Solana has been the subject of recent headlines for its price appreciation and how several projects on the blockchain completed funding rounds. What Solana offers is quite different and unique when compared to other blockchains. With web3 underway, It has become one of the most prominent blockchain ecosystems in the space, having quickly scaled up to be within the top 10 largest projects in crypto by market capitalization.
Solana was launched in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko, a former Dropbox programmer, in collaboration with Greg Fitzgerald and Eric Williams. According to the project’s developers, the fourth generation blockchain intends to provide “the open infrastructure required for worldwide adoption.”
Since Yakovenko wanted to build a highly scalable blockchain platform, the Solana ecosystem uses an open architecture to provide a long-lasting solution for scalability and sustainability, an issue that has been hard to tackle by other projects in the space.
What is Solana and what makes it so special?
Much like other cryptocurrency projects, Solana promises a more scalable platform that is faster, secured, censorship-resistant, and has smaller fees. However, these are the main promises that define Solana and make it stand out among its peers:
The Solana ecosystem provides various new, efficient technologies that work together to allow the Solana blockchain to offer faster transaction speeds and a more secure platform. To begin, the platform employs a consensus process known as Delegated-Proof-of-Stake (DPoS). DPoS blockchains are substantially faster than PoS blockchains; the Solana blockchain produces new blocks in an average of 2.34 seconds, which is several times faster than most of its contemporaries.
A DPoS blockchain is similar to a PoS blockchain in most ways. In order to stake the native token, $SOL, you can choose to take two roles within the ecosystem: a Validator or Delegator. Validators are required to process the chain’s transactions. People who own more native coins on the network have a better chance of becoming validators, so those truly invested in the network are given priority due to their significantly higher stake in the project.
When Validators process transactions and add new blocks to the chain, they are rewarded with more native tokens. Delegators, on the other hand, can “lend” their tokens to the validators to receive rewards without having to provide computational resources to the network directly.
Solana is known for being a high-performance blockchain that supports 50,000+TPS without sharding. While this is impressive, the projects built on the blockchain have a desirable value proposition for DeFi and the future of cryptocurrencies, especially as these continue to reach mainstream audiences.
Solana in the market
Solana ($SOL) is one of the cryptocurrencies that shattered the All-time-High (ATH) price of $214.96, at an astonishing $63,865,145,842 market capitalization considering the current circulating supply. Since the start of the year, this cryptocurrency has seen tremendous growth. Overall, $SOL has achieved a remarkable growth rate of nearly +8,500% in the last 12 months.
At the time of writing, Solana is currently ranked 7 of all cryptocurrencies with a market capitalization of $43 billion.
What makes Solana different?
Simply put, the blockchain is faster and cheaper, which makes Solana an appealing ecosystem for many Dapp and other DeFi applications. It has been tested to scale up to 56,000 TPS in March 2020 and 111,000 TPS in test lab conditions in May 2020. The maximum number of transactions per second is now 59,490, with block durations of 400 milliseconds.
In comparison, Ethereum, another popular blockchain for DeFi projects, can handle 15 transactions per second. This demonstrates the quickness with which Solana does business. The transaction fees are also meager, making blockchain experimentation much more appealing than Ethereum’s near-death high fees.
In addition, Solana is a platform that allows developers to create mobile apps, in addition to its blockchain and money. The platform supports the programming languages C and C+ and Rust, with further integrations planned. Rust overcomes memory safety and thread concurrency difficulties for Solana.
The platform has “composable building blocks,” making it easier to create apps that work and interact with one another. That is, between themselves and the Solana blockchain, token, and ecosystem.
Solana calls itself “Proof-of-History,” (PoH) a novel approach to consensus protocols that determines the relative order of transactions rather than requiring validators to determine transaction times. This method is still secure, but it gives developers and validators more options.
More importantly, this mechanism ensures that the blockchain runs smoothly independent of network activity. Solana has an advantage over other protocols that can bottleneck when network traffic is excessively high or low.
In a high-performance blockchain, large volumes of data must frequently be propagated to a large number of peers. One of Solana’s eight main breakthroughs, Turbine is built for streaming and solely uses UDP to transport data. As the block producers stream their data, it implements a random path for every packet via the network.
Furthermore, the Solana ecosystem has made significant progress toward interoperability, with the Wormhole bridge connecting it to the Ethereum environment. Wormhole connects Ethereum and Solana and converts ERC-20 tokens to Solana’s own SPL standard.
In a move to boost scalability and interoperability Solanax aims to use Solana’s central order book to facilitate faster transfers, pooled liquidity, and staking.
About Solanax
Solanax is a Solana-based automated market maker (AMM) exchange providing lightning-fast trades, pooled liquidity, and other income-generating features. Solana was chosen as the underlying blockchain to facilitate low-cost, high-speed transactions. It is a permissionless, high-performance blockchain based on the Proof of History consensus (PoH).
Given the advantages that Solana offers when compared to other blockchain ecosystems, it is a popular solution among investors, users, and developers. Ethereum’s Proof of Work Consensus is slow, hard to scale, and comes with high gas fees which were exacerbated by its account-based system. Where Ethereum has failed to live up to the community expe, Solana is quickly proving to be a viable alternative.
Solanax will utilize the cross-bridge Wormhole to connect to projects and digital assets existing on the Ethereum blockchain, which will facilitate adoption and allow the crypto community to seamlessly move tokenized assets from one blockchain to another, improving interoperability and liquidity setup.
Faster and cheaper; Solanax offers on-chain liquidity; traders will have more control over their trading activities; an integration of Wormhole for fusion with tokenized assets on the Ethereum blockchain and much more..
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