What is Solana?

Solana is a public blockchain protocol founded in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko, a former Dropbox software engineer. The protocol’s goal is to increase scalability while keeping costs low. Solana’s mission is to provide a strong platform that allows developers to create decentralized apps (dApps) without worrying about performance constraints. In other words, the blockchain was created to enable scalable and user-friendly apps for the entire world.

Furthermore, Solana claims to be the world’s quickest blockchain as well as the crypto space’s fastest-growing ecosystem. It also has thousands of projects ranging from DeFi to NFTs to Web3. The Solana blockchain has an advantage over its competitors in terms of transaction speed. The blockchain has 2,463 transactions per second at an average cost of $0.00025.

Star Atlas, Raydium, Audius, Serum, and Orca are some examples of Solana-based projects.

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Solana’s team

Solana Labs is the company behind the Solana blockchain. The core team includes two former employees of Qualcomm, CEO Anatoly Yakovenko and CTO Greg Fitzgerald. Also, the COO and co-founder, Raj Gokal.

Solana has collaborated with major projects such as Wormhole, Tether, Audius, and Circle, to name a few. The blockchain is also associated with the Solana Foundation, whose only aim is to establish, promote, and grow the Solana network and its community.

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Key features

Solana features a new timestamp system known as Proof-of-History (PoH), which allows for automatically ordered transactions. It also uses a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus technique to help protect the network. Sub-second settlement timeframes, low transaction costs, and compatibility for all LLVM compatible smart contract languages are further design goals.

The Solana blockchain also features millions of transactions per second as well as low costs.

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Metrics (as of 22nd May, 2022)

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Solana’s Token

SOL is the native token of the Solana ecosystem. The token basically has two primary use cases within the network. One is staking; where users can stake their SOL directly on the network. This provides the user with inflation rewards. SOL has a total supply of 511,616,946 SOL.

Next, the native token can be used for transaction fees. Users can use SOL to pay for transaction fees within the ecosystem.

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Timeline of Solana

In November 2017, Anatoly Yakovenko proposed the idea of Solana in a whitepaper.

In February 2018, Greg Fitzgerald began prototyping the first open-source implementation of the whitepaper.

Also in 2018, Loom Network rebranded to Solana.

In July 2019, the team announced the completion of a $20 million raise in a Series A round.

In March 2020, Solana launched on Mainnet Beta.

A year later, Kreechures, an NFT project, was mined on the Solana blockchain.

In November 2021, SOL reached its all-time high of $259.

In February 2022, Solana launched its Web3 payment technology, Solana Pay That same month, the team announced the “Solana Riptide Hackathon” to boost development on its network.

In March 2022, NFT marketplace OpenSea announced the commencement of listing Solana NFTs on its platform.