Beginning
What is the main challenge regarding blockchain technology? The answer is simple: scalability. Of course, when networks advance, there are often restrictions concerning transaction level of rate and verification times. The main goal of Solana is gearing the mentioned restrictions avoiding compromising safety or decentralization.
At first, there was Solana Labs. Then Solana, which was made in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko. From the very beginning, Solana blockchain has a new manner of confirmation of transactions. It is not a secret that Bitcoin, Ethereum, and so on tolerate scalability as well as rate problems. Don’t be afraid, please! With the help of Solana it becomes very easy to do several millions of transactions a minute.
What about work?
Do you know your family tree? Solana knows its family tree. So, Solana is Proof of Stake blockchain in the third generation. It is able to make the only way of making a trustless structure for resolving the time of a transfer which is named Proof of History.
If we deal with the sphere of crypto, please, mind monitoring the order of transactions, because it is so important! Solana uses absolutely different methods, which are not similar to Bitcoins ones.
Proof of History is…
Solana transactions have an input and make a specific output. The output is very hard to imagine. Solana obtains the output of a transfer and makes use of it as the input for the following hash. We can say that the order of the transferrings is constantly inbuilt into the hashed output.
For sure, the hashing process makes an extended and unbroken chain of hashed transferrings. The characteristic allows a clear, verifiable order of transferrings that a validator puts to a block. There is no necessity for a conventional timestamp in this case.
When ordering the transactions in a chain of hashes, validators process and transfer not so much data in every block. If we use a hashed variant of the latest state of transactions extremely lowers the time of confirming a new block.
We should note that Proof of History is not a consensus mechanism, of course. It is really a method of advancing the time spent confirming the order of transferrings. It is a lot easier and more pleasant to deal with it in such a case.
Solana’s key features
We can find eight main technical characteristics in order to provide the capabilities of a centralized system with the blockchain. The main is Proof of History.
Let’s look at some more:
- Tower BFT — a PoH version of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance
- Sealevel — Parallel smart contracts run-time
- Turbine — a block propagation agreement
- Archivers — Shared ledger storage
- Gulf Stream — Mempool-less transfer redirecting protocol
- Cloudbreak — Horizontally-Scaled Accounts DB
- Pipelining — a Transaction Processing Part for validation development
The interesting fact is that Solana owns about 900 validators (2021). This helps it be a justly decentralized network.
What is an SOL token?
The native crypto of Solana is SOL. The major feature of it is having a possibility to work as a utility token. People use SOL so as to pay transaction fees in case they perform transfers, dealing with smart contracts. The people who have SOL are able to act as network validators. Similar to Ethereum, Solana lets programmers create smart contracts as well as make projects on the blockchain.
The SPL protocol is used in SOL, you know. The matter is that SPL is considered to be a token standard regarding Solana blockchain. We can make use of SOL token in the following cases:
- Payment of transaction fees sustained in case of using the network or smart contracts.
- Staking tokens relative to the Proof of Stake consensus mechanism.
The best way to keep SOL
There is a chance of keeping SOL tokens on the wallet, which was created by Serum Academy. Another option is Trust Wallet (phone gadgets), or wallets that support SPL. Imagine that you have a wish of staking your SOL. The first step is to use a wallet that supports staking. Such a wallet will let you create a stake account and envoy your SOL tokens to a validator.
Conclusion
On the one hand, Solana is new and young. On the other hand, it has a lot of pros: great speed and rate, scalability and safety. Investors are attracted by it because of these benefits, of course. However, to be sure to say that it is easy to deal with, we need time. It is also in such a way in the world. Time will show.