Are you aware of the speed at which blockchain transactions take place? The fastest speed is 10,000 TPS or transactions per second, as claimed by the Ethereum 2.0 blockchain. The Ethereum 2.0 network also has shared all chains to perform transactions at a very fast speed. As financial technology is undergoing a profound change, blockchain is gaining immense popularity since it helps increase transactional speed and drastically reforms financial technology. Traditionally financial platforms would have to face the setback of low speed of making payments and transaction validation for several decades. This is why TS or transaction speed has been developed in blockchain networks since it helps drive traffic. With the increased speed in the blockchain network, transaction data transfer among different parties has improved, which helps confirm the transaction. One high-speed and modern blockchain technology is Solana. It is considered the fastest blockchain that performs transactions quickly and regulates network traffic. Solana blockchain is known to accommodate approximately 65,000 transactions per second. Before delving deep into the Solana proof of history consensus concept, you need to gain deep knowledge regarding the Solana concept, its components, and its features.
Table of Contents
What is Solana blockchain?
One public blockchain network or decentralized and open-source system is known as Solana. Solana achieves consensus through two means- proof of stake along with proof of history. It regulates the financial transaction with its currency known as SOL, and this cryptocurrency claims to perform 50,000 transactions per second. The founders of Solana claim this blockchain to be censorship resistant since its supports NFTs and smart contracts.
Who founded the Solana blockchain?
Solana blockchain was founded in the year 2017 by renowned Anatoly Yakovenko. He wrote about all concepts and aspects of a time-keeping strategy related to the distributed system, referred to as Solana proof of history. This PoH mechanism helps eliminate challenges related to time and scalability and helps reach a consensus on transaction orders. He believed this creative strategy would help automate the blockchain procedure of transaction orders and would help in driving the crypto network to perform a function beyond its capacity.
Background and capacity of Solana
Solana Labs started funding for developing its crypto network, a new stage in 2018. Solana team raised a fund of twenty million in token sales between the years 2018 and 2019. The sales were announced in 2019 as single A Series. The major and significant contributor to the Solana blockchain network is Solana Labs, and the funding is assisted by the Solana Foundation, which is helping in the network’s community building and development initiatives. The project mainnet beta network has functionalities like smart contract features and basic transaction capabilities. Solana wants to update the mainnet beta network and convert it into a better production-ready version.
Token economics
The native Solana token is known as Sols. Fractional Sols, known after Leslie Lamport, are known as Lamport’s. The import value is similar to 0.0000000000582 sol. SOLs are utilized in 2 ways within the blockchain network:
To protect the blockchain network, users directly stake their SOL on the blockchain network or even delegate the holding to active validators. Inflation incentives would be provided to the stakeholders in exchange. The inflation rewards have been enabled by the Solana network recently.
- Fees to run smart contracts and send transactions
Fees have to be paid by the users to send transactions and execute smart contracts along with SOL.
Token Distribution, as well as Sol launch
The Solana team used five financing rounds to distribute tokens, and four accounted for private sales. The private sales began in 2019 and ended in July 2019 with a twenty-million-dollar Series A, led by multicoin capital. Some partners who took part in the private sales are foundation capital, black tower capital, distributed global, slow ventures, passport capital, Rockaway ventures, etc. For investment, the company received Sol tokens in exchange. The total number of tokens the investors received in exchange has not been disclosed. In the year 2020, Solana raised an amount of dollar four million along with its 4th private sale, which is known as a strategic sale, as well as an auction sale publicly that Coinlist sponsored. The remaining SOL tokens have been distributed to the employees of Solana Lab, Community Reserve, and Solana Foundation for financing app developers and community projects.
The distribution of all the SOL tokens in the first is as follows
- Seed round participants or investors will get 15.86% of the sale proceeds
- The investors will receive around 2.63% in the founding sale
- 5.07% of proceeds will be received by validators, sales investors
- Strategic sale participants or investors will receive 1.84% of the sale proceeds
- Investors belonging to public auction sales will receive 1.6% of the proceeds
What wallets are well supported by the Solana blockchain?
Solana’s third-party wallet and command line program support many wallet types. The Solana blockchain advises using one online wallet based on browser or app wallets for users since it will provide them with a comfortable experience instead of utilizing a command-line program. Developers and expert users will best benefit from command-line digital wallets since all the new features associated with the Solana blockchain are first supported on the command line before incorporating them into third-party services and solutions. Following are the kinds of wallets that are well supported by the Solana blockchain network
- Hardware wallets
- Web SolFlare Wallet
- Command line wallets
- Mobile app wallets
What do you mean by Solana’s consensus mechanism?
Solana’s PoS (Proof-of-stake) consensus strategy has been developed for decreasing latency and communication costs and has been termed tower BFT. The PoH consensus Solana method utilizes the approach of PoH as one reminder of prior consensus. The present network configuration for 1 slot is around 400 milliseconds. Solana network consists of a rollback point within every 400 milliseconds; however, every successive voting on the fork will increase the time length. The secondary votes will make it difficult considerably for reversing the transaction in a particular slot. This is why a block having many votes will have a better chance of surviving within the chain.
