Solana is a young smart contract chain that claims to be the fastest blockchain. It uses a novel consensus mechanism called proof of history. The TLDR and oversimplified explanation is that each transaction is time stamped so validators don’t fight over what transaction should be executed next in the chain. Solana enjoyed a mercurial climb in the past 2 years with tons of dApps and a thriving ecosystem . The chain simply grew too much too fast and has experienced embarrassing outages through much of 2022.
A proposed solution to this issue is QUIC . To Understand QUIC, we must first understand its predecessors TCP and UDP. TCP and UDP have been the primary transport layer protocols for the last 40 years! They are some serious OG internet protocols. You might not realize you use them every single day.
TCP aka transmission control protocol is a connection oriented, ordered, and error checked protocol that more less guarantees delivery or retransmission of data packets. Sounds really reliable and awesome right? It is good in certain situations like right now! See that https preceding this webpage in the top left corner? Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (https) is likely using TCP to provide a stable secure transfer of information for this particular blog. However, TCP does have some downsides. It is slow and has larger data overhead. Not exactly ideal for a ton of circumstances.
That’s were User Datagram Protocol (UDP) comes in. UDP is connectionless protocol that does not guarantee delivery or even send the information in order. It uses checksums to make sure that all the data was sent, but doesn’t check if they were received. It basically just projectile vomits the data and says good luck. It sounds terrible, but it is fast AF and I bet you actually prefer it in many circumstances. When you use VOIP (voice over internet protocol) to talk to your friends on PlayStation network, would you rather every tenth word be interrupted or wait several seconds before the audio arrived? Same thing with online games. Want a quick buffer or unplayable inputs and video. Speed matters and Solana uses UDP for its transport layer.
Since Solana gas fees are so low, dubious parties have an easy time spamming the network with thousands of transactions. This spam and the UDP use led to the Solana network crashing at some inopportune times. The whole point of a layer 1 is that is it always up and running right?
So back to QUIC, what is it?!
QUIC was developed by google In 2012 and integrated into Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. Without getting way too technical, it tries to implement the dependability of TCP with the speed of UDP. They took the best of TCP, added the security of TLS and establish a “handshake” connection channel. QUIC then uses asynchronous communication to reduce latency during transactions. Developers are hoping to have their cake and eat it too.
QUIC combined with stake-weighted transaction processes should lead to less network congestion and deter spam from creating network outages.
Will all this work? Only time will tell, but you can check the status of the Solana network anytime here .
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