While Ethereum has captured most of the attention on the blockchain use cases we should not ignore what Solana brings to the table. The material here is extracted from the Solana Whitepaper. This post does not provide any advice and itshould be read as an educational piece written by a Defi enthusiast.
Solana differs from other mainstream blockchains by introducing the concept of Proof of HIstory (PoH) - “ a proof of verifying order and passage of time between event. When this is used with Proof of Work or Proof of Stake, PoH can reduce messaging overhead in a Byzantine Fault Tolerant replicated state machine, resulting in sub-second finality times.”
My inference of this is that this significantly speeds up the confirmation of a block. This gives it a performance edge and scalability advantage which leads to lower energy usage and ideal for those who want to seek out environmentally friendly protocols.
Solana is all about speed, with 400 millisecond block times and can process 50,000-65,000 transactions per second with a reportedly fees as low as $0.00025 per transaction. Solana has 1773 validator nodes and its scalability ensures that transaction processing cost will remain lower than $0.01. As hardware improves these metrics will continue to improve. Put this in comparison to traditional rails Visa 65,000 and Ethereum is predicting 100,000.
Key themes driving Solana popularity are:
The PoH ledger has a time keeping property and that adds a new dimension to validating.
Solana has been gaining popularity in the NFT space with OpenSea support.
Increased interest in using Solana for real-world use cases.
Solana is smart contract compatible with billions of dollars locked in DeFi protocols with many decentralised applications supporting Solana.
Improving liquidity on Solana as major exchanges are supporting and it being of interest by crypto fund managers.
Solana is a Layer 1 blockchain designed to facilitate smart contracts and the creation of new decentralized applications (DApps)
The bottom line from a popularity perspective is that its the next best thing to Ethereum. The promise in scaling up and meeting various commercial use cases puts it on a good path to success. If we look back at the recent market turmoil its quite evident from a percentage recovery basis Solana has tracked a lot better than Ethereum. Time magazine has even called this the Ethereum Killer.
One of the biggest user experience challenges in transacting crypto in Web3 has been the link with the wallet. Solana is attempting to solve this by creating a Solana powered mobile phone on the Android platform. This is would be the world first in bringing this closer to the masses.
“Almost 7 billion people use smartphones around the world and more than 100 million people hold digital assets - and both of those numbers will continue to grow,”
“Saga sets a new standard for the web3 experience on mobile.” Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana,