Review on Solana by Ogulnar Annamuhammedova

Solana is a successful, dynamically developing open source blockchain project, massively used in recent years in decentralized fundraising (DeFI) projects, in the creation of decentralized applications, and also as a cryptocurrency payment network.

The Solana project is being developed by the private fintech company Solana Labs (registered in the USA), as well as the Solana Foundation, headquartered in Switzerland.

Work on the Solana project began in 2017, and it was fully operational in March 2020.

The ease of use and good performance of the Solana blockchain has attracted a large number of users. Thanks to this, the Solana cryptocurrency (SOL utility token) rate in 2021 showed a record growth, reflecting the trends inherent in top coins such as bitcoin, ether and others. The maximum record of the SOL coin, equal to 58 USD, was reached on 05/18/2021. Thus, the difference with the minimum price (0.5 USD on 05/11/2020) was 11,600%. In 2021, the SOL coin rate increased several dozen times. The current price (as of 05/26/2021) of the Solana cryptocurrency is around $ 28-29.

The main goals of the creators of Solana were to provide users with a practical solution to facilitate the process of creating decentralized applications, solve the problem of scalability and maintain a high level of security.

The Solana platform provides performance unimaginable for other blockchains and even for Visa / Mastercard - more than 155,844 tx / s (up to a maximum of 710,000 tx / s). High performance (scalability) of the platform is ensured by the use of a unique hybrid PoH + PoS (proof-of-history and proof-of-stake) consensus algorithm in the blockchain.

In addition, it enables the implementation of very fast and easy-to-use smart contracts.

Technical features of the Solana blockchain:

* this is a single chain that uses hybrid consensus

PoH + PoS;

* Proof-of-history protocol developed by A. Yakovenko,

provides fast transactions in the blockchain

Solana by verifying time delays between nodes

events. Proof-of-stake is a tool for

monitoring the PoH process, and also confirms each

created block;

* the Solana blockchain uses technologies such as Tower

BFT (part of PoH protocol), data streaming

(Turbine protocol, similar to BitTorrent), transfer protocol

transactions without confirmation (Gulf Streem), runtime

smart contracts without sharding (Sealevel), optimized

transaction confirmation protocol (pipelining), cloud base

data from Cloudbreak accounts, as well as a distributed database

Archivers data;

* the time between blocks in the Solana network is 400 milliseconds;

maximum transaction speed - more than 155,844 tx / s at

using transactions of the maximum size (1232

bytes), theoretically - up to 710 thousand transactions per second;

* used to process smart contracts

multithreaded separation of operations over computational

nuclei.