What Is Solana (SOL)?
On the blockchain platform Solana, a decentralised, scalable application can be hosted. The open-source programme was started in 2017 by the Geneva-based Solana Foundation, and the blockchain was created by the San Francisco-based Solana Labs.
Solana is noticeably faster in terms of the volume of transactions it can handle and offers much lower transaction costs when compared to other blockchains like Ethereum. The Solana (SOLUSD) cryptocurrency, which trades on the Solana blockchain, has the ticker symbol SOL. It increased by about 12,000% in 2021, reaching a record market value of over $66 billion and became the fifth-largest cryptocurrency at the moment.
SOL was not spared from the 2022 cryptocurrency massacre despite its popularity. On October 3, 2022, SOL’s market value had decreased to roughly $11.71 billion. In terms of market value, it dropped to ninth place. 3 Learn more about Solana and what sets it apart from the countless copycats.
Solana History
Yakovenko formerly held positions with prestigious technological firms like Qualcomm Incorporated in the field of distributed systems architecture (QCOM). He learned from this experience that a stable clock makes network synchronisation easier, and that when that happens, the resulting network will be enormously quicker, with its bandwidth being the sole limit.
Expansion first
After reaching these project milestones, Yakovenko enlisted Fitzgerald, Akridge, and three other people to help co-found a business named Loom. However, the company/project changed its name to Solana, named after the little beach town outside San Diego where the co-founders lived when they were employees of Qualcomm, to avoid confusion with another Ethereum-based project of the same name.
What about beginnings?
Initial C programming and a private codebase were used for Yakovenko’s implementation. Greg Fitzgerald, a former coworker at Qualcomm, requested that Yakovenko transfer the whole codebase to the Rust programming language.
Technology in Solana
When paired with a blockchain, Solana’s architecture seeks to show off a set of software algorithms that remove software as a speed constraint. Transaction throughput might increase according to network bandwidth thanks to the combination.
Scalable, safe, and decentralised are all conditions that Solana’s design meets to qualify as a blockchain. Its architecture specifies a theoretical maximum of 28.4 million TPS on a 40-gigabit network and 710,000 TPS on a regular gigabit network. 9
The proof-of-stake (PoS) and proof-of-history (PoH) consensus models are both used on the Solana blockchain. PoS enables validators (those who approve transactions added to the blockchain ledger) to validate transactions based on the quantity of coins or tokens they have; PoH enables such transactions to be timestamped and confirmed very quickly.
Ethereum vs.Solana
The most popular blockchain for decentralised applications (dApps), Ethereum, has unavoidably been compared to Solana due to its rapidly growing ecosystem and versatility:
Solana’s substantial edge over Ethereum in terms of transaction processing speed and transaction costs was a large factor in the hype surrounding it in 2021. Solana’s average cost per transaction is $0.00025, and it has a maximum TPS capacity of 50,000. While the average transaction price for Ethereum is $1.68.1011, it can only manage less than 15 TPS.
With a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus method, which is used by both Solana and Ethereum, validators can receive rewards for advancing the blockchain by staking their cryptocurrency as collateral. By incorporating PoH as well, Solana raises PoS.
Smart contracts are a feature of both Solana and Ethereum that are essential for running cutting-edge applications like decentralised finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Upgrades of Ethereum
Due to its extensive ecosystem and first-mover advantage, the market valuation of Ethereum is second only to that of Bitcoin. 3 The main upgrade of Ethereum, which combined its Beacon Chain and Mainnet Chain, established the groundwork for making its blockchain more scalable, secure, and long-lasting. Sharding, which would dramatically cut down on transaction times and ease network congestion, will be introduced in a future upgrade. We still don’t know how Solana will fare in the face of these advancements.
Solana FAQS
What Position Does Solana Hold Among Cryptocurrency Businesses?
Solana is now ranked as the ninth-largest cryptocurrency corporation by market capitalization. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether, USD Coin, BNB, XRP, Binance USD, and Cardano are some of their more significant opponents.
What Percentage of SOL Tokens Are Currently in Use?
There are 511.6 million SOL tokens in total supply at Solana, 355 million of which have already been sold.
Are fractional amounts of Solana’s SOL Token available?
Lamports, which are fractional units of SOL with a value of 0.000000001 SOL, are the smallest unit of SOL available. The Lamports are named after Leslie Lamport, a computer scientist best known for his work in distributed systems and Solana’s chief technical influence.