Solana

What is Solana (SOL)?

Solana is a third-generation blockchain that uses a unique hybrid consensus mechanism in an effort to solve the classical blockchain trilemma of decentralization, scalability, and security.

With the main aim of providing massive transaction throughput to facilitate the rocketing adoption of blockchain technology, Solana strives to position itself as a fast, low-priced alternative to Ethereum.

When Was Solana Launched?

Solana was launched during the ICO boom of 2017, raising $25 million in private and public funds.

The official whitepaper and initial internal testnet were released in February 2018. The latter saw multiple iterations and testnet phases before Solana’s mainnet beta launched in March 2020.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic causing pandemonium in the markets around that time, Solana’s market value saw rapid growth. The network saw fast adoption thanks to its ability to maintain high performance without the need for additional scaling solutions.

This led several major decentralized finance (DeFi) projects, including O3Swap, Arweave, SolStarter, and Oxygen, to be built on the Solana network. Decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator OpenOcean also integrated Solana following the overwhelming community demand.

Who are the Founders of Solana?

Solana was founded by Anatoly Yakovenko, a former employee of Qualcomm and Dropbox.

Yakovenko began working on Solana in 2017 and managed to roll it out during the ICO boom of the same year. Yakovenko promised that Solana would reduce the time taken to reach consensus, an issue for the major blockchains at the time.

In 2018, Yakovenko hired former Qualcomm colleague Greg Fitzgerald as Solana’s principal engineer.

Two years later, several other ex-Qualcomm employees joined the team. Among them was Stephen Akridge, who came in with the role of co-founder after the launch of Solana’s mainnet beta.

How Does Solana Work?

Solana uses a novel hybrid structure that combines proof-of-history (PoH) with proof-of-stake (PoS) architectures.

PoH uses cryptography to establish a trustless source of time on the ledger and maintain a record of previous occurrences on the blockchain. This creates chronological storage of historical data.

This PoH algorithm ensures that nodes are synchronous, allowing them to create their own timestamps. The leader of each node is in charge of sequencing, while others process transactions. These transactions are then settled by validators.

The node leaders, meanwhile, are elected by the confirmations generated in the settlement process. This is where PoS comes in, with these confirmations acting as votes in the consensus algorithm.

Solana’s Tower BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerance) aids consensus, similarly to a system dating back to the '90s called Practical BFT. PBFT allows a decentralized computer network to attain consensus even if some nodes provide faulty information about transactions.

How is Solana Secured?

Solana’s Tower BFT system makes use of the network’s PoH algorithm for a global source of time. This allows it to control the entire blockchain’s functions. On top of that, it also significantly reduces messaging overhead to create extremely small finality times.

The actual security of Solana is provided by its PoS consensus mechanism, however. The PoS mechanism is designed for rapid confirmation of the sequence provided by the current node leader. It’s also designed to vote for and select the next node leader.

Misbehaving validators are punished as with most PoS mechanisms using slashing, where the SOL staked by a validator is destroyed upon misbehavior. This forms the economic incentive intended to discourage validators from confirming multiple branches of the chain.

What Are Smart Contracts?

Within Solana’s ecosystem, smart contracts are called on-chain Programs and are deployed using the programming languages Rust C and C++. They are read-only and stateless once deployed. This means that third-party accounts can interact with them, but they cannot change the code.

These smart contracts provide a framework of coordination without the need for facilitators or traditional legal contracts. They are often likened to a vending machine, where the buyer chooses the desired product and receives it after depositing the required amount of money.

Smart contracts are trustless. As such, you don’t have to trust the other parties involved in the transaction or involve a trusted third party. Everything is accomplished via code that is immutable and stored on a public ledger.

What Makes Solana Unique?

Solana’s proof-of-history mechanism, developed by Anatoly Yakovenko, sets it apart from most other top blockchains, which mainly use pure proof-of-work or proof-of-stake mechanisms.

Solana is well-known for extremely short processing times and quick settlement of transactions. Thanks to the rapid execution of smart contracts, Solana is in high demand when it comes to DeFi applications. Transaction costs are also kept very low, making Solana one of the most appealing blockchains to use.

What Is Proof-of-History?

Proof-of-history is a sequence of computation that aims to verify, with a cryptographic function, that time has passed between two events.

Cryptography, in Solana’s case, the extremely secure NSA-developed SHA-256, ensures that the output of the function cannot be predicted from the input and must be executed completely.

This requirement of complete execution introduces an element of time that can be quantified based on how many times the function has been run.

Thus, when looking back at the blockchain, a comparison or backtrack of output to input can define a single execution of the function. The number of executions can then be used to calculate exactly how much time has passed between any two events.

How does Proof-of-History compare to PoW and PoS?

Solana uses PoH not as an alternative to proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, but rather to complement them.

PoH is designed to reduce overhead when passing data in order to cut down validation times and as a defense of the ledger’s integrity with respect to time.

While Solana uses proof-of-stake for validation and to settle transactions, PoH works with it to primarily enhance speed.

What are Solana’s “Eight Inventions”?

Solana’s eight inventions or innovations were aimed at helping the network attain the goals of decentralization, scalability, and security that third-generation cryptocurrencies hope to crack.

