Everything You Need to Know About Solana Blockchain (SOL)

Each & every day, you find some new technology & innovation which makes our lives a lot easier & smoother. Now, let us talk about one such technology named Blockchain. It is a modern world’s buzzword such as IoT & AI. However, it is not an accessible innovation such as your games which you can see & touch like your smartphone. In this era of smartphones, we are running our lives more on the core functions of our government, society, & the economies on the internet.

Nowadays, we perform nearly everything on the internet including, logging in to the apps, shopping, sending information to someone, etc. Nevertheless, Blockchain is a well-known technology that records everything that happens, like digital transactions, exchange of goods & services, etc. Skillfully, this blockchain stitches all that data and converts it into blocks that further one cannot modify. 

Furthermore, it continues to store that data in each block across the global network of all the computers. Overall, the Blockchain works as a distributed database that maintains a shared list of records known as blocks. Furthermore, these encrypted blocks carry the history of each & every block that previously came before it with the transaction information down the next. As a result, chaining all these blocks together is known as “Blockchain.”

What is Solana Blockchain?

Simply speaking, a Blockchain is made up of 2 things – a decentralized network & the ledger. A decentralized network helps in facilitating & verifying the transactions, whereas the ledger helps maintain the network. It is a network that is accessible to everyone to see a shared transaction ledger. However, there is not even a single point from where the record can be hacked. The prime reason behind this is that it is decentralized, and no one is controlling the data. 

Even if it is a bank, tech giants like Google, or any centralized government. To understand this more easily, Blockchain is a type of database that stores a collection of information electronically on a computer device. All this data is stored in the form of a table that allows us to search & filter for specific information more easily. Now that you know the concept of Blockchain and how it works, now you need to understand Solana Blockchain. 

Solana Blockchain is a kind of web-scale Blockchain that authorizes seamless, scalable, secure, & decentralized apps & marketplaces. Furthermore, the system supports an extensive range of transactions per second. Moreover, the goal of Solana Blockchain is to demonstrate the possibilities of software algorithms using various combinations to form a blockchain.

Core Innovations of Solana Blockchain

To make Solana Blockchain achieve all its goals, the developers have developed the various core technical features to allow the Blockchain to match the capabilities of a centralized system. With this, Let us see some of the core innovations of Solana Blockchain:

PoH (Proof of History) – A Clock before Consensus

Solana’s PoH is a Consensus Algorithm that helps in creating higher efficiency & total throughput rate in the Solana Network. So, along with the records of historical events & transactions, it helps the system track the transactions more efficiently and keep track of all the events.

Tower BFT – PoH-Optimized Version of PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Toleration)

Tower BFT is a consensus algorithm just like PBFT that is concocted to draw advantages of the synchronized clock. The Tower BFT makes use of the PoH as its cryptographic clock, which grants the consensus to be attained without having to do a lot of transaction latency & messaging overhead.

Gulf Streaming – Mempool-less Transaction Forwarding Protocol

The protocol of Gulf Streaming plays a crucial role in pushing the transaction caching and carry-forwarding it to the corner of the network. This grants the validators to perform the transactions well ahead of time, faster the switching time and decreased memory pressures on the validators of unconfirmed transaction pools. Thus, this protocol is basically what allows the Solana Network to support 50k TPS.

Sealevel – Parallel Smart Contracts Runtime

Sealevel is a corresponding transaction processing engine that is utilized to scale horizontally across the GPUs & SSDs. Putting this system in place lets the Solana Network establish a more organized runtime. Furthermore, it also authorizes the transactions to run coincidently within the identical Blockchain.

Pipeline – A Transaction Processing Unit for Validation Optimization

Pipelining is an action when a flow of input data allocates to different hardware responsible for it. Thus, this system lets the transaction be immediately validated & replicated across the nodes in the network.

Cloudbreak – Horizontally-Scaled Accounts Database

To get the crucial scalability on Solana, it needs the use of cloudbreak. The cloudbreak is a kind of data structure suitable for concurrent reads & writes all over the network.

