If you’re curious about what the fastest speed of a blockchain transaction is, you’ll be interested to know that it’s 10,000 Transactions Per Second (TPS), as assured by Ethereum 2.0. Blockchain technology gained popularity for its transactional speed, and financial platforms have been struggling with transaction validation and low payment speed for a long time. This is why Transaction Speed (TS) is one of the major factors in blockchain development as it also drives network traffic. The increased transaction speed of blockchain results in better data transferring amongst the various parties for confirming the transactions.
One blockchain that stands out for its high-speed performance is Solana. Solana blockchain has an attribute of cryptographic time-sampling that can regulate the network traffic and can accommodate up to 65,000 TPS. Solana is the fastest blockchain that performs transactions in a blink.
In this article, we’ll dive deeper into Solana and its fundamentals. We’ll take a look at the concept, components, and features of the Solana blockchain.
What is Solana?
Solana is a decentralized public blockchain system that operates in an open-source manner. It achieves its consensus with the help of proof of history and proof of stake. Solana can regulate peer-to-peer transactions with its cryptocurrency called SOL and assures 50,000 TPS. Solana blockchain is “censorship-resistant” as guaranteed by its founders, and it also supports smart contracts and Non-Fungible Tokens.
The Founders of Solana
Anatoly Yakovenko founded Solana in 2017. Yakovenko wrote a whitepaper on the concept of timekeeping technique concerning the distributed systems known as Proof of History (PoH). Proof of History helps in eliminating the issue of scalability and time needed to reach consensus on transaction orders. Yakovenko believed that this innovative technique could easily automate the blockchain process of transaction ordering, giving a key piece that will drive the crypto networks to scale beyond their capacity.
Other contributors to Solana include Eric Williams, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist at Solana Labs, Greg Fitzgerald, Co-Founder & CTO at Solana Labs, and Raj Gokal, Co-Founder and COO at Solana Labs.
Background of Solana
In the second quarter of 2018, Solana Labs began seeking funding to develop its new crypto network. The team raised more than $20 million in private token sales between April 2018 and July 2019. In late July 2019, they announced the sales as a single Series A. The fundraising campaign coincided with Solana’s progress on the protocol, which went through various permissioned testnet phases until the company announced the Tour de SOL public incentive testnet in Q3 2020.
The initial stage of Tour de SOL went online in February 2020, and it is still active today with the Solana Mainnet Beta version. Solana became live on Mainnet Beta in March 2020 after raising $1.76 million in a CoinList public token sale. Basic transaction capabilities and smart contract functionality were available on the project’s beta network.
However, because Solana was still deciding its continuing issue schedule, it did not contain any staking rewards. The current goal is for the beta version to be upgraded to a more production-ready version in late 2020 or early 2021. Solana intends to upgrade its Mainnet Beta network to a complete mainnet version later in December 2020 or early in 2021. Solana’s suggested inflation schedule will be introduced in this expanded version of mainnet. The Mainnet Beta will commence voting for “pico-inflation” on December 7, 2020, followed by a voting period to allow full inflation on December 21, 2020. Solana Labs remains a significant contributor to the Solana network, while the Solana Foundation supports ongoing development and community-building initiatives.
Token Economics of Solana: Understanding SOL and Its Distribution
Solana (SOL) is a blockchain platform that aims to provide a high-speed and low-cost solution for decentralized applications (dApps). Like most blockchain platforms, SOL has its native token called Sols, which is crucial to the network’s operations. In this article, we will delve into the token economics of Solana, including its uses, distribution, and supported wallets.
Understanding Sols and Lamports
Sols is the native token of Solana, and it is divisible up to nine decimal places. Lamport is a fraction of a sol and is named after Leslie Lamport, a renowned computer scientist, and Turing Award recipient. One Lamport value is equivalent to 0.0000000000582 sol.
- Staking SOL
One of the primary uses of SOL is staking, where users can help secure the network by staking their tokens directly or delegating them to active validators. In return, stakeholders receive inflation incentives, which were recently enabled by Solana.
- Fees for Transactions and Smart Contracts
SOL can also be used to pay fees when sending transactions or running smart contracts on the network. Users can interact with applications and execute transactions by paying the necessary fees with SOL.
