Solana series — #1 Introduction

6 min readFeb 25, 2021

Welcome! Do you want to learn something about Solana project before summer comes? If so, then you’re on the right place.

Scalable Blockchain Infrastructure: Billions of transactions & counting

Solana is a high-performance blockchain supporting builders around the world creating crypto apps that scale today.

solana.com

Solana is relatively new scalable hi-performance L1 smart contract block-chain built on very robust, reasonable, sober and rational premise.

Most blockchains are fighting to bring the best solution for the well known trilemma — decentralization, scalability, security. I would say it’s actually quadlemma — decentralization, scalability, security and composability.

Most of the other blockchains do pretty well either one or two areas but rarely any of them can perform well across all these aspects. Solana might be one of those exceptions and probably one of the best candidate to take over or share Ethereum’s crown and I will tell you why.

What is the big deal?

I guess you know Ethereum and you also know why it’s currently pretty expensive to buy few hundreds USD tokens or less on it. Most of us have the same experience. Ethereum is being eaten by its popularity and limited scalability (15TPS) . If you don’t invest $10k or more, it’s basically NO-GO zone. Known issue and not good situation. Even the new fee EIP1559 proposal will not really solve it and Ethereum 2.0 completion is quite far and it will not be easy for developers to implement it right anyway.

One of alternatives, like Binance Smart Chain (BSC) is much better these days but it’s basically ETH PoSA clone doesn’t solve the scalability issue (~50% of its capacity is already eaten) and it’s semi-centralized with only several validators so it’s CeDe solution.

Alternatives

Solana Ecosystem might not yet as great as Ethereum’s or BSC’s but it’s improving fast so it’s the best time to jump onboard, I assume. Cardano or Polkadot, next challengers, are under big hype and although these project are led by great persons and teams, Cardano smart contracts are not yet ready (probably soon) and Polkadot side-chain architecture is not as composable as Solana’s which might be a huge cons. Also Solana has much better entry price that those two which is also important factor.

Even more importantly, there is also no sharding (compared to Ethereum 2.0 for example) or side-chains or sub-networks (as on Polkadot or Avalanche) on Solana and therefore transactions are replicated across all the the nodes and it provides simple reasoning about state of our apps within the network.

Sharding or not

Also because of that, Solana provides the best possible composability as great as Ethereum 1.0 which should be preferred by developers in general as it supports the “Lego effect” without any obstacles. Sharding with good composability is difficult technical problem and as far as I know, only Radix DLT made it right so far.

Even if you have perfect sharding, for many cases it’s just better to know that every node in the network holds complete history. For some applications, sharding can be completely acceptable or even better because it can scale almost limitless, but for some other it might not be the best. In general, more critical application is, less sharding is appreciated. I think both sharded and non-sharded networks will be useful for certain type of applications.

And what is the Solana recipe for success? Technical skills, rational approach, well-thought architecture, strong hardware and optimized software. All this made by pretty qualified team. Now, let’s take a look at Solana basic properties.

Technical specification

TPS: 50,000 (scales with better hardware and networking up to 700,000 TPS)
Decentralization: 658 global validators
Block time: ~400ms
Average fee per transaction: $0.00001
Consensus: Proof of History (PoH)
Block propagation: Turbine protocol
Transaction forwarding: Gulf Stream protocol
Parallel smart contract runtime Sealevel
Validation optimization: Pipelining
Horizontally-scaled account database Cloudbreak
Distributed leger store Archivers
Smart contract: YES (Rust, C, C++ and Solidity layer coming)
No sharding
True composability

Solana Token

As any other blockchain network, Solana has its own token called, surprisingly, Solana aka SOL.

Unit: 1 SOL
1 Lamport = 0.000000001 SOL (named after computer scientist Leslie Lamport)
Total supply: ~ 489 million SOL
Circulating supply: ~ 264 million SOL
Current price: $16 (2021–10 -25)
Market cap: $4B
Fully Diluted market cap: $8B
Circulation / Total ratio: ~54%

Where to Buy Solana token? Binance or FTX are probably the best places to buy SOL tokens right now.

Incentives to hold and use SOL

There are plenty incentives why to jump into and hold SOL tokens (no investment advice, though)

Lots of new projects rising (DeFi and others) are being built on Solana
Many projects from Ethereum are migrating (or expanding) to Solana
Great smart contract chain (fast and very low fees aka fragment of USD cent, even way lower than on BSC)
SOL staking (you can delegate whatever SOL you have to Solana validators) and receive stake reward
Good entry price so far (compared to ADA, DOT, ETH, …)
Already some key applications (Serum, etc.)
Strong team and personalities behind Solana (Anatoy Yakovenko — Solana founder and also Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF)- FTX and Serum founder)
Future potential in general is pretty huge IMO

KISKIS

How to keep my SOL tokens safe? There are multiple wallets beyond CLI wallet and we will take a look at it in detail in next episodes, for now just see the list below. Note right now only Leger Hardware Wallets (S and X) already support Solana so you can keep your private keys really safe.

SOL Wallets

CLI — Solana Tools
Web -SolFlare, Sollet, MathWallet
Chrome Extension — Solong
Mobile — Trust Wallet, Coin87
HW — Leger S/X
Desktop/Mobile — Exodus

Smart contracts

Smart contract on Solana can be written with robust programming language Rust (and C, C++ and Move) and for easier adoption by the Ethereum smart contract developers, there will be Solidity support very soon (according to some unconfirmed rumors). We will dive into this area in coming episodes.

Conclusion

If you should remember something about Solana, you should remember this:

✅ Solana DOES scale
✅ Solana IS composable
✅ Solana IS decentralized
✅ Robust, secure and fast platform with very low fees
✅ Growing ecosystem getting momentum

In one sentence, Solana is ready for the future! I hope at least I made you more curious about Solana Project and we will definitely dive deeper in next episodes (where we will talk about Solana staking, smart contracts, tools, etc.). For now you can join one of Solana social channels (Telegram, Discord, … see the links below). Or you can try to break Solana :D (https://break.solana.com/)

How about some cons? I already mentioned some and there are few more:

ecosystem not as mature and polished as on Ethereum or BSC
no Solidity support yet for easy migration of Ethereum smart contracts
no Trezor or other HW wallets support (except Ledger)

Disclosure: SOL is part of my crypto portfolio

Ok, that’s all for today and see you next time. Blessings!

Support

In case you want to support this series (and try Solana Network at the same time), feel free to contribute any amount of SOL (yes, even one cent micro-transactions are possible and welcome (+about $0.00001 fee) to the SOL address below.

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