Archivers – Distributed Ledger Storage

We use ‘Archivers’ for storing data. Data on Solana Network offloads from validators to a web of nodes called Archivers. These nodes can be as light as a laptop, and they will be a subject matter to check to ensure that they are collecting the correct data.

About Solana (SOL) Cluster

The Solana Cluster plays a crucial part in Solana Software. A Cluster is a set of computers that are working all together. From the outside, you can view it as a singular system. Each Solana Cluster is a set of individually-owned computers that generally work together. However, furthermore, they may work against one another as well. These computers help to verify the production of untrusted & user-submitted programs.

Furthermore, we can use the Solana Cluster anytime a user desires to store a fixed record of events. Or even the programmatic explanation of the events. Some practical cases of this technology are to trace which computers did that was meaningful in keeping the cluster working. Another can be to trace the ownership of the real-world assets. The good thing is that forasmuch someone is holding the copy of the ledger, the production of its programs will always be able to reproduce itself.

The SOL Token

The token: SOL is a native currency to Solana’s Network. Thus, the token can pass the nodes within the Solana Network in return for validating its output or running on-chain programs. Another use of SOL is to execute Micropayments that are also known as – Lamport’s. The current circulating supply of SOL is 26 million. Moreover, the max. The supply of SOL capacity is 489 million SOL. 

Furthermore, SOL has some more use cases – you can stake your tokens to make additional rewards. Do not worry; the staking process is straightforward. You need to follow the following process:

• Transfer your tokens to such a wallet that supports the token staking
• Create a staking account
• Select a validator of your choice
• Assign your stake to your validator

Pipelining – A Transaction Processing Unit for Validation Optimization

The Transaction Validation Process on Solana makes excellent use of development every day in CPU, which we call Pipelining. It is a suitable process when there is a flow of input data that you need to process through a sequence of steps. Moreover, there is different hardware that is in charge for each of them.

On Solana Network, the Pipeline Mechanism (Transaction Processing Unit) goes through Data Fetching at Kernel Level, Banking at the CPU level, Signature Verification at the GPU level, and Writing at the kernel space. So, when the TPU initiates sending blocks to your validators, it has already been fetched in the upcoming set of packets, authenticated their signature, & began to credit the coins.

Among the GPU Comparability in this 4-stage pipeline. Now at any moment, The Solana TPU will be making progress on 50000 transactions correspondingly. You can achieve this all with a computer for under $5000.

State of the Network

Solana’s testnet is live now. You may see it at testnet.solana.com. For price purposes, we are running only a few nodes. Nevertheless whatsoever, they have spun it many times for nearly 200 physically different nodes on 23 data centers on Azure, GCE, & AWS for benchmarking. The runtime is working currently, and the developers may deploy codes on the testnet now. Developers can now make intelligent contracts in C, and they are working aggressively on the Rust Toolchain. 

Will be the coaster language for Solana’s Smart Contract Development. Moreover, the Rust Toolchain is available publicly as a chunk of Solana’s Javascript SDK. Further, we are iterating on the Software Development Kit. Finally, Solana will soon float a public beta that incentivizes validators to course the nodes through Tour de SOL. It is analogous to Cosmos’ Game of Stakes that is challenging the public to check Solana’s limits while earning the tokens.

Wrapping Up

Technology makes our lives easier, and in the present time, we see new technology every day. One such technology is Blockchain that is ruling the modern world like AI & IoT. These days, we perform everything on the internet starting from shopping & transacting money. Therefore, we perform similar transactions on Blockchain as well. One such Blockchain is Solana, and it is solving various previous issues that users were facing. 

Solana displays a new type of structure to verify the transactions and a more effective consensus algorithm. The platform will become a strong competitor against Bitcoin & Ethereum. Also, Solana is displaying very rapid developments in this industry in just around ten years. This platform will indeed become something to look at as it is continuously growing.