Today’s topic of discussion will revolve around the Solana platform itself; how it’s different from Ethereum in design and architecture, how it handles complex operations, and importantly, how we aim to leverage these features as part of the Solstarter launchpad.
The Solana Platform
Before getting into the details of the Solana platform, it is important to understand that, unlike other ICOs, Solana has a built-in token system, or as it is called, a “smart asset”. This allows Solana to work the way its developers want it to. In the same way that a solid central authority governs a fiat currency or its issuer, Solana can control the amount of the smart assets and the way they are transferred. With this preface, we will look at Solana’s main, modular features and how the Solstarter product team will be using them to set the stage for a successful proof of concept, and then launching the Solace ecosystem and application framework upon which a variety of applications will be built.
How is it different than Ethereum?
Solana was developed from scratch with the intention of being a true blockchain-based platform that functions as a whole and can address all of the technological shortcomings of other platforms. As we will see, Solana has a different architecture, it has fewer moving parts, and it includes more robust privacy and authentication features than any platform to date. If Ethereum is a blockchain in the traditional sense, Solana is a decentralized permissionless blockchain that offers features not yet available on traditional blockchains.
One of the main differences between Ethereum and Solana is that the former is designed for micropayments, whereas the latter caters to much more complex and secure transactions involving different users (a.k.a. nodes) in what’s referred to as a scalable system.
While Solana is being promoted as an Ethereum killer for micropayments, we must also mention its scalability for every kind of transaction; it even handles advanced smart contracts. In fact, the Solana architecture is the closest thing to Turing-complete smart contract functionality offered by Ethereum.
What makes it so scalable?
Ethereum builds smart contracts to solve real-world problems. They’re smart because the protocol and smart contract are tightly bound and intrinsically deterministic; that is, the same program or code can’t run twice. While this is good for storing immutable data, it presents a challenge when it comes to computation.
How Ethereum handles computation is key to how it scales. Ethereum requires a miner to perform computing tasks in exchange for the right to add to the state or to publish transactions. When miners sign their work, they also earn new “gas” – a cryptocurrency that incentivizes them to work and take action. These tasks are ultimately solved by processing transactions; or in other words, adding, validating, and deleting transactions.
Solana was designed from the ground up to make it easier to have multiple different computers run a given software program, by offloading the heavy mathematics of that computer onto a distributed network. In other words, the network’s computing power is shared amongst many different computers (a process known as a “hashing”), which are generally networked using the Tor anonymity network.
The Solana software application itself, however, isn’t limited to one application or a number of applications. Solana can be extended to work as a customized application, potentially adding additional functionality via external components. These external components could include wallets, voting systems, remittance, etc.
Solana and the Future of Crypto
The Solana team has been working towards making the transition from centralized services to decentralized protocols since the project launched, and has been making considerable progress in the two years since its inception. These efforts have manifested in multiple facets, the first of which is the release of the Solana version 1.0.0 of the SmartContract language for the DEX, the two most popular features for the Solana community to date. These include Blockchain Internals and Cryptographic Efficiency.
This release of the platform not only provided native integration for the SmartContract features but also eliminated some legacy, centralized parts of the ecosystem, such as a smart contract chain input/output.
Conclusion
This was a great session, it really got the crowd’s wheels turning with how Solana will take on Ethereum with next-generation code on the blockchain. I believe that the team has a great vision and mission to improve the blockchain technology landscape as well as the crypto market in general.
Solana is a new form of governance in the world of cryptocurrencies that’s been chiseled out with the help of some of the most accomplished minds in the field. The Ethereum platform has been an incredibly useful platform to set up your own economy, and since the price of Ethereum is about ten times that of Bitcoin, there’s plenty of room for building your own parallel economies to thrive.
By contrast, Solana is built to handle much more complex operations, and it is very different from other solutions that are out there. Because of its purpose, the Solana platform is much more focused on the user experience and efficiency, compared to much of the competition.
So, in short, Solana has a big plan, and we have a lot of work to do to make this become a reality.
If you’re interested in the project, visit https://solana.network/. Cheers!