Get Started with Solana

Solana, a unique and 4th generation blockchain developed by Solana Labs, is a project that entered the industry by publishing the whitepaper in November 2017. Later, when the Mainnet beta was released in April 2020, all rights of the project were transferred from Solana Labs to the Solana Foundation. Its founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, built Solana as an opportunity to counter these bottleneck issues, as BTC and many other projects suffer from scalability and speed issues. Yakovenko, conveying his experiences during the time he worked at Dropbox company in reaching these goals of the project was very effective in the progress of the project.

During the process, 167 million SOL tokens were transferred from Solana Labs to the Solana Foundation, with the motto “Helping the adoption of decentralized technologies as a public good”.Solana is a blockchain network focused on fast transactions and high throughput. It uses a unique method to deliver transactions to increase its speed. Users can pay transaction fees or create or use smart contracts with the network’s native cryptocurrency, SOL.

Solana uses a network based on DPoS(Delegated-Proof-of-Stake) consensus software. This differs from PoS networks in some ways. While there is a validator in DPoS as in PoS networks, it stands out as a much faster network than Pos in terms of speed. As the validators confirm the transactions and ensure that these transactions are added to the blocks, they earn rewards at a determined rate within the network.

Non-verifiers, on the other hand, can earn some incentive rewards, provided that they transfer their assets to validators. Thus, it can be said that the operation of the system is ensured by allocating trust, and it can be said that it can be decided which nodes deserve to verify transactions.

The process of confirming a transaction on the network is as follows:Your transactions will be added to the leader.The leader will sort the messages and efficiently sort them so that they can be processed by other nodes.The leader then executes the processes in the current state stored in RAM.

The leader will then publish the transaction and signature of the latest status to the verifiers.Verifiers will then perform the same actions on copies of the status and, if approved, publish the signatures of the status.

Published endorsements will then act as votes for the consensus algorithm.

Proof of History (POH)Solana PoH consensus algorithm helps to generate greater efficiency and higher throughput within the Solana network. Thus, by having historical records of events or transactions, it allows the system to track transactions and follow the sequence of events.Practical Byzantine Fault ToleranceThanks to the improved version of the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance, PoH is freed from transaction latency and high message stacks.

Gulf Stream Protocol

The Gulf Stream protocol plays an important role in caching transactions and forwarding them to the edge of the network. This allows validators to preprocess transactions, reduce confirmation time, faster leader switching, and reduce memory space on validators from pools of unconfirmed transactions. So this protocol is the feature that allows Solana to support 50k TPS.

Parallel Smart Contracts

Sealevel is a hyper-parallelized compute processing engine used to scale horizontally between GPUs and SSDs. When this system is implemented, it allows Solana to achieve a more efficient runtime and allows transactions to run concurrently on the same state blockchains.

Processing UnitWhile blocks are validated at all nodes in the network, a flow assignment is made for data entries on different hardware responsible for each block in Solana. Thus, a high-performance scalability performance is achieved.Compute DatabasesThe project organizes a database that reads and writes transaction entries simultaneously, and transactions are carried out without the risk of fragmentation.

Storage of Blockchain HistoryEach node of the network can copy information from the blockchain according to the volume of available space on their hardware. Archivists download their relevant data through these verifiers. At the same time, this data can be accessed by the network at any time.

Total Number of Transactions: 18 Million+Average Transaction Cost: $0.00025Total Node Number: 959Number of Collaborating Institutions/Organizations: 157Solana: 274 Million LEFTTotal Supply: 496.6 Million LEFTNumber of Transactions Per Second: 862 Solana is the native cryptocurrency of the blockchain. It is used for charging fees within the Solana network. Another usage area of ​​SOL is to use this token in order to run on-chain applications and verify the outputs in the software. In addition, SOL tokens are preferred in micropayments known as Lamport.Solana also announced that she had partnered with another important project, the Serum protocol, to have her own DEX project.Apart from this, Solana cooperates with a total of +157 important projects such as Chainlink, Formatic, FTX, Anchor, Tempest, Exodus, Waves, Crypto.com, Swipe, Okex.

Solana Advantages:It is a high TPS (Transactions Per Second) rate.

Low Transaction Fees ($0.0005 USD)

DeFi support is a 4th generation blockchain project.

Solana provides composability between projects. It allows users to perform transactions without having to deal with the Layer 2 system.

Solana achieves high scalability by leveraging PoH and many other breakthrough innovations.

Solana Disadvantages:The minimum hardware requirements required to be a validator are quite high.

Because it is an innovative solution, it is less preferred than BTC and ETH.

Many apps are still waiting for the launch time in the Mainnet Beta.

The main problems in 1st generation and 2nd generation blockchain projects were transaction speeds and transaction costs. Solana is trying to solve this common problem with high transaction speeds and bandwidth. It is a green blockchain network compared to BTC, with a new structure and an efficient consensus algorithm for verifying transactions. Combining this new generation consensus algorithm solution with the PoS mechanism, Solana is certain that it is still early for it to reach a level that can compete with projects such as BTC and ETH thanks to its architecture.