Solana is a super-fast, highly secure censorship-resistant blockchain. It aims to provide developers with the infrastructure which will power the next generation of blockchain DApps and secure wider crypto adoption.
Introduction
In an increasingly competitive space in which developers have their pick of a number of chains, Solana is aiming to set itself apart with massive throughput and scalability, making it the solution for any developer with a need for speed.
Solana is capable of an impressive 50,000 transactions per second (TPS), while delivering 400-millisecond block times. The blockchain is reportedly so fast, and the company so assured in its abilities, they actively challenge users to ‘come and break’ Solana. Beyond the hyperbole, the company has developed a formidable technological approach to decentralized finance (DeFi). This has already tempted considerable numbers of programmers to make Solana the backbone of their DeFi, Web 3.0, and gaming platforms. This article is a breakdown of Solana’s key features and what is making it a destination blockchain infrastructure.
Eight Key Features
There are eight key features which Solana use to differentiate their technology from other blockchains on the market. These features are as listed:
Proof of History (PoH) – a means by which all participants in the network can reach consensus on time. The Proof of History mechanisms allows Solana to create a historical record that leverages a Verifiable Delay Function to prove that a certain event has occurred at a specific moment in time.
Sealevel – the parallel execution of smart contracts. Whereas other smart contract verification systems such as EVM and WASM-based runtimes are single-threaded, meaning that only one smart contract can modify the blockchain at any one time, Sealevel from Solana allows for tens of thousands of smart contracts to modify the blockchain at the same time.
Tower BFT – Solana’s proprietary Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus mechanism, turbocharged by the PoH timing mechanism which it leverages as a clock to reduce messaging overhead and latency. In effect, PoH is the network clock of Solana.
Pipeline – a means of maximizing the hardware resources within the Solana network. The four stage pipeline encompasses data fetching at the kernel level, signature verification at the GPU level, banking at the CPU level, and writing at the kernel space.
Turbine – the block propagation protocol, similar to BitTorrent. Turbine is optimized for streaming data, grouping validators into communities known as neighborhoods for even greater speed.
Cloudbreak – a horizontally scaling accounts database which maximizes hardware utilization. This allows SSD drives to operate at a capacity nearing RAM-like speeds, allowing significant speed advantages.
Gulf Stream – a memepool management system allowing up to 100,000 transactions. Since Solana can manage 50,000 TPS this allows the memepool transactions to be processed in seconds.
Replicators – these replicators or archivers maintain a distributed ledger store for petabytes of blockchain data storage, ensuring the probity of the network.
A Strong Community
Outside of Solana’s technology stack there are significant other allures which tempt developers to choose the lightning quick blockchain. Chief among these is the strong community which the company has built, comprising tens of thousands of members with representatives in 35 countries. The Telegram community is lively with 73,000+ members. The company also has a Discord community reaching 20,000+ and over 138,000 people following on Twitter. This reflects the huge buy-in which Solana has already developed and something which developers may wish to reflect upon.
Conclusion
With an impressive technology stack and a strong community of engaged members, there are plenty of reasons for developers to join the Solana blockchain. For developers which prize speed and require an incredibly high throughput of transactions, there is little doubt that this is one of the top options available anywhere.
Source : solana.news
