What is Solana blockchain?

​ All blockchains out there today, not refer to the time when recording transactions. It means, There is no timestamp within a chain block. Until one day, when someone noticed that nobody is keeping time in crypto and started to build what we call now Solana blockchain.

Solana is a name of a beach in San Diego in California, The chief architect, ANATOLY YAKOVENKO, gave the same name to the project created with the help of Solana labs. 

Caffeine induces fever dream.

The creator of Solana, who was working as a software engineer in Qualcomm was not a big fan of cryptocurrencies, slightly interested in Ethereum. Until one night in 2017 when Anatoly has the fever dream induced by probably caffeine to figure out how to improve cryptocurrency's blockchains by adding the timestamp to transactions.

Bitcoin longest chain

As you may know, the longest chain is something that happens when two miners try to produce a new block at the same time, This is very common in Bitcoin blockchain, where the blockchain temporarily splits, and the longest of the two blockchains wins. In short, whichever of the two chains produces the new block first becomes the actual bitcoin blockchain. Not very efficient, right!

Regular clock

We could easily prevent the longest chain to happen if only we could tie any transaction to a timestamp, like this every transaction would proceed depending on a regular clock. Well! Google and Intel have already done that in their center servers using a centralized regular clock.

Building a decentralized regular clock is not an easy task! Who would be the time keeper on a decentralized blockchain?

Bitcoin mining algorithm

To build a decentralized regular clock on a blockchain, Anatoly has figured out that we could tweak the same bitcoin mining algorithm or ‘SHA256’ to function as a clock. Combining this with an optimized proof of stake consensus, would make it possible to proceed a huge amount of transactions per second, competing than with the unbeatable Visa network regarding the TPS or the transaction per second.

Solana Blockchain

In November 2017, Solana was born. Let's see how Solana is by far the most interesting blockchain out there.

Solana is so complicated! that even some gurus of blockchain technology were having their heads wrapped to understand this insane project when interviewing Anatoly.

At a glance, Solana is a high-performance layer one proof of stake blockchain, Which means. It is not needed to use a second layer or other solutions to handle transactions. Solana can proceed with 65k transactions per second, making it the fastest layer one blockchain right now. Like Ethereum, Solana is smart contract compatible, meaning that developers can create decentralized applications on it.

Proof of history

Proof of history is not a consensus mechanism! It is a critical component of Solana's proof of stack consensus, which makes Solana clock tick. Simply said, Proof of history added something called a verifiable delay function to the SHA256 bitcoin mining algorithm, which makes it possible for all transactions on Solana to be timestamped.

Not yet clear, well! Let me recap. Every transaction needs to be written on the Solana blockchain record. It needs to follow the ticking clock. Every tick clock on Solana counts 400 ms, to be exact.

Now we know how Solana organizes its data, but how is it possible to validate so many transactions per second on the Solana blockchain?

A reason for its fast network is the low barrier to entry for participating as a validator node on the network. Solana doesn't require any validator node to have a minimum stack.

With that been said. As a validator, You can validate a transaction, store a transaction record and produce a new block. Moreover, Solana blockchain has what we call a leader validator which each validator takes a turn to be a leader, The leader has only 4 blocks to produce which takes 1.6 s to be done. This technique makes it hard for a group of validators or a leader to corrupt the entire network.

The other reason that makes the network fast is what we call Solana clusters. Solana clusters are a group of validators that are dedicated to a specific category of transactions on the Solana blockchain.

Tour de sol

Tour de Sol is an incentivize Solana testNet, that consists of various events, which reward users with 30k Sol when successfully attacking the network, or even for just being the most active validator node. If you want to participate in the Solana event, make sure you provide KYC documentation and make sure, your computer meets the required spec to be a validator node.

Private funding

Solana had 4 funding round, from seed to the launch round. Private investors bought Over 32% , 13% to the founders and team, 10% for Solana foundation and a remaining 39% for community initiative such as the Tour de sol.

Is Sol, Inflationary or deflationary

It is not clear whether Sol is inflationary or deflationary. Although Sol is burned in transaction fees, inflation would be when paying block reward to validator nodes.

C/c

Although it is still in technical development, Solana is already able to host something as demanding as the Serum dex. Thanks to its unique design based on the proof of history which takes the proof of stake to the next level by time stamping transactions. The low barrier to becoming a validator on the network is one of its major selling points.