The first of the eight is proof-of-history and the second is Tower BFT, wherein PoH is essentially used as a clock by the system to reduce overhead and latency by improving node communication.

The other six are:

• Turbine. The turbine is a block propagation technique that optimizes how blocks are transmitted through the network independently.
• Sealevel. This is a transaction processing engine that gives Solana the ability to scale horizontally across graphics processing units (GPUs) and Solid State Drives (SSDs). It also allows Solana to introduce parallel transaction execution across a single shard (a horizontal partition of data in a database).
• Gulf Stream. This mechanism allows validators to execute transactions in advance and reduce confirmation times.
• Cloudbreak. It’s a state architecture optimized for concurrent reads and writes on certain SSD configurations, supporting Gulf Stream.
• Archivers. This refers to a smaller network of nodes that stores part of the network state, queried occasionally by the Solana network as a whole.
• Pipeline. It ensures that network hardware is working efficiently at all times.

Why doesn’t Solana Use Layer-2s?

A layer-2 solution is meant to increase blockchain scalability. It is used by many blockchains such as Ethereum (Polygon, Loopring, etc.) and Bitcoin (Lightning Network) for high performance, speed, and scaling.

However, Solana’s unique architecture and suite of innovations allows it to scale to levels far beyond a lot of these other chains. SOL advertises over 50,000 transactions per second, block creation every 400 milliseconds, and fractions of a cent in transaction fees.

How Much Solana Is In Circulation?

The native asset of the Solana blockchain currently has a total diluted supply of over 500 million SOL, of which over 340 million are in circulation as of June 2022.

SOL was used in private and public sales following its issue in 2017. The amount of SOL in circulation surged in 2021, when the lockups on these initial investments from validators, service providers, and other early investors ended.

SOL is also an inflationary token, with its total supply increasing year-on-year, although at a diminishing rate, starting at 10% but tapering to a bottom of 1.5% for the long term. However, as of May 2022, 50% of SOL transaction fees are burned, thereby reducing the amount in circulation.

Around 3,600 of the largest SOL accounts control 88% of the total diluted supply. As of May 2022, this amounts to less than 0.1% of the total number of SOL accounts.

How Do You Buy Solana?

You can purchase Solana on most cryptocurrency exchanges thanks to its status, as of June 2022, as a top-10 cryptocurrency.

Besides Bitcoin and Ethereum, Solana is often traded against the most reputable stablecoins. Depending on the exchange, you can also trade it with some fiat currencies.

You can also buy Solana in peer-to-peer transactions and on decentralized exchanges (DEX) on the Solana network.

Is It Possible to Buy Solana Instantly?

When purchasing on a DEX, the settlement of SOL is practically instant thanks to its extremely fast transaction speed. This is also the case with P2P transactions.

On a centralized exchange (CEX), the purchase of SOL may seem instant, but the coins aren’t actually being settled. Rather, the new SOL balance is just reflected in the user’s account, although it remains in the CEX’s SOL wallet.

Practically, therefore, transacting in Solana should be as good as instant. Exceptions may occur when withdrawing SOL to a private wallet from a CEX or another centralized service. That’s because the CEX may have to apply Know Your Customer or Anti Money Laundering procedures before initiating a transaction.

How Do You Store Solana?

You can store Solana in wallets, of which there are two main types when not counting a CEX or other centralized service’s account that doesn’t actually store the user’s SOL.

Cold wallets employ purely offline means of storing the keys to the wallet. Some users simply write the key down on a piece of paper, and others use devices that aren’t connected to the internet. While varying in sophistication and bearing their own risks, they do protect the keys from hacks and other internet-based attacks.

Hot wallets, meanwhile, connect to the internet. They often come in the form of desktop applications or browser extensions.

Solana Energy Consumption

As a network that uses the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, Solana’s energy consumption tends to be far lower than that of cryptocurrencies that use proof-of-work like Bitcoin and (currently) Ethereum.

According to Solana Labs, Solana’s energy use per transaction in joules amounted to just 2,707 in March 2022. In contrast, their figures rate Bitcoin at over 7 billion and Ethereum at 777 million joules per transaction.

As per the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute’s 2022 report on PoS networks, however, Solana draws almost 2 million kWh of electricity per year.

This puts it at a far higher consumption level than the likes of other third-generation blockchains like Polkadot (approximately 70,000 kWh) and Cardano (approx. 600,000 kWh).

Is Solana a Good Investment?

Solana’s exciting combination of extremely high transaction throughput and very low fees make the network an appealing destination for dApp developers, and that in itself is a good enough prospect for many investors.

This is underlined by the fee-burning mechanism implemented by Solana. It has the potential to make Solana deflationary and therefore a better store of value with more and more adoption and network use.

However, critics of Solana point to its failings in terms of decentralization. This is mainly because the validation on the network costs far more than most cryptocurrency users can afford, and tokenomics appear to favor venture capital investors.

Furthermore, several outages have seen the blockchain being halted. These successful attacks have led many to question Solana’s security and its ability to compete with the likes of Ethereum for dominance in the space.