What is Solana (SOL)?
Solana —— A Web-Scale Blockchain for Secure and Scalable Decentralized Apps and Marketplaces
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- Solana is a high-speed single-layer blockchain, currently supporting peak capacity of 65k transactions per second and 400ms block times using a network timestamp system called Proof-of-History ("PoH").
- Solana’s mission is to support all high-growth and high-frequency blockchain applications, and to democratize the world’s financial systems.
- Core technical team comes from Qualcomm, a Fortune 500 chip manufacturer, where they managed projects such as Firefox OS and the BREW Operating System.
- SOL is the native asset of the Solana blockchain. It is used for:
- Staking: Solana is in the process of enabling inflation rewards for staking the SOL token in exchange for powering and supporting the network.
- Transaction fees: users can use the SOL token to pay for simple token transactions and smart-contract executions on the network.
- Governance: the SOL token will be used in governance voting in the future.
Solana Key metrics
| Recent Price | $15.75 |
|---|---|
Market Cap | $4,142,483,137.73 |
Circulating Supply | 16,350,633 SOL (3.35%) |
Current Total Supply* | 488,634,933 SOL |
Initial Total Supply | 500,000,000 SOL |
- 11,365,067 SOL tokens are burnt and removed from supply.
About Solana
Founded by former Qualcomm, Intel, and Dropbox engineers in late-2017, Solana is a single-chain, delegated-Proof-of-Stake protocol whose focus is on delivering scalability without sacrificing decentralization or security.
Core to Solana's scaling solution is a decentralized clock titled Proof-of-History (PoH), built to solve the problem of time in distributed networks in where there is not a single, trusted, source of time. By using Verifiable Delay Functions, PoH allows each node to locally generate timestamps with SHA256 computations. This eliminates the need for the broadcasts of timestamps accross the network, improving overall network efficiency.
Solana’s mission is to support all high-growth and high-frequency blockchain applications, and to democratize the world’s financial systems.
At its core, Solana offers:
- Scalability: Solana is capable of supporting over 50,000 transactions per second, while maintaining block times of 400 milliseconds.
- Decentralization: with the use of Turbine block propagation protocol, the platform can support thousands of nodes while remaining performant and scalable.
- Inexpensive execution: transactions costs on the network are estimated to cost 10 USD for 1 million transactions.
SOL is the native asset of the Solana blockchain. It is used for:
- Staking: Solana is in the process of enabling inflation rewards for staking the SOL token in exchange for powering and supporting the network.
- Transaction fees: users can use the SOL token to pay for simple token transactions and smart-contract executions on the network.
- Governance: the SOL token will be used in governance voting in the future.
Solana Project Team
Anatoly Yakovenko is the most important person behind Solana, also the actual CEO of Solana. His professional career started at Qualcomm, where he quickly moved up the ranks and became senior staff engineer manager in 2015. Later on, his professional path shifted, and Yakovenko entered a new position as a software engineer at Dropbox.
In 2017, Yakovenko started working on a project which would later materialize as Solana. He teamed up with his Qualcomm colleague Greg Fitzgerald, and they founded a project called Solana Labs. Attracting several more former Qualcomm colleagues in the process, the Solana protocol and SOL token were released to the public in 2020.
Raj Gokal, the COO of Solana, is a venture investor at General Catalyst, Former Director of Product at Odama Health, Entrepreneur in Residence at Rock Health, CEO and co-founder of Sano.
Solana has a strong technical team including engineer like Michael Vines, Stephen Akridge, and more.
Solana Key Features
Solana's highly performant blockchain is built using 8 major innovations highlighted below:
- Proof of History - a clock before consensus. Record and prove that an event occurred within a specific point in time. Nodes in the network can continue to operate (process transactions) because they can trust the order and timing of transaction information before reaching a consensus.
- Tower Byzantine Fault Tolerance - a PoH-optimized version of PBFT. Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) is a method to alleviate bad behavior in distributed systems. Tower BFT leverages Solana’s PoH as a clock before consensus to reduce communication overhead and latency.
- Turbine - a block propagation protocol.
- Gulfstream - a Mempool-less transaction forwarding protocol.
- Sealevel - the world’s first parallel smart contracts run-time.
- Pipelining - a transaction processing unit for validation.
- Cloudbreak - a horizontally-scaled accounts database.
- Archivers - for distributed ledger storage. Archiver nodes store transaction status historical record fragments, used for Poh optimized PoRep (Proof of Replication) to prove storage status.
Solana Community and Social Channel
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