Token Distribution and Launch of SOL
To distribute tokens, the Solana team conducted five financing rounds, four of which were private sales. These sales started in Q1 of 2019 and ended in a $20 million Series A lead by Muliticoin Capital in July 2019. Partners in these sales included Distributed Global, BlockTower Capital, Foundation Capital, Block change VC, Slow Ventures, NEO Global Capital, Passport Capital, and Rockaway Ventures. The exact amount of tokens distributed to investors was not disclosed, but Solana stated that the funds would be allocated to engineering and project management.
In 2020, Solana raised an additional $4 million through its fourth private sale (called a Strategic Sale) and a public auction sale sponsored by CoinList. The remaining SOL tokens will be distributed to Solana Labs employees, the Solana Foundation (to aid development and counterbalance validator voting power), and a “community reserve” (also maintained by the Solana Foundation) to finance community projects and app developers.
Here’s a breakdown of the token distribution:
- Seed Round investors – 15.86% of the proceeds
- Founding Sale investors – 2.63% of the proceeds
- Validator Sale investors – 5.07% of the proceeds
- Strategic Sale investors – 1.84% of the proceeds
- Public Auction Sale investors – 1.6% of the proceeds
What Are the Wallets Supported by Solana?
Solana is a rapidly growing blockchain that has attracted the attention of investors and developers alike. It offers fast transactions at a low cost, making it a desirable option for users looking for an efficient and affordable blockchain. One of the key features of Solana is its support for a variety of wallets, making it easy for users to manage their digital assets. In this article, we will discuss the different types of wallets supported by Solana and how they can benefit users.
Mobile App Wallets
Solana’s native command-line program supports a range of mobile app wallets, which can be downloaded and installed on smartphones. These wallets offer an easy-to-use interface, making them a popular choice for users who prefer a convenient and user-friendly experience. The Solana mobile app wallet is available on both Android and iOS, providing users with a seamless experience regardless of their mobile device.
Web Wallets
In addition to mobile app wallets, Solana also supports web wallets that can be accessed through a browser. These wallets are often more convenient than command-line tools, which can be intimidating for users who are not familiar with coding. Solana recommends using one of the app wallets or a browser-based online wallet for most users, as they offer a more comfortable experience than command-line tools.
SolFlare Web Wallet
SolFlare is a popular web wallet that is specifically designed for the Solana blockchain. It provides users with a simple and secure way to manage their digital assets, including the ability to stake their SOL tokens. SolFlare is easy to use and is a popular choice for users who want to access their assets quickly and easily.
Hardware Wallets
For users who require an extra level of security, Solana supports hardware wallets. These wallets store private keys on a physical device, making it almost impossible for hackers to access them remotely. Solana supports a range of hardware wallets, including Ledger and Trezor.
Command-line Wallets
Finally, Solana also supports command-line wallets, which are typically more suited to expert users or developers. These wallets offer more advanced features, and new features on the Solana blockchain are usually supported first on the command line before being incorporated into third-party solutions.
What is Solana’s consensus mechanism?
Solana uses a Proof of Stake (PoS) based consensus method called Tower BFT to reduce communication costs and latency. To achieve consensus, Solana’s approach utilizes the network’s Proof of History (PoH) as a reference. Validators can only vote on a fork during a defined period of hashes called a slot, which is approximately 400 milliseconds (ms) long in the current network configuration.
The network can roll back to a previous point every 400ms, but the duration of the delay increases with each subsequent vote. Thus, secondary votes make it increasingly difficult to reverse transactions in a particular slot. Consequently, a block with more votes has a greater chance of remaining in the chain indefinitely. Each validator votes 32 times in the previous 12 seconds, and the vote cast 12 seconds ago has a timeout of 232 slots, or around 54 years. Therefore, the network is unlikely to reverse its decision.
After two-thirds of the system’s validators have voted on the order of events, Tower BTF delivers finality. Completed transactions cannot be reversed on-chain, and the Solana mainnet employs delegated Proof-of-Stake (dPoS). Token holders can participate in the block creation process by either staking their tokens and becoming validators or delegating their tokens to trusted validators and earning rewards.
Anyone on the network can become a validator, and the network’s structure is designed to scale with bandwidth and hardware. Although the leader selection mechanism is stake-weighted, there is no minimum staking requirement. GPU cores are utilized to parallelize processing and shorten verification times.
What is the Technology Stack Used by Solana?
Solana is a fast-growing, high-performance blockchain platform that boasts five breakthroughs, making it one of the best in the market. Let’s take a closer look at the technology stack that Solana uses, and what makes it perform so well.
