Solana information

What is Solana?

Solana is a high-performance blockchain platform designed to support scalable and decentralized applications (dApps). The platform uses a unique combination of consensus mechanisms—including Proof of History (PoH) and Proof of Stake (PoS)—to achieve high transaction speeds and low costs. Solana aims to provide infrastructure suitable for mass adoption, with applications ranging from payments and gaming to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized finance (DeFi).

Whitepaper: Solana Whitepaper

How does Solana work?

Solana’s architecture is based on several innovative technologies:

• Proof of History (PoH): A cryptographic clock that creates a historical record proving that an event occurred at a specific moment in time. This reduces the need for traditional timestamps and speeds up the consensus process.
• Tower BFT: An optimized version of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) that uses PoH as a clock, allowing the network to reach consensus faster with less communication overhead.
• Turbine: A block propagation protocol that breaks large data into smaller packets for more efficient network transmission.
• Gulf Stream: A mempool-less transaction forwarding protocol that pushes transactions to the edge of the network, enabling validators to pre-execute transactions and reduce confirmation time.

These technologies work together to allow Solana to process thousands of transactions per second with low latency and low fees.

The token

Ticker: SOL

Category: Platform Token

Blockchain: Solana

Protocol: Proof of Stake (PoS) combined with Proof of History (PoH)

Year of launch: 2020

The technology behind Solana

Solana’s technology is engineered for scalability and speed:

• Sealevel: A parallel smart contract runtime that enables thousands of smart contracts to run simultaneously, contributing to high network throughput.
• Pipelining: A transaction processing unit that enables streamlined transaction validation across all nodes in the network.
• Cloudbreak: A horizontally scalable accounts database that allows for concurrent reads and writes across the network.

These innovations support Solana’s ability to maintain high throughput and low latency—essential for large-scale dApp deployment.

The Solana ecosystem

The Solana ecosystem has grown rapidly and includes a wide range of projects and applications:

• DeFi: Platforms like Serum and Raydium provide decentralized trading and liquidity services.
• NFTs: Marketplaces like Solanart and Magic Eden enable the creation and trading of NFTs.
• Gaming: Projects such as Star Atlas and Aurory are developing blockchain-based games on Solana.

In addition, Solana has partnerships with various companies and organizations to promote blockchain adoption.

Who founded Solana?

Solana was founded in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko, a former Qualcomm engineer with extensive experience in distributed systems and compression algorithms. Together with co-founders Greg Fitzgerald and Stephen Akridge, he formed Solana Labs, the company behind the development of the Solana protocol. Their combined expertise helped build a scalable and efficient blockchain platform.

Impact on the environment

Work in progress.