Solana Review: A new architecture for a high-performance blockchain
Original article by EVALUAPE
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A. Introduction
Solana is a high performance underlying blockchain protocol based on Proof of History (PoH). The platform weaves timestamps into the blockchain to realize the data horizontal scaling finality and features a newly-designed architecture to achieve high performance without sharding. The whitepaper states that throughput up to 710k transactions per second is possible.
B. Industry
The project works on the underlying public chain, which aims to improve the performance of the current blockchain. At the moment, scalability and privacy are two urgent issues to be addressed in the underlying layer of blockchain. There are already many solutions, such as sharding, sidechain and state channel, which also come with some well-known projects like PLASMA, Celer Network, Zilliqa and Lightning Network. In addition, there are quite many underlying public chains using the high TPS as selling point, such as EOS, Thunder Token, Difinity and Hashgraph, all of which can achieve a million TPS. In short, there are already reams of solutions and public chains with high TPS, which makes the market get over-saturation. Besides, the public has gradually realized that the value of the public chain depends largely on the prosperity of its ecosystem. From this point of view, the first-mover advantage is particularly important. Therefore, for projects that simply use high performance as its selling point but without any technological innovation, whether a flourishing community ecosystem can be founded is of importance.
C. Mode
Solana has adopted the PoS mechanism as well as the Proof of History (PoH) architecture without sharding to achieve high performance. Unlike other projects in the market, Solana has designed a brand new blockchain architecture.
Design Concept: Solana believes that the bottleneck of improving the performance lies largely in the difficulty in reaching an agreement on the sequence, which consequently causes much consumption to reach a consensus. The performance can be improved greatly, if there is a credible clock like Google’s atomic clock which is trustless and objectively exists, to record the transaction order of the entire blockchain. In addition, the project is designed to support smart contracts written in any language.
In the ecosystem of Solana, there are three types of characters: leader, verifier and user. When a user starts a transaction, Leader is responsible for generating a Proof of History sequence, providing the network global reading consistency and a verifiable passage of time. The Leader sequences user messages and orders them so that they can be efficiently processed by other nodes in the system, thus maximizing throughput. It executes the transaction of the current state stored in RAM and publishes the transactions and the signature of the final state to the replication nodes called Verifiers (via the innovative Avalanche mechanism). Verifiers executes the same transaction on their copies of state and releases their computed state signatures as confirmations. The released results will be used as votes for the consensus algorithm. The leader adopts a rotation system, and anyone can be voted as a leader by verifiers. Verifiers need to collateralize certain tokens for verification, and when verifiers are caught cheating, they will be fined for some tokens. The overall consensus mechanism is similar to other POSs and requires 2/3 nodes approval. The incentive comes from transaction fees within a passage of time. However, the current economic model and the economic type of node storage have not yet been released.
In terms of the overall architecture design, what needs further explanation is the three primary innovations of Solana, namely PoH, VDF and Avalanche.
PoH: Proof of History, briefly speaking, adopts the way of a cryptographic hash function (e.g. SHA256) to encrypt some random starting value, thus generating an output hash value in fixed length and size. Then the system takes the output and passes it as the input into the same function again. It records the number of times the function has been called and the output at each call. In this way, we can obtain a series of fixed hash values and its corresponding sequence so that the objective sequence of passages of time in the blockchain becomes available. Due to the properties of functions such as SHA256, it is difficult to perform violent inverse operations and it is not economical either. In addition, via PoH, user data can be added to the fixed hash to generate new hash, and thus the blockchain is able to locate the sequence in which the data occurs accurately. The sequence between the nodes can be mixed to achieve the horizontal scaling of the performance of the whole system.
VDF: Verifiable Delay Function, a function used to generate PoH. It is a collision resistant hash function. In short, this is a function that takes a bunch of data inputs and spits out an output in fixed size. The main advantage of the function is its security. Regardless of the given input data, the exact output cannot be predicted, that is, the entire function must be performed to truly get the output.
Avalanche Communication: The goal is to reduce the bandwidth loss and improve efficiency during the verification process. In the traditional blockchain, copying and spreading the full ledger is a work that consumes time and bandwidth. However, due to the design of PoH, when Solana is verifying, the Leader can segment the ledger, split the bandwidth between the upstream and downstream nodes and perform multi-layer propagation to achieve parallel verification. Simply speaking, since the hash value in every timestamp is calculated by the previous hash value, a long range of hash value can be broke into small partitions to be verified separately by the nodes. Each node only needs to verify a partition of hash value, and then concatenate and restore to a long hash value. Considering the parallel computing power of the current GPU, the whole system can be quickly verified. According to the calculation, as the number of nodes increases, the final confirmation time increases in line with log(N).
D. Technology
The project is technically innovative, and both PoH and Avalanche Consensus are unprecedent in other projects. However, even though the current white paper is rather detailed, it’s always worrying when it comes to the security and development difficulty of specific innovation. Luckily, the team has already launched a multi-nodes test network with its TPS reaching 250,000. The open source code is also available on Github. There are currently 2016 submissions, the update frequency is pretty high. The team claimed that the main network could be released in the fourth quarter, which is feasible judging from the current progress.
E. Team
Anatoly, CEO of Solana, led the development of Qualcomm Operation System and the distributed systems at Mesosphere, as well as the compression technology of Dropbox. He holds 2 patents on high performance operation system protocol.
Greg Fitzgerald is the CTO of Solana. He had worked at Qualcomm for 13 years as the technology director of the Web and message transmission infrastructure team. He created a bidirectional RPC bridge between C and Lua for the BREW operating system, helped launch the ARM backend for the LLVM compiler toolchain, and published a variety of open source projects.
Raj Gokal, COO of Solana, has experience of 10 years in product management and finance. He was a venture investor at General Catalyst, and founder of the consumer medical device company Sano that attracted over $20 mln investment.
The official website displays a total of 12 members, of which all of the core founders come from Qualcomm. The rest staff all have more than 10-year working experience in their respective fields. Given that they all worked in well-known companies, they should be supposedly well trained. It’s fair to say that they have excellent capabilities and working efficiency in research, development and operation.
F. Community
It has 34,346 followers on telegram, and 6,104 followers on Twitter. The discussions mainly focus on the technology. In addition, many posts have been posted on reddit. In addition, the project is well completed in the aspects like technical video, learning materials, official website design and the white paper, etc. However, the large-scale DAPP ecosystem layout and external cooperation have not yet been disclosed.
G. Conclusion
Solana has adopted methods like the new PoH protocol and parallel verification to improve the performance of blockchain. The project has shown strength in various aspects, including underlying technological innovation, technology realization, team development and stability, and steady development of community ecosystem. The release of multi-nodes test network and the realization of 250,000 tps all help attract supporters more quickly compared with those projects just shouting slogans. However, the area of high performance underlying public chain and related solutions are too competitive. Not much foundation of the ecosystem has yet been seen in the project, which is worrying. In addition, technically, the possibility of cheating due to sequencing led by a single leader and the accuracy of parallel merge sequencing still needs further consideration. But, in the early days of the blockchain, any technologically innovative project is worth continuously tracking.
Hype Score: Medium High
Risk Score: Medium High
Investment Score:Medium High
Total Score:7.7
All information in this article is provided for reference only and does not constitute investment advice.
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