Not to be confused with classic Patty Labelle, that trash song from Train, or this women's accessories and clothing website. I'm obviously speaking of a cooler SOL sister (outside Patty Labelle)... Solana. The Solana blockchain is one of the more interesting projects to pop this bull cycle, so let's find out what makes this thing tick and why it continues to crush.
What is Solana?
Solana is a dApp production ecosystem focused on scalability and speed. Their stated goal is "scaling blockchain for global adoption". They want to be the foundational layer for devs to build their products in an efficient, quick, and language agnostic manner within a secure, immutable environment.
It was founded by engineers at Qualcomm, Intel, and Dropbox with the promise of delivering a scalable network without sacrificing security or decentralization. This Delegated Proof of Stake network supports up to 65K transactions per second and 400ms block times. (Dahlem)
Key Attributes
Anatoly Yakovenko, a Solana founder and POH creator, describes SOL's "8 Key Innovations" that make up the blockchain in EXTREME detail on the Solana Medium page (links included):
- Proof of History (POH) — a clock before consensus;
- Tower BFT — a PoH-optimized version of PBFT;
- Turbine — a block propagation protocol;
- Gulf Stream — Mempool-less transaction forwarding protocol;
- Sealevel — Parallel smart contracts run-time;
- Pipelining — a Transaction Processing Unit for validation optimization
- Cloudbreak — Horizontally-Scaled Accounts Database; and
- Archivers — Distributed ledger store
Feel free to dive into the nerddom of each category, but I will try to provide a high level, short & palatable definition of each that goes a bit beyond the blurbs above.
Proof of History is quite literally a distributed cryptographic timestamp or clock that allows for event order history. Here's a shiny video:
Tower BFT is a modified version of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT). Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) is the feature of reaching an agreement or consensus about particular blocks even when some nodes are failing to respond or sending malicious values to the network. PBFT is optimized for asynchronous systems and is faster than BFT algorithms which are more suited to synchronous systems. Tower's main difference is that it utilizes the POH as the global network time source prior to consensus.
Turbine is Solana's block propagation protocol and its answer to the blockchain trilemma- scalability, decentralization, and security. "Turbine is optimized for streaming, and transmits data using UDP only, and implements a random path per packet through the network as leaders (block producers) stream their data." These leaders break a block into packets and send data 'downstream' to validators. These validators then send that packet to a group of peers called a neighborhood. "You can visualize the network as a tree of neighborhoods, allowing the network to grow".
Gulf Stream is not referring to your grandpa's RV (although those are pretty cool). It is the transaction forwarding protocol used by the network. It basically sends upcoming unconfirmed transactions to the designated Leaders at the network edge. Solana calls it mempool-less because validators can essentially process 100K unconfirmed transactions (mempool is a batch of unconfirmed transactions) in about 2 seconds.
Sealevel is its "parallel smart contracts runtime... that can process tens of thousands of contracts in parallel, using as many cores as are available to the Validator...The reason why Solana is able to process transactions in parallel is that [the] transactions describe all the states a transaction will read or write while executing." This is contradictory to single threaded runtimes (cough...cough, Ethereum Virtual Machine and EOS WASM) where one smart contract at a time modifies the blockchain.
Pipelining is a common method used to achieve quick validations of blocks and replicating them across the network. Pipelining is the Transaction Processing Unit for validation optimization used in Solana.
Cloudbreak is SOL's horizontally-scaled accounts database. It differs from some blockchains that use LevelDB and are limited to ~5000 TPS per machine. Cloudbreak uses Operating System-centric mechanisms such as memory mapped files and sequential operations to allow for concurrent read/writes and scalability.
Archive is Solana’s distributed ledger. It takes the idea of FileCoin's Proof of Replication (PoREP), then modifies and optimizes it for batch verification. It uses its POH technology so that nodes are not required to keep Petabytes of data and implements its fast-to-verify PoREP- in essence, enabling a bit torrent style distribution of the ledger.
Tokenomics
SOL is the native coin of the Solana Blockchain and is used for staking, transaction fees, and governance. It uses a Delegated PoS algorithm. The MC of Solana is currently $9.2B. The max supply of SOL is 488.6 million with 272.6 million coins currently in circulation.
SOL's all time high was recorded on May 18, 2021 at $58.03 and its recorded ATL was May 11, 2020 at $0.50. It has been ranging between $20-$45 since late May 2021.
Why has it crushed this year?
Putting in Work
The Solana project has done well in terms of increase in network size and appreciation of the SOL coin. Much of the warranted hoopla is due to the team's dedication to getting things done. As of May 2021 they had the most active developers out of any blockchain project and just released today they were second only to AVAX (via Coin98 Analytics). Just check out their GitHub Activity courtesy of TheTie:
The Ecosystem
They are also adding projects to their ecosystem at an incredible rate. They have around 250 projects on their blockchain with notables such as Serum, Audius, Solstarter, Radium, and bunches more below.
Big Money Backer
They also have Sam Bankman-Fried the FTX/Alameda Research/Project Serum billionaire-haircut-needing-desk-sleeping-dude that has a love affair with them.
DeFi
Not gonna go too deep here, but if you haven't heard of Serum DEX, Raydium, Saber Stablecoin, as well as the others on the list above... you may want to look into them. Small Caps Raydium and Serum have roughly $1.2B TVL between the two of them.
My take
What drew me to Solana, and the reason I bought in, was the intuitive nature and the clean build of the dApps. I first saw Audius- was impressed and started looking harder at Solana. Many Solana projects look and feel natural, unlike many of the clunky friction-ridden blockchain apps we deal with generally. It currently holds 3% of my crypto portfolio, but it is definitely a project I will continue to buy into as long as progress keeps moving forward.
If you haven't taken a deeper dive into Solana I would suggest you start with some of the links below (just please not the Train video). As always, thank you for reading and have a great week!
