Don’t miss Solana This time for 25X

Genel Overview

Solana is a layer 1 blockchain with layer 2 speed, and this is a big deal. İf you don’t know what layer 1 and layer 2 mean and why this is a big deal. The idea that led to Solana was published as a white paperback.

2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko. And from the outset, the focus was to remove the scalability concerns of base chains.

So that dApps developers can focus on building the best dApps without being held back by how to scale them, for example, by Bitcoin’s validation times or Ethereum’s gas fees.

The beta mainnet was launched in March 2020. And they are officially still in beta. However, despite being in beta, the ecosystem around Solana and its impressive is developing in its life.

Solana was started to solve blockchain’s holy trilemma of scalability speed and security. And the fourth one to add is cost. So I call it the blockchain tetralemma.

When Solana raised money back in 2019, it was presented as achieving layer 2 speed on a layer 1 platform without sharding. What this means in practice is that you get the 50 to 60 000 transactions per second on smart contracts as well.

I would like to add here that it’s similar to how Bitcoin is divided into satoshis. For example, Solana is divided into lamports, bringing the total units from 489 billion Solana to 489 quadrillion lamports.

What Problems Solana Solves

Solana is galaxies ahead in terms of speed, scalability, and cost. Solana’s ambition is infinite scalability, limited only by the capacity of the hardware. They reference slower when they forecast the speed of the network.

And Moore’s law estimates that the processor power will double in capacity approximately every two years. So let’s look at Solana how they are doing this and then compare it to the other blockchain projects.

Prof Of History

The founder Anatoly’s big idea is to decouple the ordering of events from the consensus mechanism. So Solana runs two parallel processes. Proof of history to create a proof of the order of events. And proof of stake to validate the integrity of the blockchain.

A problem in distributed systems is how to agree on a time, and the common way to solve this is to use synchronized atomic clocks. These need to be coordinated and maintained.

The problem is even greater in blockchains as you have independent nodes and you have trust issues. How do I know that the timestamps in the message you send me are true? And this is important because we need to know in which order transactions happen.

For example, to prevent double-spending. Bitcoin and many other blockchains solve this are to compare the timestamp of a block to the median timestamp of the 11 previous blocks.

And the median current time of all the nodes connected to you. This introduces a timeline, and we only get a new hash with every block.

In Bitcoin’s case, that’s set to every 10 minutes to ensure security and even dApp, and even if dApp can be sped up, we are still talking minutes.

So what Solana is doing is using the same SHA-256 algorithm as Bitcoin. But looping it to produce new hashes as fast as it can. So it’s not validating transactions.

Only creating new hashes and stringing them together in a chain. This now works like a clock with a new cycle, and a hash generated every 400 milliseconds.

This is solving the timestamp issue when an event is submitted to the network. First, İt’s validated by a validator based on a chain sample and attached to a timestamp. The next step then is to get consensus on the integrity of the blockchain, and Solana is using proof of stake here.

Solana has implemented penalties for validators who misuse the system and are increasing the penalty to 100 of stake tokens. Read More…