At the time of writing, querying “solana meaning” returns a bunch of results letting you know that it means “sunshine” in the Spanish language and is primarily a female name of Latin origin. But you probably wanted to find out the meaning of Solana in the world of cryptocurrencies and the results from a query like “solana meaning crypto” would have made more sense to you.
Nevertheless, we’ll assume the latter to be your intention and cover the Solana blockchain, often dubbed “the ETHereum killer”, to make sense of your supposed query.
What Is Solana (SOL) Crypto?
Solana is a Layer 1 blockchain designed to facilitate the use of smart contracts and the creation of new decentralized applications (DApps), popularized by its fast transactions and high throughput on the network. By adopting a unique innovation in verifying transactions more efficiently called ‘Proof of History’, the Solana blockchain aims to solve the blockchain trilemma once and for all.
Represented by the ticker symbol SOL, Solana’s native cryptocurrency is used to pay transaction fees on the network, can be used for generating staking rewards as a proof-of-stake validator, as well as grants holders the rights to vote in governance decisions. Fueled by its theoretical throughput of 65,000 transactions per second, Solana has managed to establish itself as one of the largest L1 blockchain by market cap, rivaling those of fellow “ETHereum killers” like Cardano and Polkadot.
Solana Meaning: Derivation Of Its Name
In November 2017, Anatoly Yakovenko published a white paper introducing Solana's proof-of-history concept and with plans to weave all the world's transactions togETHer on a single, scalable blockchain, he called the project Loom. Shortly after in early 2018, Anatoly brought on former Qualcomm colleagues, Greg and Stephen, along with three others to co-found a company that took on the project and its name.
Around the same time, ETHereum-based project Loom Network sprung up and caused confusion among many, pertaining to whether they were the same project. That triggered the company to be rebranded as Solana Labs and its project, Solana – derived from the small beach town North of San Diego called Solana Beach, where Anatoly, Greg and Stephen lived and surfed for three years during their time at semiconductor giant Qualcomm.
How Does Solana Work?
To understand how Solana works, we have to understand its key innovation: Proof of History (PoH), which stemmed from the fundamental issue of scalability that has plagued even blockchains such as Bitcoin and ETHereum. In traditional consensus methods like PoW and PoS, all of the nodes must communicate with one another to determine the order in which the valid transactions occurred and the time elapsed between them in order to achieve consensus. The longer it takes to reach consensus, the slower the process of adding new blocks becomes because the next block cannot be verified and added to a blockchain until the current one is confirmed.
The Solana blockchain is designed to provide a verifiable passage of time by employing the PoH innovation to add the element of time to its blockchain ledger. Solana events and transactions are all hashed using the SHA256 hash function which takes an input and produces a unique output that is extremely difficult to predict. Solana takes the output of a transaction and uses it as the input for the next hash such that the order of the transactions is now inbuilt into the hashed output.
This hashing process creates a long, unbroken chain of hashed transactions which presents a clear, verifiable order of transactions that a validator adds to a block, without the need for a conventional timestamp. Hashing also requires a certain amount of time to complete, meaning validators can easily verify the passage of them between transactions. By ordering the transactions in a chain of hashes, validators process and transmit less information in each block, thus greatly reducing the time to reach consensus and the confirmation of a new block subsequently.
To accomplish this, a network node is selected as the leader and placed in charge of generating a PoH sequence. This leader sequences messages for maximum efficiency and throughput. The ordered output is then sent to network validators, which are in charge of verification for Solana’s PoS consensus algorithm. At any given time, there is one leader on the network that is chosen by PoS elections and any validator node is eligible to be chosen as the PoH leader. If there is any failure detected with the PoH generator, then the validator node with the next highest voting power will be chosen to replace the original leader.
There are a few other technical design reasons for Solana's relative speed advantages, but the end result is that Proof of History helps optimize the transaction process by cutting down on the work that validators need to do, enabling much shorter processing times. Though, it’s important to note that Proof of History is not a consensus mechanism. It is instead a mETHod to improve the time spent confirming the order of transactions and when combined with Proof of Stake, selecting the next validator for a block is much easier and quicker.
Closing Thoughts
Without a doubt, Solana has huge potential having positioned itself as a faster, cheaper alternative to ETHereum with its speed and low fees. The innovative technical components comprising its network and market capitalization of its cryptocurrency certainly presents favorable prospects for its future. With the continued growth of the Solana ecosystem, it could definitely give a whole new “solana meaning” to the first page of Google’s search engine page results.
