Up Next: Solana
Solana is a high-performant blockchain, solving the ‘scalability’ bottleneck of other blockchains.
Beginning
Solana implements a new protocol system to validate transactions called ‘proof-of history’, which allows it to be the fastest blockchain technology yet. I’m sure you’ve heard of ‘proof-of-work’, ‘proof-of-stake’, and whatever the hell dogecoin does, but the limiting factor of these systems is they are too slow. Bitcoin’s proof of work can handle 5 transactions per second (tps) and ETH 2.0’s new proof-of-stake can handle 10,000 (tps) which are too slow for modern systems. Take Visa for example, they process over 65,000 transactions per second, meaning even if they wanted to go full blockchain — they can’t. Solana aims to solve this using proof of history which Solana claims can achieve around 50k transactions per second, miles ahead the current largest networks. Solana doesn’t claim being the best blockchain, and I don’t think there ever will be. The future is many protocols governing different aspects of our life, and Solana is taking a step forward into the future closer to payments and other high-speed applications to go “full blockchain”. Proof-of-history works differently than PoS and PoW in that Solana is able to collect a bunch of different timestamps of transactions and when they were sent, and put together the pieces to understand which transactions happened first, which is much more efficient than traditional mining. PoH is only 1 of 8 key innovations Solana has created, with many others that help developers think about creating their Dapp on Solana.
Middle
Solana was co-founded by Alan Yu, Anatoly Yakovenko, Greg Fitzgerald, Raj Gokal, and Stephen Akridge (three of whom are UIUC alums 🥳 ). Solana isn’t redefining the concept of cryptocurrency or blockchain, but they are building it better than any of your favorite cryptos.
Solana hides the hard parts of building dApps. With industry experts in compilers and distributed systems, it is no surprise that the Solana team has been able to build crypto that can handle multiple services and transactions at a scale that no other crypto and top card network companies can’t do themselves. With blockchain and cryptocurrency proving to be a fast-growing tech space, with new players joining every day, it is hard to stand out. DogeCoin and Shiba Inu Coin have had large success from meme culture and celebrity involvement (hey Elon 👋🏼 ), but it is becoming ever more apparent, with Solana’s success, that building blockchain networks with well-built infrastructure and system architecture is going to enable the next wave of dApp development and allow the masses to take part in this exciting new technology.
End
There’s still a long way to go for crypto in general, and Solana is just a step in the right direction. Though we believe in Solana’s technology, crypto is much more than that, it’s about the community and conviction that takes it to the next level, which will take time to develop. Solana only officially launched in 2020, and their having a hackathon right now to get devs excited about developing. Oh, and also their supported language for Solana is Rust, which is quickly becoming a favorite. Solana has a long road a head of them, but we believe with this high performing chain, developers will see it as a necessity to build on top of Solana. Solana faces the same crypto issues Bitcoin and Ethereum are facing like regulation, but have nowhere near the support yet which has us somewhat skeptical.
