{"id":469270,"date":"2021-08-15T06:36:53","date_gmt":"2021-08-15T06:36:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wncen.com\/?p=469270"},"modified":"2021-08-15T06:50:49","modified_gmt":"2021-08-15T06:50:49","slug":"an-introduction-to-solana-innovations-characteristics-and-criticism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wncen.com\/news\/an-introduction-to-solana-innovations-characteristics-and-criticism\/","title":{"rendered":"An Introduction To Solana: Innovations, Characteristics, And Criticism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Will Solana be the one? The race to be the prime smart-contract-enabled blockchain is heating up. Many projects are chasing Ethereum\u2019s tail, offering faster and cheaper transactions plus technological innovations. What does Solana offer? An internal clock. An incredibly higher number of transactions. Fees so low that are almost non-existent. The possibility to scale to global adoption in their layer 1.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Related Reading | Solana to Launch Stake Pools, This Is How It Will Enable Rewards For SOL Holders<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Will this be enough to capture the market? Is Solana the mythical Ethereum-killer that everyone is looking for? Keep reading and get enough info to make your own mind. We\u2019ll summarize the good, the bad, and the ugly in digestible bullet points and short text.<\/span><\/p>\n

What Is Proof Of History And How Does It Work?\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

Contrary to what the name suggests, proof of history is not a consensus mechanism. Solana uses Proof-Of-Stake to validate its blocks. \u201c<\/span>The core Solana innovation is Proof of History (POH), a globally-available, permissionless source of time in the network that works before consensus,<\/span><\/i>\u201d says the following video\u2019s information box.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/iframe><\/div>\n

To drive the point home, let\u2019s also quote <\/span>Techcrunch<\/span><\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

Enter Yakovenko\u2019s big idea, which he calls \u201cproof of history,\u201d wherein the Solana blockchain has developed a kind of synchronized clock that, in essence, assigns a timestamp for each transaction and disables the ability for miners and bots to decide the order of which transactions get recorded onto the blockchain. Yakovenko says doing so allows for greater security and \u201ccensorship resistance.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Solana\u2019s creator is Anatoly Yakovenko, a San Francisco resident \u201c<\/span>who spent more than a dozen years as an engineer working on wireless protocols at Qualcomm.<\/span><\/i>\u201d He wasn\u2019t interested in cryptocurrencies until he figured out a way to improve the system. In traditional blockchains, the blocks don\u2019t carry a timestamp and that leads to inefficiencies. Yakovenko figured out a way to include it in the SHA-256 (Secure Hashing Algorithm 256) hash function, and the rest is history\u2026 proof of history.<\/span><\/p>\n

Other Innovations That The Solana Blockchain Offers<\/span><\/h2>\n

This section will be the only technical part of the article, we promise. To start, we\u2019re going to quote <\/span>EVALUAPE\u2019s analysis<\/span><\/a>. They\u2019re \u201c<\/span>a platform for demonstration and evaluation of blockchain projects<\/span><\/i>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

VDF, Verifiable Delay Function:<\/span><\/p>\n

A function used to generate PoH. It is a collision resistant hash function. In short, this is a function that takes a bunch of data inputs and spits out an output in fixed size. The main advantage of the function is its security.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Avalanche Communication:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Simply speaking, since the hash value in every timestamp is calculated by the previous hash value, a long range of hash value can be broke into small partitions to be verified separately by the nodes. Each node only needs to verify a partition of hash value, and then concatenate and restore to a long hash value.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And for the next batch, we\u2019ll quote <\/span>Decrypt\u2019s analysis of the Solana<\/span><\/a> platform.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tower Consensus, a variant of Proof-Of-Stake that:<\/span><\/p>\n

Enables distributed networks to reach consensus despite attacks from malicious nodes, known as Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT).<\/span><\/p>\n

Solana’s implementation of PBFT enforces a global source of time across the blockchain through a second novel protocol known as Proof of History (PoH).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sealevel:<\/span><\/p>\n

This allows for a parallel smart contracts runtime that optimizes resources and ensures that Solana can scale horizontally across GPUs and SSDs, which should help the platform scale to meet demands.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gulf Stream:<\/span><\/p>\n

Solana also completely nixes the mempool system used by other platforms, and instead forwards transactions to validators even before the previous batch of transactions is finalized. This helps to maximize confirmation speed and boost the number of transactions that can be handled both concurrently and in parallel.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Key Characteristics Of The Solana Blockchain<\/span><\/h2>\n