What is Solana? Solana Crypto Explained for Beginners

Want to know more about Solana $SOL? Then you picked a great place to start your journey. With Solana’s Ecosystem growing at a tremendous rate, this guide is here to help you understand why Solana is quickly becoming one of the fastest-growing networks in the blockchain space.

What is Solana?

Created by Anatoly Yakovenko in 2017, Solana is considered to be one of the most technically advanced Blockchains in operation. As an open-source protocol, development, grants, and support for the project are maintained by The Solana Foundation. This foundation is made up of individuals that have extensive experience building products for companies that include Google, Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Twitter, and Dropbox.

How does Solana Work?

Solana operates by using a hybrid of various core concepts that combine to create one of the fastest and most cost-efficient networks today.

Solana believes that the most important factor in determining decentralization is a network’s censorship resistance. This is why Solana has the unique ability to increase hardware and bandwidth to improve network speeds as needed.

Solana smart contracts have full compatibility with the Ethereum network allowing for easy integration and replication. Unlike Ethereum, Solana is able to process tens of thousands of contracts in parallel instead of only one at a time.

Through the use of proof of stake and proof of history Solana is able to replace standard communication with local computation and scale its growing infrastructure at an unprecedented rate.

While Mempools in Ethereum and Bitcoin are propagated between random nodes in a peer-to-peer fashion. On the Solana network, transaction caching and forwarding are pushed to the edge of the network, allowing validators to execute transactions ahead of time, reduce confirmation times, switch leaders faster, and reduce the memory pressure on validators from the unconfirmed transaction pool. None of which are possible on Ethereum due to its technical limitations. 

With Solana built on the foundation of Moore’s Law, Solana will never have to worry about layer-2 scaling solutions. It’s for this reason Solana’s network continues to grow at its current rate, giving developers the freedom to create and deploy new products without concerns of future limitations (an important selling point for building on Solana).

Through a process called Pipelining, Solana can quickly confirm massive blocks of transactions and replicate them across the network at lightning speed. A process that effectively removes all signature verification concerns associated with transaction bottlenecking on other networks.

Due to all these technical advancements at the base layer, Solana can already handle transaction throughput of more than 50,0000 transactions per second and block times as short as 400 milliseconds. 

It’s for these reasons that Solana has surpassed many other legacy networks to become one of the top contenders in the DeFi space.

Solana’s Growth

In 2021 Solana grew from only $150 Million in TVL to over $12 Billion, becoming one of the fastest-growing projects of the entire year. Similar to the early days of Ethereum, Solana has had its own unique set of challenges that come with the massive adoption of its protocol.

Most recently, in September 2021, the network was taken offline for 17 hours as a result of “resource exhaustion.” Solana remains self-aware that it will take an equal amount of time stabilizing the network as it did to build it.

This year Solana plans to launch its newest product Solana Pay. The protocol provides a specification that allows consumers to send currencies like USDC, from their wallet directly to a merchant’s account instantly. With the help of Circle, this will undoubtedly open up new and exciting commerce opportunities for Solana and its users.

Want to know more? Read our full guide on How To Use Solana To Its Fullest!