With the evolution of the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry, the contributors to the ecosystem have arrived at a dilemma which requires one of the three essential features to the blockchain – decentralisation, security and scalability.
Like the other triangles, there’s a tradeoff among the characteristics.
One can have any two, but not three Decentralized, Consistent, Scalable. Pick any two.
Ethereum 2.0 development has been stalled because of concerns around these factors only. The Solana blockchain is developing a network that aims to solve this problem within a single-chain, without the use of shards.
Solana is a single-chain, delegated-Proof-of-Stake protocol which offers up to 50,000-65,000 TPS (Transactions per second) and a block-time of 400 ms. It is a smart contract platform just like Etherum and EOS.
The network is secured by the Proof of History (PoH) protocol on which blockchain uses a ‘verifiable delay function.’ It uses a trustless and secure clock with timestamps of the nodes of the validators to solve the clocking problem and double-spending problem to secure the network.
Solana is headquartered in San Francisco, Boulder and San Diego. The blockchain was founded by a group of former developers and scientists from Qualcomm, Intel, and Dropbox. Anatoly Yakovenko, Greg Fitzgerald, Raj Gokal, and Eric Williams are the leading members of the team. It was founded on Jan 1, 2018. The project has raised up to $23.9 million since 2018 via the investors funding rounds.
Key Features
- The network aims to provide support for all LLVM compatible smart contract languages which include Solidity, Rust, Objective C, Fortran, Ada, Haskell, Java bytecode, Python, Ruby, ActionScript, and GLSL.
- The validation system behind the PoS staking implements a new timestamp method (PoH and Verifiable Delay Functions) and data organization (Avalanche) to securely store data on the blockchain.
- The high-speed and scalability allows for low-cost transactions.
The strategic partners of the blockchain project include leaders of the industry such as DDEX (largest exchange on Ethereum), Chainlink, Civic Key, University of Illinois and so on. Chainlink provides the oracle solution to the blockchain to provide a link to APIs and real-world applications.
SOL Token
Solana uses a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm that incentivizes token holders to validate transactions. All fees will be paid in SOL and will be burnt, reducing total supply. Hence, making it deflationary in nature.
An auction for the tokens was recently conducted via Coinlist which ended on 24th March 2020 at a price of $0.22 per $SOL. The team further plans to implement a “Staker Price Guarantee” after the auction, which provides a 90% price guarantee to the ‘stakers’ of the token.
Presently, the token is listed on leading exchanges like Binance and Coinbase(custody), with wallet support from Trust Wallet and Ledger.
To kickstart the listing process, Binance initiated a bounty program totalling $50,000 to reward users engaging with $SOL. Solana went live on Binance for trading on 11th April 2020.
SOL is currently trading at 1.06$, recorded over 380% growth since its went live for trading on Binance.
Token Economics
The maximum supply of SOL token is capped at 1,000,000,000. A fractional unit of SOL is a ‘Lamport‘; it is equal to approximately 0.0000000000582 sol. Solona is a deflationary asset as all fees will be paid in SOL and will be burnt, reducing total supply.
Solana faces a lot of competition from existing smart contracts and Dapps platform. There are a couple of other DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) solutions like Hyperledger and Corda with similar high-throughput performance.
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