Proof-of-History: A Clock Before Consensus
Solana’s first breakthrough is the Proof-of-History (PoH) algorithm. In distributed networks, nodes cannot trust the timestamp on messages received from other nodes, which creates the biggest challenge in distributed networks – agreeing on the time and order of events. PoH uses a high-frequency Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) to establish a cryptographically safe source of time throughout the network. This allows nodes to trust the date and sequencing of messages they receive and generate the next block without having to align itself with the entire network beforehand, reducing the consensus overhead.
Turbine: A Block Propagation Protocol
Solana uses a unique but linked protocol called Turbine to transmit blocks between validators independent of consensus. Turbine is primarily influenced by BitTorrent and is designed for streaming. When a block is streamed, it is split into tiny packets containing erasure codes and is then dispersed across a large number of random peers.
Tower BFT: A PoH-optimized version of PBFT
Solana runs a consensus mechanism called Tower BFT on top of Proof-of-History, which is a PBFT-like algorithm that uses the synchronized clock allowed by PoH to reach consensus on network transactions. When a node on the chain votes on a specific fork, they agree to be locked out of voting on an opposing fork for a given period of time. As they continue to vote on the same fork, the time they are locked out rises exponentially until they reach a maximum lockout of 32 votes for the same fork. When nodes on the network hit this maximum vote lockout, they will earn inflation incentives.
Pipeline: A Transaction Processing Unit for validation optimization
Solana’s Transaction Processing Unit (TPU) takes full use of pipelining, a CPU design improvement, to optimize transaction validation. The TPU goes through data fetching at the kernel level, signature verification at the GPU level, banking at the CPU level, and writing at the kernel level. By the time the TPU begins sending blocks to the validators, it has already collected the next batch of packets and is beginning to sign them.
Archives: Distributed Ledger Storage
Solana delegates data storage from validators to Archivers, a network of nodes. The network history is fragmented, and small sections of the network are archived by archivers. The Archivers are asked to show that they are storing the data that they are required to store on a regular basis. Solana uses Proofs of Replication (PoRep), which are significantly influenced by Filecoin.
Developing Solana Blockchain Services with Etelligens
As blockchain technology continues to revolutionize industries, the demand for blockchain development services is increasing. Etelligens provides top-notch Solana blockchain services to help businesses leverage the power of decentralized systems. In this article, we will explore the range of services offered by Etelligens in Solana blockchain development.
Creating Nodes for Public and Private Blockchain Networks
At Etelligens, our team of blockchain experts develops effective and robust nodes for both public and private blockchain networks. We ensure that the nodes comply with the consensus process in place. For Solana’s network, we use the Proof-of-History method to create nodes. This approach integrates timestamps while recording each transaction, allowing the system to monitor historical records of every transaction.
Support and Maintenance of Solana dApps
Our clients rely on us for extremely effective support and maintenance services for their Solana-based decentralized applications (dApps). We offer lifelong assistance to clients with existing dApps, as well as those who have their dApps built by us. Our team of experts helps clients with architecture, auditing, and providing optimal dApps, as well as in designing and implementing them.
Development of Solana Wallet Apps
At Etelligens, we have blockchain developers with technical expertise in creating blockchain wallet apps for Solana. Solana wallets are essential for storing various currencies and digital assets, checking your balance, and monitoring your transactions. Our team helps clients develop custom wallet apps that meet their specific requirements.
Smart Contract Development
To support diverse dApps, we provide Smart Contract development services using the Rust programming language for the public Solana blockchain network. Our team helps clients with architecture, auditing, and providing optimal Smart Contracts, as well as in designing and implementing them.
Development of Enterprise-Grade dApps
Etelligens has a team of skilled blockchain experts who can create enterprise-grade dApps for clients using the Solana platform. Our services enable clients to reduce their time to market and increase their ROI by creating innovative and high-performing dApps.
Concluding Note
Solana is an open-source platform that offers scalable transactions at a fast pace. With the Proof-of-History consensus mechanism, Solana improves the efficiency of the blockchain by integrating timestamps while recording each transaction. This mechanism serves as a clock for the network, allowing it to regulate its transaction monitoring tasks at a faster speed with enhanced security and privacy.
Etelligens is committed to delivering high-quality Solana blockchain services to its clients. Our team of experts has the technical expertise to develop custom blockchain solutions tailored to meet the specific requirements of businesses. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can help your business leverage the power of blockchain technology.
