Solana

Solana is a high-performance cryptocurrency blockchain which supports smart contracts and decentralized applications. It uses a proof of stake consensus mechanism with a low barrier to entry along with timestamped transactions to maximize efficiency.This allows Solana to process 50-65 000 transactions per second with a theoretical limit of over 700 00 transactions per second (compared to Bitcoin’s 7 TPS and Ethereum’s 15 TPS). In contrast to other similar projects such as Polkadot.
The team at Solana has designed their blockchain with a long-term vision in mind. This comes from founder Anatoly Yakovenko’s own experience watching telecommunications technologies almost double in capability every year during his time at Qualcomm.
Solana is developed by a company of the same name which is based in San Diego, California. The Solana team consists of former Qualcomm, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Dropbox employees. In addition to being based on similar database technologies used by Google and Microsoft, Solana’s architecture is also inspired by Filecoin, a decentralized data storage cryptocurrency project.

How does Solana Work?

Disclaimer: Solana is incredibly complex. Start with a term you may have heard if you have looked at the project before: Proof of History (PoH). PoH is not a consensus mechanism. Rather, it is a component in Solana’s Proof of Stake consensus. PoH involves timestamping transactions when they are added to a Solana block. A new block on Solana is generated every 400ms (compared to Ethereum’s roughly 15 seconds and Bitcoin’s 10 minutes).Without getting into too much detail, the decentralized clock which is used as reference for the timestamps is the SHA256 hash function. SHA256 may sound familiar because it is used in Bitcoin’s Proof of Work consensus mechanism. However, instead of working to “solve” the hash functions to produce a new block, Solana instead uses SHA256’s repetitive outputs as reference – timestamps. This produces a sort of “clock tick” where each clock tick is 400ms (instead of one second like a regular clock).