Exploring the Solana Blockchain Revolution
By Lekshmi PG, R & D Engineer, Kerala Blockchain Academy
Watch the Solana Dev Series on our YouTube channel:
Episode 02: Phantom Wallet & Solana Playground
Episode 03: Solana Dev Environment ( PART 1)
The term “Blockchain” initially became prominent alongside Bitcoin, but its evolution didn’t stop there. Ethereum, the first public-programmable blockchain, played a crucial role in shaping its independent existence. With Ethereum’s introduction, the concept of immutability and decentralisation gained significant attention, attracting numerous tech enthusiasts to the ecosystem. This influx of interest led to the development of many other blockchain platforms that can build innovative decentralised applications (dApps) on top of them.
So what is the need for this large number of different Blockchain platforms? The primary reason is Blockchain Trilemma. According to Vitalik Buterin, no simple Blockchain Architecture can attain all three features: Decentralization, Scalability & Security. Ethereum lacks Scalability by providing Decentralization & Security. The research is still ongoing to make Ethereum faster and likewise invent a newer blockchain network that could solve this trilemma issue.
Solana Blockchain took birth to fulfil this mission. Solana has SOL as the native token, which claims to process 65,000 transactions per second(tps). Not only that, at the time of writing this article, Solan boasts a Total Value Locked (TVL) of $1.75 billion, impressively hitting the $1 billion mark in just 40 days.
What makes Solana stand out?
Anatoly Yakovenko (Founder of Solana) knows that to achieve scalability, some changes have to be made to the consensus mechanism. So, he introduced a new consensus mechanism named Proof Of History (PoH). Solana stands out with this consensus mechanism, enhancing the Proof of Stake mechanism to expedite information validation. PoH serves as a consensus mechanism, establishing a chronological record to verify the occurrence of events at precise moments. It achieves this by integrating the flow of time into the ledger, enabling the confirmation of event sequences without the need for network-wide synchronisation.
Solana Development from NewBorn to Teenager
Solana was born in November 2017, when Anatoly Yakovenko released a whitepaper detailing Proof of History, a method for synchronising time among computers lacking mutual trust. On February 13, 2018, Greg Fitzgerald, a former colleague of Anatoly, developed the first open-source version based on Anatoly’s whitepaper. The project was published to GitHub under the name, “Silk” in the Loom Protocol Organisation.
On February 28th, Greg unveiled his initial release, showcasing that 10,000 signed transactions could be verified and processed in just slightly over half a second. Not long afterwards, Stephen Akridge, another of Anatoly’s former colleagues, revealed that throughput could be significantly enhanced by delegating signature verification to graphics processing units. Thus, Anatoly, Greg, Stephen, and more enthusiasts got interested, and the team was formed. They initially founded a company named Loom; however, due to naming conflicts with another project in the Ethereum ecosystem, they later rebranded to Solana.
Do you know the name Solana pays homage to Solana Beach, a quaint beach town located north of San Diego, where Anatoly, Greg, and Stephen resided.
On March 28th, the team established the Solana GitHub organisation and renamed Greg’s prototype, Silk, to Solana.
In June 2018, the team expanded the technology’s capabilities to operate on cloud-based networks. On July 19th, they launched a 50-node, permissioned public testnet that consistently handled bursts of 250,000 transactions per second.
In December, under the name v0.10 Pillbox, the team released a permissioned testnet with 150 nodes on a gigabit network, showcasing soak tests that processed an average of 200,000 transactions per second, with peaks exceeding 500,000. To support further development, the team conducted fundraising from April 2018 to July 2019, amassing over $20 million through various private token sales. Followed by subsequent rounds of fundraising. Following this, they launched their test network, Tour de SOL, as an incentivised testnet event, encouraging the community to participate and thus aid in the ecosystem’s growth.
In March 2020, Solana’s beta mainnet made its debut.
Let’s Dive on Solana
As said, Solana got a high tps. By profoundly studying & comparing Ethereum & Bitcoin — which has 10–14 tps for the former and 7 tps for the latter, with Visa — which manages peaks of 65,000 tps, Anatoly identified the lack of a reliable clock for network synchronization. He also understood that with easy synchronisation, the resulting network can achieve blazing speeds, limited only by the network’s bandwidth. This inspired the creation of Proof of History.
With this PoH and some protocol-level updations, Solana claimed a tps rate of 65,000. Solana features a block time of approximately 0.4 seconds, offering the fastest transaction finality among other blockchain networks. Solana claims to achieve decentralisation by supporting around 1,652 validators on its mainnet. Solana boasts the lowest transaction fee among layer-one blockchain networks. Last but not least, Solana possesses high scalability potential.
Solana boasts a vast ecosystem, which is worthy of its video to describe fully. Discover more about them here.
Solana Grants
In order to support new web3 developers and also to grow and secure their ecosystem, Solana provides various Grant programs. They provide funds for a few categories of projects like Censorship Resistance, DAO Tooling, Education, Developer Tooling, Financial Inclusion, and Academic Research. Apart from that, there is Solana Ventures, an independent venture capital firm that is not affiliated with the Solana Foundation. It invests primarily in companies’ pre-seed or seed stages and is more heavily weighted towards token-based investments. Moreover, Solana also conducts frequent Hackthons with large reward pools that welcome you to a large community with filled opportunities to grow your portfolio. If you want to know more about Solana grants, visit here. Solana has also partnered with other stakeholders worldwide to enable more innovation; for more info, go here.
To Conclude…
Launched in 2020, Solana has emerged as a promising blockchain platform with high transaction throughput. While it’s true that early growth brought scalability challenges, network outages, and security incidents, the development team has demonstrably addressed these issues through ongoing optimisations and security enhancements. Despite these hurdles, the Solana ecosystem boasts a dedicated community and continues to attract developers drawn to its potential for building scalable applications.
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