Solana mainnet utilizes delegated PoS approach for allowing holders of the token to significantly contribute to the block creation process and get rewards either by delegating the tokens to the reliable validators or by taking their tokens to become validators themselves. Anybody on the Solana network may easily become a trusted validator and take part in the overall security of the network protocol. Even though the mechanism of leader selection is quite stake-weighted, there are no necessary staking requirements. The structure of the Solana network is built for growing with hardware and bandwidth.
What is the technology stack which Solana blockchain uses?
Five important breakthroughs have made Solana an important blockchain. They are as follows.
- PoH
As the nodes present in the distributed network can’t rely on the time stamp on the received messages from other network nodes, the biggest challenge in a distributed network is trusting the order and time in which all the events occur. This is why the Solana network uses PoH consensus to tackle this challenge and establishes a cryptographically secure time source within its network. The PoH approach is a function that requires certain steps for evaluating and provides unique and accurate results which can be confirmed publicly. As the nodes can’t trust the sequence of the message they have received and the date, they can produce the next block and need not align themselves with the entire network beforehand. This helps to reduce the overall consensus overhead.
- Turbine
Solana uses the different but linked blockchain protocol known as the turbine for transmitting blocks independent of any consensus. This turbine protocol is influenced primarily by BitTorrent. It is specifically designed for streaming. If a particular block in the Solana network is streamed, it becomes split into little packets comprising erasure codes dispersed across several random peers.
- Pipeline:
Pipelining is required on the Solana network for validating a transaction procedure. When all the incoming data is required to be sequentially processed in several steps with different hardware, pipelining is a suitable technique.
- Tower BFT:
On top of proof of history, the Solana blockchain runs a consensus mechanism, which is quite like a PBFT algorithm and uses a synchronized clock enabled by proof of history for reaching consensus on blockchain network transactions.
- Archives:
Well-funded organizations and institutions can act as validators and participate in the consensus in case the storage costs become quite expensive. Data storage on the Solana network is dedicated to archivers from validators, as these archives are a network of all the nodes. The archivers archive small network sections. The network will ask archivers to prove that they perform data storage regularly.
What Solana blockchain Network services can you hire for your business?
After knowing the benefits of Solana blockchain, if you want to incorporate Solana blockchain services into your business project, the first step would be to hire the best Solana development company to provide you with the following services and solutions.
- Creating Nodes
On hiring a development company, you get blockchain experts who will help you develop robust and effective nodes for private or public network blockchain and ensure that the nodes abide by the consensus procedure. Solana uses a PoH approach for its network.
- Supporting and maintaining Solana dApps
Solana blockchain experts will help your business project by providing support and maintenance services associated with Solana-based decentralized applications. You can get lifelong assistance on having these internalized applications built by the solar development company.
- Development of wallet
The company has technical experts to help you create a blockchain wallet application. Solana wallets also help in storing several varieties of digital assets and cadences, and you can also check the balance whenever you want and even monitor your financial transaction.
- Developing Smart Contracts
On hiring Solana blockchain services, you get development services for a smart contract from the company which supports different dApps. Smart contracts utilize programming languages for Solana’s public blockchain network. The company can provide various services such as auditing, architecture, offering smart contracts, and helping to design and implement smart contracts.
- Development of a decentralized application
You can build enterprise-rated decentralized applications for your business project built on the Solana network. On hiring a Solana development company, you’ll get blockchain experts who will help you to reduce downtime and increase the ROI of your business.
Concluding Note
Solano blockchain is a modern, open-source, decentralized network platform that helps to offer scalable transactions quickly. One of the most challenging factors is keeping a large transaction record. For example, Bitcoin keeps a record of all its transaction by clubbing the transaction into blocks, and this requires immense time as only one single node is required to validate whether the block is in consensus. However, this isn’t the case with Solana, as it uses the PoH consensus method, which enhances the efficiency and speed of the Solana blockchain network and integrates periods while recording every financial transaction. The proof of history consensus in Solana is a check for the Solana network. This is why this blockchain can regulate all these transactions and monitor tasks faster with high privacy and security. If you hire a Solana blockchain development company to create a Solano decentralized application for your business and you need to hire an export company that can also provide you with consultancy services and lay out a development plan so that your project can be a successful one.
Solana is one of the top ten currencies globally because of its significant features like low fees, high speed, powerful venture capitalist backing, etc. This has made this blockchain network an exciting and new competitor in the decentralized application field. In removing scalability problems from its network by introducing proof of history consensus. The Solana proof of history consensus combined with the proof of stake approach helps to increase efficiency in verifying and recording the transaction on the Solana blockchain network.
Artem Ilchenko is a seasoned crypto enthusiast with a journey dating back to 2016. With a wealth of experience in blockchain technology, DeFi (Decentralized Finance), NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), and the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem, Artem is a passionate advocate for the decentralized future. His deep understanding of the intricacies of blockchain and its innovative applications has positioned him as a valuable resource in the ever-evolving world of digital assets. Artem’s commitment to exploring and promoting the potential of blockchain technology has made him a noteworthy figure in the crypto community.