Discussing Solana’s technical architecture in detail: Why wasn’t Solana killed by Ethereum?
Original source: Haotian, blockchain security practitioner
Under the background of the bear market, everyone will calmly think about some things that the bull market may have ignored, such as the return to the public eye.Solana, does the technology work? Can centralized downtime destroy everything?
Recently, MakerDAO said that Solana’s codebase is not bad, Visa has also announced that it will cooperate with Solana on a pilot basis, and Solana’s TVL and other data indicators have also improved a lot. Will Solana usher in a second spring? How to interpret it?
At the time of the bull market, faced with the sudden rise in the currency price of $SOL, everyone said that Solana had a strong capital background and community ecology, but few people could explain clearly what Solanas technical framework was.
Without bragging, this article briefly analyzes the technical architecture behind Solana from a popular science perspective, and why Solana was not killed by Ethereum.
Tips: Only from the perspective of technology popularization, I will help you to re-understand Solana without making any investment reference.
POH consensus mechanism
First, let’s talk about the POH consensus mechanism, namely (Proof of history), which is a special innovative mechanism adopted by Solana. In the traditional sense, there is no relationship between block time and physical time (weak correlation). For example, the time benchmark of public chains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is the block height, and the manifestation of time passage is only the continuous superposition of block heights. Therefore, the Cancun upgrade This specific time can only be estimated based on the network block production rate.
The innovation of Solanas POH is to anchor the time passage of the chain with physical time. For example, the interval between each POH block is fixed, continuous hash operations will produce a verifiable time series, etc.
This can avoid manipulation and attack problems caused by subjective time. Imagine that if the block time is irregular, it will be difficult to quickly reach a consensus among nodes, and it will be easy to cause rollback, replay and other attacks. The objectivity of physical time It is unshakable. Nodes can detect some abnormal situations only based on the current time series without going back to all historical data.
Therefore, the innovation of POH is to strongly bind physical time to promote better collaboration and consensus among Solana nodes.
In my opinion, the POH mechanism has another advantage: the node receives a large number of transactions in batches and sorts them (Pipeline), and has to wait for the POH timestamp to submit the transaction, which is equivalent to layer 2 to layer 1 Batch transaction. This mechanism is like Rollup The idea is brought into layer 1, which provides prerequisites for the high throughput and parallel processing mentioned below.
Storage and computing separation features
Next, let’s look at the “storage and computing separation” feature, which allows Solana to get rid of the bottleneck restriction of Data Availability.
The traditional blockchain verification framework relies on full nodes to publish a large amount of historical data to achieve real-time calculation of changed status. This coupling of calculation and storage will limit the performance of the chain to some extent. For example, when Ethereum wants to update its status, it must first synchronize the entire chain data and then perform historical record calculations. In addition, Ethereum generates blocks sequentially and cannot be serialized, so the block generation time and single block capacity will be limited.
Solana separates state storage and transaction execution. There is a separate storage system to retain the state, including account information, signer history, transaction records, etc. When a new transaction is executed, Solana will perform high-speed calculations on the Pipeline node. Finally, only the status is updated to the storage system. The separation of the two can ensure the fast operation of the ledger system and avoid the time loss of DA verification status time + calculation and waiting for DA verification results. It should be noted that network computing and storage resources need to be obtained by staking SOL.
To put it in a laymans terms, workers in Ethereum have to go to the warehouse to pick up raw materials and then go to the workshop for processing. It is inefficient to run back and forth between the two responsibilities. However, Solana has dedicated workers in both workshops, and the porters only need to move the materials that are used nearby from time to time. The production workshop is just fine, and the efficiency has been greatly improved.
Highly concurrent transaction processing
Lets take a closer look at the high concurrent transaction processing feature, which makes it feasible for Solana to meet the web2 market demand.
Although Solanas claim of having 700,000 TPS was treated as a joke in the context of its occasional downtime, MakerDAOs Endgame selection and Visas selection are to some extent a recognition of its performance limits. So, how does Solana achieve high concurrency?
To put it simply, it is created by the advantages of POH and separation of computing and storage mentioned above. In order to give everyone a deeper understanding, I will try to compare it with the high concurrency of Starknet.
Solana receives 10 transactions sent by user Alice at the same time. The node will sort the transactions, wait until the POH timestamp comes to Batch package, and then when the next timestamp arrives, the node will call the status data of the independent storage system to detect the 10 transactions. Whether there is a status conflict, if there is no conflict, 10 transactions can be packaged into one block normally. If there is a conflict, the conflicting blocks will be excluded from this package.
The difference is that under a set of account abstraction models, Alice in the Starknet network cannot have state conflicts in the transactions issued by one account. She can execute Approve and Transfer at the same time because they modify different states of the contract. Approve corresponds to Allowance. , Transfer corresponds to Balance, but if two Transfers are executed at the same time, Balance must be modified at the same time, which may easily lead to status conflicts and calculation errors. Therefore, the account abstraction feature is the basis for Starknets high concurrency.
To give a popular example, Solanas parallel method is like a restaurant arranging multiple waiters to order food for customers at the same time. Each waiter handles a transaction thread, and the order order is also coordinated by the waiter. If there are the same dishes, the kitchen can run them in parallel. Serving food; and Starknets parallel method is equivalent to using a self-service ordering machine to scan the code to order food. Customers can receive orders on multiple machines at the same time, and the back-end central control system coordinates the orders.
In short, the purpose of high concurrency is to make reasonable and efficient use of system resources without disrupting network order.
Solana’s waiter is the high-cost node operation and maintenance system that everyone complains about, while Starknet’s self-service ordering machine is the account abstraction basis that is compatible with the contract.
With a deep understanding of the underlying technology of Solana, we may have different answers if we look at some of the criticized questions.
In my opinion, Solana’s problem lies in the overly complex technical implementation logic: 1) Solana’s node operation and maintenance costs are too high, resulting in a limited number of nodes and constraining its decentralization capabilities; 2) POH+POS consensus mechanism , nodes need to have powerful computing and bandwidth resources to carry high concurrency, and the higher the resource cost, the greater the node operation and maintenance cost; 3) Problems such as status conflicts and network load will inevitably occur during high concurrency processing;
Some people say that Solana is using web2 thinking to build a web3 network, and its technological innovation starting point is higher than the existing blockchain architecture. If its problems are regarded as fault tolerance on the road to innovation, there may be different evaluations.
The price of innovation may be as everyone can see, watching it rise and seeing its building collapse. But if the foundation of innovation is there, will this collapsed building rise again?
Note?item_id=888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">see more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View more? item_id= 888" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">See more: I do not hold SOL. The above analysis is only a calm thinking and observation from a technical + business perspective, and there are some imprecision in the popular interpretation process. You are entitled to read it as a popular science article and do not use it as an investment reference. .
