What is Solana crypto?
Solana is a cryptocurrency that is very similar to the Ethereum Network i.e. it is a platform that allows developers to build decentralized applications using smart contracts.
Founded by some pretty legit players (more on them later), Solana was built to address the deficiencies of the Ethereum network: slow transactions and high fees.
Fast, decentralized, and scalable.
The first thing you should know about Solana is that it is super-mega-ultra fast.
It can currently process 50,000 transactions per second. This is more than twice the processing capacity of Visa and more than 10 times that of Ethereum.
They claim that their theoretical maximum is 200K per second.
Secondly, Solana’s fees are much cheaper than Ethereum’s.
To process a transaction it currently costs $0.000001 compared to more than $30 on Ethereum.
Because Solana is so much faster and cheaper it is much more attractive as a platform to build on.
For example, say you are building a decentralized exchange. Wouldn’t you much rather use a platform that offers faster and cheaper transactions?
The way that Solana deploys software means it is also scalable. Its only limit is how far hardware can go.
Effectively it is the processing power of chips that creates the upper bound for performance.
As processing power improves following Moore’s law so too will Solana. In reality, 50,000 transactions per second is more than enough.
Solana’s innovation is the way that it validates transactions on the blockchain.
Like many other blockchains, Solana uses a proof-of-stake model.
Whereas proof of work requires energy, proof of stake requires validators to stake capital in the form of tokens. In this instance, they stake SOL tokens.
In short, a validator known as a miner stakes tokens, and if they try to cheat the system they lose their tokens. So economic incentives ensure they stay truthful.
The fast transaction speed is attractive to many dapp developers. Solana has built a large ecosystem of decentralized apps
How is Solana different from other blockchains
What is unique about Solana is that in addition to the proof of stake, they use an innovative method called Proof of History.
The mechanics of how this works and why it matters require you to have a computer science background so I will only describe this at a high level.
The core idea is that up until now it was very hard to measure time on a decentralized exchange.
You and I can look at our watches or phones to know what time it is but computers can’t.
Knowing the timestamp of blocks is key to processing transactions securely.
The proof of work mechanism that Bitcoin uses allows it to figure out the time but this slows down processing. As a result, a block is created every 10 minutes as opposed to every 800ms on Solana.
Solana figures time out by feeding the hashes.
This way miners know the order of transactions and can therefore process transactions in batches which results in them being many times more efficient.
Founders
Solana was founded by Anatoly Yakovenko who was a seriously good engineer working at Qualcomm.
He hired a bunch of his team when he left to found Solana.
Solana is named after his favorite beach in San Francisco where Qualcomm was based.
Anatoly had come across Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper on Bitcoin when it came out but had dismissed it.
Later in 2013 he revisited and acknowledged there was something more profound in it than he had originally realized.
As a senior engineer, he was able to critique the strengths and weaknesses of Bitcoin.
His epiphany on proof of time came after a coffee and beer-induced night at 4 am in the morning. Once he discovered this concept he left what he calls an ideal job to found Solana.
One of Solana’s key sponsors is Sam Bankman-Fried, the now multi-billionaire founder of FTX.
Sam is an influential stakeholder in the crypto space and he has used Solana to build a DeFi platform called Serum.
By the way, if this article is going over your head it would be best to read my foundational explanation, What is Ethereum, first
Criticisms of Solana
The founders say that they are still in beta mode.
This means that their blockchains are still rough around the edges. In computer geek speak it means that things might break. And they do.
Recently the Solana network was out for more than 48hrs and this is not the first time it happens.
For a blockchain with a market cap of $35Bn as of February 2022, outages such as this are not acceptable to many.
Solana’s detractors claim that it is neither truly decentralized and neither does it fulfill its promise of …well, actually working.
Another criticism is that you need to write code in Rust.
Rust is a more robust language. The problem is that fewer people know it and have to invest time and effort in it if they want to build dapps on Solana.
It’s a wrap
Solana is ultra-fast and backed by serious people in the crypto space.
As such it could be a serious contender to Ethereum and other layer 1 solutions.
However, it is still experiencing growing pains. I guess we will find out how things pan out.
If you want to read about some projects that use Solana I recommend you read my description of Genopets crypto, a move-to-earn game with a lot of potential. Or you can find out everything about Helium, a wireless internet network who have just moved to Solana.