked Facebook, but both their Telegram and their Twitter are both very active and have many followers.

Conclusion

I have not made an investment in Solana myself, but nevertheless I expect that if you did, it could well be worth it. When the news came of the upgrade to the Mainnet Beta to the full Mainnet, this could just cause another spike in the price. And then it is up to Solana to prove that they are worthy of this trust. But for now it looks rosy for Solana, despite everything that went wrong that could go wrong. Ultimately, confidence in their product turns out to be great and that's what it's all about.


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