What is Solana?
Omni -Solana is a decentralized, open-source blockchain project designed to allow globally scalable, user-friendly applications through the implementation of a permissionless, high-speed layer-1 blockchain
Solana combines a synchronization engine with a proof-of-history (PoH) algorithm to create a hybrid consensus model. This model enables Solana to process over 710,000 transactions per second.
SOL is used as the project’s native cryptocurrency. The SOL token is used to pay transaction fees and micropayments (known as lamports).
Solana has become one of the most popular blockchains, rising to the top ten in total market cap. Fundamentally, Solana is intended to make it easier to create smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps). There are a variety of NFT marketplaces and DeFi platforms supported by the project such as the NFT marketplaces SolSea, Magic Eden and Solanart and DeFi projects Saber, Serum, and Oxygen. Sometimes referred to as an “Ethereum Killer” Solana is known for its cheap fees and fast transactions when contrasted to the high levels of traffic and the resulting expensive gas fees.
Near the end of 2017, founder Anatoly Yakovenko published his whitepaper describing a technique to simplify network synchronization by creating a reliable clock to effectively keep time between computers that do not trust each other. He believed that in order for there to be competition with the large centralized payment systems the tps (transactions per second) rate would need to improve exponentially from the low tps that systems without a clock struggled to scale beyond. In 2018 Anatoly Yakovenko, Greg Fitzgerald, and Stephen Akridge founded Loom, rebranding to Solana a few weeks later. During the summer of 2018 Solana’s public testnet was published, supporting up to 250,000 tps. At the end of the same year, Solana published another testnet that supported up to 500,000 tps. Today, Solana supports an upper bound of 710,000 tps. You can find the real-time data for Solana here.
The only remaining item on Solana’s official roadmap is its full mainnet release, which is currently out in its beta form. The latest Solana mainnet is version v1.10.29 which new features are QUIC, Stake-weighted QoS, fee markets, and seeks to fix various bugs. The future of Solana looks bright according to Yakovenko saying: “The next phase is onboarding a billion users. Solana was built from the ground up to accommodate this scale. With this funding, Solana Labs is now positioned to bring in the right partners and capital to build products and tooling to get there”.
Apart from the mainnet, Solana announced a new Web3 mobile phone, Solana Saga.
Solana has a growing user base of daily active users and new dApps being built. Due to its instant transaction speeds, low fees, and positive environmental impact, Solana is quickly becoming a favorite of Web3 network users
Many Solana holders prefer to not sell their SOL and find SOL staking to be a great way to passively earn more SOL. Learn more about SOL staking and how you can earn with your SOL from liquid staking.
