What Is Solana (SOL) and How The Ultra-Fast Cryptocurrency Works?

What is Solana (SOL), and how the ultra-fast cryptocurrency works? Solana, a blockchain platform developed in 2017 by former Qualcomm CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, aims to boost throughput above common blockchains while maintaining a competitive price.

Solana’s novel hybrid consensus model combines the proof-of-story (PoS) and proof-of-stake (PoS) versions of the lightning-fast synchronization engine. As a result, the Solana network theoretically can perform over 710,000 transactions per second (TPS) without scaling techniques.

What Is Solana (SOL) and How The Ultra-Fast Cryptocurrency Works?

Solana uses the third-generation blockchain architecture, developed to facilitate the creation of smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps). The project supports several non-fungible token (NFT) markets and decentralized finance (DeFi) systems.

Launched the Solana blockchain during the initial coin offering (ICO) boom of 2017. The project’s internal testnet was launched in 2018, followed by several testnet phases that led to the official launch of the manner in 2020.

What makes Solana unique?

Solana’s ambitious project aims to uniquely solve the blockchain trilemma, a concept proposed by Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin. Blockchain developers must overcome the three main difficulties of decentralization, security, and scalability.

As they can only offer two out of three advantages at once, blockchains often force developers to give up one of the features in favor of the other.

The Solana blockchain platform has introduced a hybrid consensus mechanism, which trades decentralization for speed. Moreover, Solana (SOL) is a pioneering project in the blockchain sector thanks to its novel PoS and PoH mix.

Blockchains are generally more scalable; the more and better they scale, the more transactions they can handle per second. However, decentralized blockchains are slower due to time inconsistencies and larger throughput, which requires more nodes to verify transactions.

Solana’s design addresses this issue by selecting a leader node based on the PoS mechanism that distributes messages among nodes. Thus, even without a centralized and precise time source. The Solana network gains from the workload reduction that leads to an increase in throughput.

Solana also builds a transaction chain by hashing one transaction’s output and using it as the input of the following one. This transaction history gives Solana’s primary consensus mechanism a name: PoH. This idea enables the protocol to scale more easily, which in turn, improves usability.

How does Solana (SOL) work?

Proof of history, a series of calculations producing a digital record confirming an event on the network at any given time, is the fundamental part of the Solana protocol. And can describe as a data structure that is a direct addition to a cryptographic clock that provides a timestamp for every transaction on the network.

PoH relies on PoS using the Tower’s Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) algorithm. An optimized version of the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT) protocol. Solana (SOL) uses it to reach a consensus, and Tower BFT keeps the network secure and also running and acts as an additional tool to validate transactions.

In addition, PoH can produce a single, reliable output as a high-frequency verifiable delay function (VDF) and a triple function (setup, evaluation, verification). So, the VDF maintains order in the network by proving that block producers have waited long enough for the network to move forward.

Solana uses a secure 256-bit hash algorithm (SHA-256), a set of proprietary cryptographic functions that generate a 256-bit value. The network periodically sampled the SHA-256 number and hashes, providing real-time data from the set of hashes used by the central processing units.

Solana validators can use this series of hashes to save particular information created before producing a particular hash index. Once it establishes this information and enters it, it establishes the transaction timestamps. Therefore, to achieve high TPS and block creation speeds, all nodes on the network must be equipped. And also with cryptographic clocks that keep track of events instead of relying on other validators to validate transactions.