Solana is named after the beach "Solana Beach" where the founders often go, a project developed by the big cows from Qualcomm. At present, it has grown into the third largest public chain after Ethereum and BSC.

The platform token SOL, with the highest currency price of about 220 US dollars, has the fifth largest market value in the encryption industry in the world, and the highest total lock-up amount (TVL) is nearly 14 billion.

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Data source: solanabeach.beach

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Data source: solanabeach.beach

Solana chain features: low rate, high TPS.

ecology

ecology

So far, there have been more than 400 projects on Solana. The platform of SBF and the capital support of a16z have allowed Solana to shine in the second half of this year, and at the same time brought rich capital returns to early investors.

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Image credit: Solanians_

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Image credit: Solanians_

Solana's ecology has formed a large scale, including AMM, DEX, wallet, oracle, lending, derivatives, options, asset management and other tracks, and has also produced leading players like Serum, Orca, Raydium, and Pyth in each track. department project.

Blockchain impossible triangle/trilemma

The trilemma is an economic term. It was first proposed by V God in the currency circle, that is, decentralization, security, and scalability (efficiency) cannot be achieved at the same time. The current blockchain is based on the premise of sacrificing efficiency to ensure security and decentralization.

Solana claims to solve this problem and break through this limitation. However, there are also doubts about the degree of decentralization of Solana. The most typical is that Solanan was down for 18 hours in September this year. During the downtime of up to 10 hours, no transaction was generated, and all nodes were shut down, which is almost impossible in the decentralized world.

Network participant type

User: Users who use the Solana network pay a small gas fee when using it.

Miners: Pledge SOL tokens to the verification node to obtain income. When there is a problem with the verification node, the miner should also bear the corresponding responsibility.

Verification node: Verify the validity of the block and verify the POH status. Legitimate verification nodes will be rewarded, otherwise they will lose the mortgaged SOL.

Leader (leader): The leader selected from the verification block is responsible for collecting transactions, creating blocks containing POH, and updating the network status. The leader has the right to retain a portion of transaction fees up to the upper limit specified by the protocol.

VDF verifiable delay function

VDF is a mathematical function that is used in Solana to implement POH. VDF functions have the following properties:

1. Verification is very convenient and efficient, which is very similar to Bitcoin hash value verification.

Second, the result is unique. There is only one output for any input, and there are no two different outputs.

3. Resistance to parallel computing. It can only be done by a set sequence of steps, each of which must depend on the previous one.

Proof of POH history

History proves that by encoding time into VDF, verifiers use VDF to maintain their own clocks, thereby reducing the burden on nodes in the network.

Each validator maintains its own clock, chooses the leader first, and proceeds a full epoch later. The validator runs the VDF to prove that they get the transfer block and the validator's time slot (slot). Doing so validators can get block rewards.

consensus mechanism

consensus mechanism

TBFT consensus (Tower BFT), similar to PBFT consensus.

PBFT (Improved Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant Algorithm), the minority obeys the majority principle. Each node represents one vote, and the majority of the voting results is the solution to the problem. PBFT controls fault tolerance to 1/3 of all nodes, that is, more than 2/3 of normal nodes can operate normally.

The biggest difference between TBFT and PBFT is whether the nodes are fixed. PBFT is a fixed leader node that packs transactions and replaces them when they fail; while the leader of TBFT is replaced, and will be rotated into the next node after packing a few blocks. Fairness will be better.

Pipeline virtual machine

Currently the most widely used virtual machine is EVM, which is single-threaded. The Pipeline virtual machine built by Solana is an engine that can handle parallel transactions.

token economy

token economy

Solana platform token SOL has a total supply of 488 million pieces. The current unit price is more than 200 US dollars, and the market value of the encryption market ranks fifth in the world.

SOL sets an initial inflation rate of 15%, which is reduced by 15% of the previous year every year, and eventually stabilizes at 1%-2% after a long period of time. So early entrants are very beneficial.

token sale

Seed round: $0.04, accounting for 15.68%, April 5, 2018

Founding round: $0.2, accounting for 12.63%, June 3, 2018

Validator round: $0.225, accounting for 5.07%, July 9, 2019

Strategic Sales: $0.25, accounting for 1.84%, January 2, 2020

Coinlist auction: $0.22, accounting for 1.6%, March 23, 2020

Compare with BSC

As the current public chain second only to Ethereum and BSC, Solana and BSC are often compared.

The two occupy the second and third largest public chain positions respectively, and both are supported by very well-known large exchanges and investment team platforms.

From an ecological point of view, the ecological development of BSC is undoubtedly stronger and more sound, and Solana in the DeFi field is catching up.

future outlook

future outlook

Under the standard Gigabit network, Solana has a theoretical TPS of up to 710,000. Of course, the current actual TPS is nearly 3,000, which is already a hundred times that of other public chains. And Solana officially promised to double the TPS. The rapid development of the DeFi ecosystem will further amplify the advantages of Solana, and the two complement each other.

Solana has proven its worth and continues to expand its territory. In the blockchain era after the arrival of Ethereum 2.0, how to face new competition and gain greater market recognition may be the challenge that Solana will face.

Attached reference reading:

1. White paper: https://solana.com/solana-whitepaper.pdf

2. [Research] Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) (1) Understand VDF in one article: https://blog.priewienv.me/post/verifiable-delay-function-1/

3、POH：https://medium.com/solana-labs/proof-of-history-a-clock-for-blockchain-cf47a61a9274

4. In-depth analysis of the popular public chain Solana: how does it work? How to generate value? : https://www.chainnews.com/articles/847729457993.htm

5, 8 points explain Solana's ambition to become the first Web-scale blockchain: https://medium.com/solana-labs/7-innovations-that-make-solana-the-first-web-scale-blockchain- ddc50b1defda

6. Solana inflation design overview: https://forums.solana.com/t/solana-inflation-design-overview/920