What is Solana (SOL)?

What is the popular SOL coin and what is Solana’s Uniqueness?

Many people have pondered upon what the SOL coin is and what its unique features are.

Today, Bitkub Academy will clear your doubts with the article, “What is Solana(SOL)?”.





What is Solana (SOL)?



Solana is a third-generation blockchain network built with the main objective of providing better network scalability capabilities to support increased traffic of users. Undoubtedly, scalability is a major limitation that many popular networks are experiencing that affects their users in terms of transaction speeds and higher fees.



Solana also aims to develop the network to be easily accessible for user usage and coding operations for developers, while maintaining SOL's usages as the base currency for transactions and various functions.



The Solana network currently has over 400 projects built within the ecosystem for different purposes engulfing numerous points of interest in the world of blockchain, including Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT),  Decentralized Application (dApps), etc.





Developers



Solana Labs is a project that was created in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko and Greg Fitzgerald, who worked together previously at Qualcomm and invited other colleagues to join, which later launched SOL and Solana Network into the world of blockchain and digital assets in 2020.





Interesting Technology



The Solana network’s consensus algorithm, Proof-of-Stake (PoS), which is the core of Solana's blockchain functionalities, monitors transactions occurring within the network by staking within the system as a verifier, while simultaneously raising the level of security for the network.



In addition to the PoS consensus system, Proof-of-History (PoH) is also integrated to initiate high-speed transactions for Solana’s blockchain network, allowing it to handle up to 50,000 transactions per second, while also only taking 400 milliseconds to create a block, allowing Solana to be recognized as one of the fastest blockchain networks out there in contemporary times.



Proof-of-History is a consensus system that was developed and deployed in 2017 on Solana's network to reduce transactions confirmation time within the network through a Timestamp system, which is used to indicate the node or user that verified the transaction, to further create a credibly trustless network that does not require prior communication. Moreover, it also builds the reliability for the whole system for users, creating true decentralization on Solana.



With technologies like PoH, which was designed to resolve limitations of scalability, combined with PoS, the Solana network is able to provide less power-consuming functions, faster transaction confirmation, enhanced network security, and affordable fees, while also being easily accessible for individual users up to enterprise-level nodes.





Unique Points



In addition to transferring the value of money in the network, Solana also facilitates decentralized applications (dApps) building through smart contracts, enabling various implementations, including standard SPL tokens, wherein the design is similar to the ERC standard tokens on the Ethereum network for the use of various application services.



Transactions within the Solana network currently have an average fee of only 0.0025 U.S. dollars and will never be more than 0.01 dollar in fees as the network is prepared to scale up to support the number of users and developers in the future.









In reference to statistics from Coinmarketcap on January 27, 2022, SOL is ranked as the 8th highest in terms of market capitalization, with around 28.5 billion U.S. dollars or around 945  billion Thai baht. SOL’s maximum supply is fixed at 511,616,946 SOL with a current 314,967,353 SOL in circulation. Additionally, SOL once made an all-time high at 8,611.57 baht and is hovering around the price of 3,000.48 baht at the time of writing.





Conclusion



Solana is a scalable blockchain network, allowing it to support a large number of users, while also providing easy access for both users and developers, with SOL as the base currency of the transaction and various functions.





References:

Solana Docs, Solana Beach, Messari, Wikipedia