Solana is described as the world’s first web-scale blockchain and is being offered as such. Since its start in 2020, Solana has grown to become one of the most promising crypto projects, accumulating over 350,000 validators and building a passionate global community of over 650,000 users.
The project focuses on a relatively simple solution that addresses many of the issues that plague various blockchain architectures.
What is Solana?
Solana is a newcomer to the crypto business that promises high performance. Similar to the Ethereum network, Solana’s blockchain supports smart contracts as well as decentralised apps. Unlike other similar blockchains like Ethereum and Polkadot, however, Solana uses a single blockchain (layer 1) approach. Other chains attached to the network are not delegated operations (layer 2).
Solana currently uses the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus method (with intentions to improve in the future) to achieve a low barrier to entry and timestamped transactions to maximise efficiency. Solana can process 50-65,000 transactions per second because of its technology. As a result, Solana could theoretically execute over 70,000 transactions per second (TPS) (compared to 7 TPS for Bitcoin and 15 TPS for Ethereum).
How does it work?
Proof of History (PoH) and Proof of Stake (PoS) are used by Solana to process transactions efficiently. Proof of History is a simple approach to validate transactions without having to communicate with nodes. Proof of Stake is a method for validating transactions in which people stake their bitcoins.
PoH is based on a simple formula: it assigns a “leader position” to a particular node, and any node holding the leader position must generate the whole “proof of history” statement. After acquiring the responsibility, the blockchain network’s leader node coordinates with other nodes to construct a proof of history declaration.
The leader node also pushes the execution of current transactions, and it finally publishes the transactions with “verifiers” in their final nodes. In order to “verify” transactions, verifiers repeat the process. Verifiers also make copies of the transactions, which they then disseminate.
There is one leader in each Solana network. The verifier node performs intelligently and has the same capabilities as a leader node; however, the verifier node can subsequently be elected as a leader through “proof of stake” elections.
When compared to bitcoin and ethereum’s blockchain networks, a combination of PoH and PoS works best for Solana, allowing it to process at a cheap cost.
Is Solana worth buying in 2023?
The Solana blockchain, which is widely regarded as a rival to Ethereum, has gone down for the eighth time in less than a month. It’s unclear whether the problem was caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attempt by hackers or by a normal network breakdown caused by high traffic.
There have also been numerous claims on Twitter, ranging from a slow network to a major DDoS attack that brought the entire network down. The Solana Foundation has yet to confirm any of them, though it can’t truly deny that the network experienced a slowdown because it can be monitored in real-time.
However, Yakovenko, a co-founder of Solana Labs, has stated that the problem was not a DDoS assault. “It’s not a DDoS, simply the pain (sic) of commercializing a new runtime,” he wrote.
In September of last year, the site experienced a 17-hour outage, causing the price of its cryptocurrency to drop from $220 to $140 in less than 24 hours. “Transaction load on the Solana Mainnet Beta increased dramatically, reaching 400,000 TPS at one point.” “These transactions overwhelmed the transaction processing queue, and the network forked due to a lack of priority of network-critical communications,” the Solana Status Twitter account stated at the time.
Slowdowns on blockchain networks aren’t new, and Solana isn’t the only one to experience them. However, the fact that such slowdowns have occurred several times in less than six months may cause concern among many decentralised software (Dapp) developers who may have regarded Solana as a platform for their products and services otherwise.
While market participants have demanded that the Solana network put its house in order as a result of the controversies and network concerns, the price of SOL has had an incredible run in 2021. In December alone, the Solana blockchain network processed over 45 million transactions, making it a leading contender among “Ethereum killers.”
SOL, on the other hand, has been one of the hardest affected in the January crypto market disaster. SOL is down roughly 40.5 percent this month and 63.8 percent from its all-time high of $260 in November. SOL is now at $96, up 5.81 percent in the last 24 hours.
Closing thoughts
Solana is a blockchain network that has the potential to change the way people invest. This energy-efficient system can perform many transactions in a single transaction. Solana’s future appears bright, especially in the age of DeFi applications and NFTs.