"As a decentralized application, Solana has become a strong competitor in the blockchain with its lightning-fast transaction speed and extremely cost-effective transaction fees."
Solana is a blockchain-based smart contract platform designed to facilitate the creation of decentralized applications (dApps). Founded by Anatoly Yakovenko in 2017, the original token SOL was officially launched in March 2020.
Compared with existing dapp platforms such as Ethereum, Solana can achieve 65,000 transactions per second (tps), and the average fee is only $0.00025. In comparison, Ethereum only processes about 30 tps (before the 2.0 upgrade is complete), with an average transaction fee of $4.50.
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1) Consensus mechanism
Unlike other dapp platform competitors, Solana has its own unique approach to the transaction verification process. Notably, Solana founder Yakovenko incorporated a transaction timestamping system so that validators (computers that verify transactions on the blockchain) can uniformly see the order in which all new activity on the blockchain was performed.
In other words, the Solana system is essentially a consensus mechanism, as blockchain network participants are tasked with analyzing the validity of transactions and must agree on a single history of activity, hence the concept known as Proof of History (PoH) consensus.
2)Time,Sand Clock (time, hourglass)
According to Yakovenko, when he designed the concept of the Solana timestamp system, he borrowed from the centralized database design of Google and Intel, and transformed the system to adapt to the decentralized architecture.
In addition to the aforementioned Proof of History (PoH), Solana also implements a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus protocol.
It is important to note that blockchains are not controlled by a single entity. Users must play their part in maintaining and securing the network, which is especially necessary when validating transactions. Of course, the blockchain requires users to jointly ensure the validity of network transactions. Essentially, users must assume the role of verifiers.
However, the blockchain protocol is not arbitrarily selecting or judging whether the user has the relevant capabilities. All blockchains hope that interested users can prove that they are ready to become a validator by meeting certain requirements. For example, the Bitcoin blockchain expects users to invest in mining equipment and hash calculations are performed continuously.
With blockchains like Cardano, Polkadot, and Solana, users indicate that they want to become network validators by staking, or locking, crypto assets.
The consensus mechanism protocol then randomly picks a staker and grants the staker the right to propose and add a new set of confirmed transactions to the blockchain. The protocol that manages the entire process is called the PoS consensus mechanism.
3) Transaction processing (transaction processing)
By combining PoH and PoS consensus protocols, Solana achieves unprecedented transaction speed without going through L2 products such as sidechains. This means that the Solana ecosystem only needs to rely on one chain, while other blockchain ecosystems need to share the transaction load on multiple interoperable blockchains, which is called "sharding". "Sharding" is a major feature that Ethereum will launch during the 2.0 upgrade. The same goes for Polkadot and Zilliqa, which also utilize sharding to increase transaction processing power (also known as transaction throughput).
Solana's single blockchain infrastructure has amazingly fast block times, creating a new block every 400 milliseconds on average. In comparison, the following is a list of block times for the top-ranked decentralized application platforms:
Ethereum: 13 seconds
Cardano: 20 seconds
BNB: 3 seconds
Avalanche: 1.7 seconds
Polygon: 2.2 seconds
Polkadot: 7 seconds
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2. What are the unique features of Solana?
1) Tower Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) algorithm (Tower Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm)
The Tower BFT protocol strengthens the PoH consensus mechanism so that validators have access to a single global source of time. This way, the blockchain network can take advantage of synchronized clocks without having to calculate and store timestamps of historical transactions on the blockchain. In contrast, other blockchains still rely on validators to randomly select unconfirmed transactions (regardless of the order in which they were generated) and load them onto the blockchain.
Based on the above-mentioned Tower BFT calculation method, the time stamp must be calculated, and then a new transaction is performed on the blockchain. For Solana, the availability of PoH and Tower consensus removes the need for validators to deal with timestamps, so there is more room to focus on other aspects of the transaction validation process.
2) Gulf Stream (Gulf Stream)
Solana uses a system called Gulf Stream to eliminate the need for a mempool. Here you can think of mempool as an area waiting for unconfirmed transactions, from which validators will select transactions and add them to the blockchain. For Solana, validators receive transactions before the final state of newly added blocks is locked. Therefore, there is no waiting list for unconfirmed transactions on the Solana blockchain.
3) Sealevel (sea level)
Solana allows smart contracts to run in parallel, augmenting the computing power of its blockchain. The technology, dubbed "Sealevel," extends Solana's scalability so multiple smart contracts can run simultaneously without adversely affecting the speed of the blockchain.
4) Wormhole (wormhole)
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3. Why does Solana emphasize transaction speed?
Like Ethereum, Solana supports smart contracts, which are self-executing computer programs that perform certain functions when predetermined conditions are met. Thus, developers can launch and operate their blockchain applications on Solana.
As we have seen in the Ethereum ecosystem, high transaction throughput has always been one of the core requirements, especially when it comes to blockchain applications, which is why the Ethereum ecosystem is undergoing a major upgrade. Therefore, the Solana development team is always looking for ways to optimize the output of the blockchain.
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4. Solana Original Token — SOL
As mentioned earlier, SOL is the original token of the Solana blockchain and currently ranks among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. At the time of writing, the crypto asset has a total supply of 508,180,963 SOL and a market cap of $29.2 billion.
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