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What is Solana? What Does Solana Do?

By Sherry Cantwell
Oct 29, 2024
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 Solana is a smart contract platform that offers high speeds, scalability and low transaction costs. This article will discuss, "What is Solana? What Does Solana Do?" Let's get started.

What is Solana?

Solana is a blockchain platform created to support scalable, decentralized applications. Compared to competing blockchains like Ethereum, Solana processes transactions significantly faster and charges significantly lower transaction fees. The Solana (SOLUSD) cryptocurrency, which uses the ticker symbol SOL, and is based on the Solana blockchain, experienced a nearly 12,000% increase in 2021. At one point, it had a market capitalization of over $66 billion, ranking it as the fifth-largest cryptocurrency at the time.

What Does Solana Do?

Solana is the world's first web-scalable blockchain. Due to its unique architecture, the platform's permissionless blockchain can produce a throughput of 50,000 TPS.

The Solana blockchain is intended to be the fastest on the market. It employs eight core features (PoH, Tower BFT, Gulf Stream, Turbine, Sealevel, Pipelining, Cloudbreak, Archivers) that enable it to achieve unseen transaction speeds.

Solana uses a PoS consensus mechanism, aided by the Tower BFT consensus.

The Tower BFT imposes proof-of-history, a universal time source that enables the network to come to an agreement. This provides a constant reference for each network node. Do not mistake the network's permissionless clock, known as PoH, with a consensus process .

One of the eight main ideas of Solana is a decentralized clock called the proof-of-history that aids in securing the blockchain. The permissionless clock is used by the tower BFT to speed up transactions. Smart contracts can operate concurrently thanks to the transaction parallelization system, Sealevel, which makes use of the SSDs and GPUs that are easily accessible.

The memory pool system, often known as mempool, is a feature of the Gulf Stream. Prior to the finalization of previous transactions, it assists in sending the transactions to validators. By doing this, transaction speed is increased.

In a nutshell, Solana's processes function like this:

- Receives the translation input on the ledger

- The ledger sequences and orders the messages so that they can be processed by other nodes in an efficient manner

- The same ledger executes current state transactions and stores it in the RAM

- The ledger published the transactions and signature of the final state to Verifiers (these are the replication nodes)

- Verifiers execute the same transactions on the copy of the state and publish their signature of the state when it receives confirmation

- Published confirmations will be the votes for the consensus mechanism

What is Solana? What Does Solana Do? - Hopefully, this article can help you to get some knowledge.

Disclaimer: The information on this page may have been obtained from third parties and does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of BitKan. This content is provided for general informational purposes only, without any representation or warranty of any kind, nor shall it be construed as financial or investment advice. BitKan shall not be liable for any errors or omissions, or for any outcomes resulting from the use of this information. Investments in digital assets can be risky. Please carefully evaluate the risks of a product and your risk tolerance based on your own financial circumstances. Products mentioned in this article may not be available in your region.

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