We introduce Solana crypto (SOL), the fast, secure and extremely scalable blockchain.
Solana is a blockchain featuring extremely fast transaction speeds.
When more nodes come on board as part of the network, Solana aims to solve what they call the trilemma, by also offering security and censorship resistance.
If they hit their goals, the Solana crypto network certainly has the potential to provide the open infrastructure required for global adoption.
The Solana crypto project allows businesses to focus on their core value propositions and not worry about whether their blockchain infrastructure can handle the throughput.
Something that those building products and dApps on the Ethereum network can no doubt attest to stressing over.
By building on Solana, businesses the pitch is that you longer have to choose between scalability, security and censorship resistance.
Solana has solved the trilemma without the need for sharding or layer-2 solutions.
Sounds pretty hot, right?
Almost like its Solana summer or something!
Let’s now jump right into our comprehensive Solana guide, starting with an introduction below.
Introduction to Solana crypto (SOL)
Solana was primarily created by current CEO, Anatoly Yakovenko.
The former Qualcomm and Dropbox engineer was originally launched in 2017, but it wasn’t until March 2020 when the Solana (at the time, called Loon) mainnet was launched.
The Solana protocol
The solution to the trilemma that the team often speaks about, comes on the back of the Solana protocol.
Designed to facilitate decentralised application (dApp) development, the Solana protocol introduces a combined proof-of-history (PoH) and proof of stake (PoS) consensus.
You can see the protocol’s scalability simply by looking at the current transactions per second (TPS) running through the network.
Currently, Solana supports 50K TPS while producing new blocks every 400 milliseconds.
While the number of nodes may currently be limited and somewhat centralised when compared to Ethereum, there is no doubting Solana’s speed and efficiency.
Any dApps looking fed up with Ethereum’s expensive and slow transaction speeds can certainly weigh up the pros and cons of making the switch to Solana.
The SOL token
The native cryptocurrency of the Solana network and ecosystem is the SOL token.
Rocketing up the market cap rankings to 10th on CoinGecko, Solana (SOL) consistently ranks in the popular and trending sections of the site.
All of this hype surrounding Solana crypto has obviously helped the price of SOL, with the cryptocurrency about to eclipse its all-time high of $56.20.
SOL has a maximum supply of 489 million and a current circulating supply of 26 million tokens.
Use cases for the SOL token include:
- Being passed to nodes in exchange for validating the network.
- Performing micropayments of fractional SOLs known as lamports.
- Staking to earn rewards.
If you’re interested in a deep dive into Solana’s SOL token distribution, the team publishes official transperancy reports that are worth a look.
Something we go over a little later ourselves.
With that introduction out of the way, let’s now head into the meat of our guide to Solana.
Best of probabilities to you.
Direct from the desk of Dane Williams.
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