Blockchain network Solana focuses on fast transactions and increased throughput as a way to encourage consumer adoption of cryptocurrencies at scale and blockchain. Solana uses several innovations to increase speed, such as Proof of History (PoH) and parallel transactions. Users can pay fees and interact with smart contracts through SOL, the network’s native token.

Introduction

Scalability is currently the most critical issue in blockchain technology One of the challenges. As they continue to evolve, these networks are often limited in their transaction speeds and confirmation times. Solana aims to break down these barriers without compromising security or decentralization.

Solana blockchain was created by Anatoly Yakovenko of Solana Labs. It was launched in 2017 and uses a new transaction verification method. . Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many other projects suffer from slow transaction times, high fees, and high energy consumption. Solana uses a number of innovative technologies, such as history proof and parallelization, to achieve thousands of transactions per second (TPS).

How does Solana work?

Solana is a third-party proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain that uses a variety of unique innovative technologies to achieve High throughput, fast transactions, and low fees.

• Proof of History (PoH): A method of verifying time without traditional timestamps.

• Parallelization: The ability to process multiple transactions at any given time.

• Tower Byzantine Fault Tolerance - a PoH optimized version of practical BFT.

• Turbine — a block propagation protocol.

• Gulf Stream — Mempool-less transaction forwarding protocol.

• Sealevel — Parallel smart contract runtime system.

• Pipelining — a transaction processing unit used for verification optimization.

• Cloudbreak (Cloudbreak) — a horizontally scalable account database.

These features create a high-performance network with 400ms block times that can process thousands of transactions per second. To put this into perspective, Bitcoin’s block time is about 10 minutes, while Ethereum’s block time is about 15 seconds.

SOL holders can pledge their tokens, making them part of the blockchain PoS consensus mechanism. With a compatible cryptocurrency wallet, you can stake your token holdings to validators who handle transactions on the network. Thereafter, successful validators share rewards with relevant token stakers. This reward mechanism incentivizes validators and delegators to act in the interests of the network first.

As of December 2022, Solana has 2,034 validators and a Satoshi coefficient of 31.

What is unique about Solana?

Solana focuses on reducing handling fees and enriching transaction methods to prepare for the widespread adoption of blockchain and promote a large number of Development of unique and innovative technologies:

Historical proof

For cryptocurrencies, tracking the sequence of transactions is a crucial task. Bitcoin does this by bundling transactions into blocks that add a single timestamp. Each node must validate these blocks consistently with other nodes. But this process results in a long time for nodes to confirm blocks throughout the network. Solana uses a new approach — Proof of History (PoH).

Solana’s events and transactions are hashed through the SHA256 hash function, which generates a unique and unique Unpredictable output values. Solana will use the output value of the transaction as the input value of the next hash operation. At this point, the order of transactions is built into the hash output value.

This hashing process creates a long, continuous chain of hashed transactions. This gives validators a clear and verifiable ordering of the transactions added to the block without the need for traditional timestamps.

Hash operation also takes a certain amount of time, so the verifier can easily verify the total time elapsed. By ordering transactions in the hash chain, the amount of information processed and passed by validators in each block is reduced. Using a hashed version of the latest transaction state can significantly reduce block confirmation times.

History proof is not a consensus mechanism, it is a method to shorten the time required to confirm the transaction sequence. When combined with proof-of-stake, selecting the next validator for a block becomes much easier. The time required for nodes to verify the order of transactions is significantly reduced, and the network can elect new validators more quickly.

Low cost

Solana has extremely low fees, with an average cost of $0.00025 per transaction. The low fees significantly lower the barrier to entry for Web3, as gas fees on other chains significantly increase the cost of a single purchase.

Energy efficiency

Because Solana's nodes require less time and resources to verify transactions and do not require mining like proof-of-work (PoW) networks, the network has become one of the most energy-efficient blockchains.

The Solana Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting and supporting the Solana network. It regularly releases third-party audits of Solana's energy impact. , and how Solana compares to other blockchain projects and average household energy usage. The latest report, released in September 2022, highlights the following energy usage data:

What is Solana (SOL)?

SOL is Solana’s native utility token, which is burned by the Solana network as part of a deflationary model. When transferring money or interacting with smart contracts, users need to pay handling fees in SOL. SOL holders can also become network validators. Like Ethereum, Solana supports developers to build smart contracts and create projects based on the blockchain.

SOL uses the SPL protocol; SPL is the token standard for the Solana blockchain, similar to ERC20 in Ethereum. SOL tokens have two main use cases:

1. 1. Payment generated when using the network or smart contracts transaction fee.

2. As part of the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, it acts as a pledge token.

A decentralized application (DApp) built on Solana creates SOL and uses SPL New use cases for other tokens built into the standard.

Solana Ecosystem

Since the launch of the mainnet beta version in 2020 , the Solana ecosystem has grown tremendously. As of December 2022, there are 21,255 Github developer repositories using Solana, serving 8 million active users.

Traditional economy Giants have announced their entry into Solana. These include Discord (user profiles can link to the Solana wallet) and ASICS (users can use the Solana Pay payment system to purchase limited edition shoe designs).

Solana has become the network of choice for multiple Web3 use cases with fast transactions and high throughput.

• Non-Fungible Tokens: Fast transaction times and low fees have contributed to the thriving Solana NFT ecosystem. As of December 2022, more than 150,000 creators have minted more than 22.7 million NFTs on Solana, and Solana NFTs are supported by Meta's Facebook and Instagram. Many famous Solana NFT projects were born, including Degenerate Ape Academy, Okay Bears and Solana Monkey Business.

• Payment System: The Solana Pay protocol powers an ecosystem of smooth, permissionless payment structures that enable payments to be made in seconds. In Stripe’s recently announced fiat-to-crypto currency exchange project, 11 of the 16 partner projects mentioned are built on Solana.

• Games: As of December 2022, Solana has 15 playable games online; it is expected that there will be 37 games by March 2023.

• Decentralized Finance: Due to its fast transaction speed, Solana has become an ideal choice for decentralized finance (DeFi). The Solana DeFi project raised more than US$150 million in 2022. Notable projects include community-run order book OpenBook and Jupiter Aggregator.

• Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: The development of new tools has led to a surge in decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) on Solana, with 8,489 DAO proposals and a total of 34,484 votes.

• Mobile: In June Saga, the first phone to use the Solana Mobile Stack, was released, and the Solana ecosystem is leading the way in mobile-first cryptocurrency development. The first Saga devices will be delivered to developers in December 2022.

What will be the future of Solana develop?

The Solana Foundation Breakpoint 2022 conference introduced some projects to be carried out in the next few months and years, including:

• Firedancer: Jump Crypto is developing new Solana core open source software, including processing in a test environment as of November Second validator client for 1.2 million TPS. This move will further expand Solana’s throughput.

• Mobile: Saga devices are expected to be available in 2023. Solana Mobile will also launch the Solana DApp Store in January 2023, which is a free DApp store focusing on Web3.

• Network upgrades: A number of upgrades have been made to improve network performance, including the QUIC protocol, equity-weighted quality of service and fee markets. Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko also laid out his vision for improving the network.

Conclusion

After appearing in the blockchain field in 2020, Solana has gradually grown into a strong and sustainable ecosystem and has now become a popular choice for projects and users. , and is expected to develop further.