Solana Network - the real Ethereum killer?

By Mr. Valentine ❣️ | Informative crypto-related topics | 5 Jan 2021

With a name inspired by the coastal beach in California, Solana is a blockchain that has breezed into the race to be the fast, most secure and scalable solution in cryptocurrency space. But how does it measure up? Will it edge out Ethereum or other high-performance blockchain?

The Solana Network.

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The team of Solana, including former leading technologists from Intel, Qualcomm, Google and Netscape.

The CEO of Solana, Anatomy Yokovenko has an experience in software engineering from Dropbox and Qualcomm.

Solana has raised funding from investors such as Foundation Capital, Multicoin Capital and Distributed Global with an amount of $25 million.

Features of Solana.

1. Scalability

Scaling as a Layer 1 blockchain at Moore's Law rating, which says that processing speeds will double every after two years.

By simply using GPU and CPU power, there is no need for other complicated Layer 2 solutions like sharding that compromise stability and security.

2. Speed

For every 400 milliseconds, Solana creates a block with a sub-second confirmations and a speeds of 50,000 per second in transaction.

With such speeds, Solana has already passed Ethereum in terms of block account. This is why some people call Solana as the world's first ever web-scale blockchain, as it has a comparable transactional capacity to the internet.

3. Validators

Solana has over 350 validators around the globe, ensuring the network stability and security.

Any holder of Solana can be a validator, without a minimum requirement of staking.

4. Fees

Solana costs about $10 for every 1 million transactions, making it one of the lowest costs chains around the block. In comparison, transactions in Ethereum can cost people an average of $2.

What makes Solana different?

There are 8 innovations that makes Solana different from its the competitors;

And they are;

Proof-of-History

Tower BFT

Turbine

Gulfstream

Sealevel

Pipeline

Cloudbreak

Archivers.

What is Solana's Proof-of-History?

Proof-of-History, is the "secret sauce" and key innovation, allowing it to make superspeed fast transactions at 50,000 transactions for every second.

Despite the name, Proof-of-History is not actually a consensus mechanism such as Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake. PoH is a cryptographic clock in the blockchain of Solana that allows its nodes to agree on the the ordering events and time, without needing to talk with each other.

Each node can maintains its own clock by simply encoding the time passage in a simple, sequential-hashing Verifiable Delay Function SHA-256. This is a mouthful of words, so think of it graphically like this:

Imagine you are taking a photo of yourself that is holding a newspaper and showing the time and date, and published it or that picture on the next release of the newspaper.

Proof-of-History works in a similar way to record time. This will decreases messaging in nodes overhead and computation bulk, that allows Solana to reach a very fast speed.

Solana's unique offering has attracted over 100 projects in DeFi, Web3 and blockchain gaming today like;

1. FTX

Crypto-derivatives platform that is founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, already launched a superspeed decentralized exchange called Serum on the Solana Network, leveraging the capabilities of Solana to give sub-second settlement with very small transaction fees.

2. Audius

The audio streaming platform, a community-owned, has also partnered with Solana, and is now working on migrating its system on content management, with audio tracks of over 150,000 to the blockchain of Solana.

3. Chainlink

The oracle giving data feeds to every decentralized exchanges, has also partnered with Solana and aims to develop a very high-frequency oracle that can provide price updates for every 400 milliseconds.

With promising partnerships, Solana's ecosystem is growing fast and carving out a formidable niche in the crypto space.

It's mainnet is still in Beta mode and have been running since March 2020 and already processed with over 7 billion transactions until today.

However, recently on December 04, 2020, Solana experienced an outage which lasted for 6 hours. The network somehow managed to resume its function, with a reminders from commentators that Ethereum also had this teething problems during its early stages.