Solana was created in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko a Russian-born entrepreneur to satisfy all three desirable properties of a proper blockchain: scalable, secure, and decentralized, since it’s so fast (able to handle 710,000 transactions per second not exceeding 176 bytes) and has lower gas fees than Ethereum has led many to dub it an “Ethereum killer”. Like ETH, Solana has smart contracts (self-executing code that automatically carries out the terms of an agreement having met certain conditions).
Blockchain platform vs Coins.
A blockchain platform is used to deploy Decentralized Apps (Dapps) that run on the blockchain while coins like Bitcoin, Eth, and Litecoin are used either as a mode of exchange (like money) or a sign of wealth(investment). A blockchain platform could have a token used to pay for transactions in the network, in the case of Solana: SOL is the native token.
uh-oh! Still didn’t get it?
Look at it this way, blockchain platforms, and an apps store like GooglePlay & App store have some similarities.
They provide a marketplace for people to discover apps: but, blockchain platforms rely on decentralized and use consensus mechanisms to verify transactions and data and are uncensored by a single entity like Google or Apple.
Solana’s Consensus Algorithm.
Solana uses the Proof of History (PoH) consensus algorithm to secure its network. Unlike Proof of Work and Proof of Stake, this way of verifying transactions neither requires high computational power nor high stake like 32 ETH in the case of Ethereum. It just makes a short statement on the state of the blockchain and sends it to all participating and new nodes (nodes in a blockchain mean computers).
Traditionally, blockchains compute transactions one at a time to avoid conflicts. Unlike the Ethereum Virtual Machine and the EOS Web Assembly (WASM), Solana runs multiple transactions in parallel powered by Sealevel — Parallel Processing Thousands of Smart Contracts, (the world’s first parallel smart contracts run-time)
The State of Solana.
As of today, January 27,2023. The community boasts 11.5M= active accounts, 21.9M NFTS (Non-Fungible Tokens) minted, $0.00025 average cost per transaction 2,192 validator nodes, and about 3,600 transactions each second. Visit solana.com
