The What? Why? And Who of Solana Blockchain
What is Solana?
Solana is a blockchain of a robust ecosystem of defi, NFT, Dex projects, and other web3 Apps. It is a global, distributed network designed to scale natively, without sacrificing decentralization or security, through the combination of PoH and PoS consensus mechanisms. Solana was rolled out during the 2017 ICO boom and was able to raise $25 million from both public and private funding rounds. In March 2020, the network launched its main-net beta and got listed on many exchanges.
$SOL; the native coin of the Solana ecosystem is used as gas and also for the security of the network through staking. The technological innovation of this chain adds value to the $SOL coin. The ability of the network to scale at nothing less than 50,000 tps without depending on the Layer2 solution earned it the cliché “Ethereum killer.”
Furthermore, its fast transaction process and low fees have made it a popular choice for developers. Owing to this, Solana has been able to onboard multiple projects into its network. At the time of writing this article, a relatively high number of projects are active in the Solana ecosystem; some of which are giants of the NFT and Defi spaces.
There is no doubt in the fact that Solana is one of the projects that will survive the nascency of the web3 space. Maybe when real mass adoption happens, the poorest holder of the Solana coin will be richer than the fiat richest of today.
Why Solana?
During the earliest time of cryptocurrency, both Bitcoin and Ethereum struggled to scale beyond 15 transactions per second. How will this duo live up to the dream of becoming the global money when Visa at that time could handle up to 65,000 transactions per second?
In the quest for a highly scalable cryptocurrency, Solana rose as a crypto network that can achieve 50,000 tps without forgoing security and decentralization. The Blockchain Trilemma of scalability, security, and decentralization is the problem Solana aims to solve as well as being an alternative to Ethereum due to its unbearable fees.
In November 2017, Anatoly Yakovenko and founder of the Solana chain, published the Solana whitepaper, describing how throughput can be improved through the Proof-of-History(PoH) technique. The PoH technique allows computers that do not trust each other to agree on a time and thereby increase the throughput of a distributed ledger system. With Proof of History, it is possible to create a historical record that proves that an event has occurred at a specific moment in time.
In addition, TowerBFT, an optimized version of PBFT, is another main engine of the Solana blockchain. It leverages Solana’s PoH as a clock before consensus to reduce messaging overhead and latency. Eight key technologies developed by the Solana team for the successful creation of the Solana distributed ledger are the Proof of History (POH), Tower BFT, Turbine, Gulf Stream, Sealevel, Pipelining, Cloudbreak, and Archivers.
The Who of Solana
The idea that gave birth to Solana was developed by Anatoly Yakovenko and was published as a whitepaper in 2017. Anatoly was once the Lead of operating systems development at Qualcomm, he worked at Mesosphere, as well as Dropbox. Anatoly reinforced the foundation of Solana with Greg Fitzgerald, Stephen Akridge, and three others. This cohort co-founded the network.
At the development part, Solana Foundation has been empowered to speed up the development and expansion of the Solana ecosystem. The focus of the foundation is to ensure various optimization techniques which will make the network a capable one for global usage. The foundation controls grants & delegation programs, education & advancement, development, and research.
Council members of the Solana Foundation
Wolfgang Albrecht
James Prestwich
Mable Jiang
Patrick von Felton
Some Solana Handles that are worth giving a follow:
https://twitter.com/aeyakovenko
https://twitter.com/SolanaFndn
If you have read to this stage, we say kudos!👍
See you on the other side of this series to discuss the great projects that have made up the Solana ecosystem. Don’t forget to clap us and follow up for more content across ecosystems.
