Solana is an open-source blockchain system that aims to provide a high-performant, decentralized, secure and scalable system. It was release in April 2019. Solana aims to provide a very fast and scalable system with about 50,000 transactions per second and a maximum of 710,000 transactions per second. This impressively fast system allows the transaction fee to be very low with about $0.00025 per transaction. These are really interesting numbers, but it should also be noted that solana is still less mature when compared to other existing blockchains like Ethereum.
Why does solana exist?
The early blockchain system like Bitcoin and Ethereum are limited in the amount of workload they can process within a given time. For example, bitcoin can process a maximum of 7 transaction per seconds and 30 transactions per second for ethereum. This limitation is responsible for the high transactions fees in the blockchain network, with the average of $60 per transaction for Bitcoin and $65 for Ethereum.
Scalabilty is always at the core of every technology that influences our day to day activities. For instance, Visa processes 1,700 transactions per second on average and can have a maximum of about 65,000 transactions per second. With this in mind, blockchain developers are challenged with creating a system that is decentralized, secure and also scalable. This is where solana comes in.
Difference - Solana and Ethereum blockchains
Solana and ethereum differs majorly in their underlaying technology and consensus mechanism.
Underlaying Technology
- Ethereum
Ethereum uses stateful architechture as a mechanism to acheive decentralization. Every transactions in the ethereum blockchain is being transmitted to every nodes on the blockchain in real-time. For example, if I want to send $3 to a friend, the validity of the transaction must be transmitted and updated in all the mining nodes on the ethereum blockchain before the transaction can be valid. This is the major cause of the slow transaction speed in ethereum.
- Solana
Solana uses a stateless architechture to acheive decentralization. Every transactions is initially sent to the mining nodes, but there is no need for updating the time the transactions was completed. The time tracking is taken care of by the cryptographical calculations which is made possible by its consensus mechanism (Proof of History).
Consensus Mechanism
Consensus in a blockchain is an agreement protocol to validate that the data about to be added to the blockchain is valid.
- Ethereum
Ethereum 1.0 uses the proof of work consensus mechanism. This mechanism ensures that all mining nodes compete to become the leading node (the one that adds a new block to the blockchain) and spends energy by making some high-computational calculations to prove their validity. This is energy consuming and involves a large waste of useful energy. Ethereum 2.0 aims to switch to a better alternative - Proof of Stake. The Proof of Stake is less energy consuming because the leading node is selected at random and also based on its stake ( its total assets on the blockchain).
- Solana
Solana uses a combination of Proof of Stake and Proof of History to achieve consensus amongs its validator nodes. The Proof of Stake is similar to that proposed by ethereum 2.0 while the Proof of History helps to support its stateless architechture where the timestamp of each transactions is calculated cryptographically.
The way forward
In the web3 ecosystem, Ethereum is still the most used blockchain in terms of the number of Decentralized applications, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) currently hosted on it. That said, solana is one of the fastest growing blockchain for building DeFi , Dapps, and NFTs majorly because of its scalability, fast transaction speed, and low transactions fee.
In the upcoming articles of this series, I will discuss how you can build Web3 apps (NFTs, DeFi and so on) using solana program. Solana program is similar to Ethereum's smart contract but it uses Rust programming language. So, I will also touch on Rust and explain some of the basics concept of Rust you will need to know to build a solana program.
Let's get in touch on Twitter @drayfocus and Linkedin Akinola Ayomide.
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