I am glad to take part in this weeks lecture by Prof @pelon53 as he unfolds a lot about the solana blockchain.

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Question 1

Solana's Proof of History

The Proof of History of Solana can simply be viewed as proof of history event that keeps an accurate records of historical events that occured at a particular point in time. This function has its standard of allowing each validator in the Solana blockchain to maintain and encode every past event in the Solana blockchain with a simple SHA-256 function.

Prior to other blockchain that solely depends on a sequence of blocks to get confirmed before being verified which most times, there is always some delays in the confirmation process, Solana uses Proof of Stake consensus algorithm facilitated by Proof of History to overcome this delay and scalability problems. This therefore means that the structure of the Solana blockchain is oriented with great speed and capacity or scalability, maintaining optimum security and decentralization.

Proof of History is not a consensus algorithm, rather it is a critical component of Proof of Stake which is Solana’s consensus algorithm and it is what makes Solana to tick. Proof of History is infact an add-on in form of delay function to the SHA-256 function that enables all the transactions carried out on the Solana blockchain to be timestamped. This allows every validator node to have all the transaction records in the network to be in order without depending or relying on other validator nodes.

Each new block produced on the Solana network is a tick on the decentralized clock. Therefore the Solana’s clock ticks at a time duration of 400mili seconds, that’s amazingly really quick.

Question 2

Two Use Cases of Solana

The exceptional qualities of Solana has propelled many Defi projects to hint their root in the Solana network. At present, several projects like NFTs, infrastructure, games, Dex and so on has found the Solana network a great ecosystem to build their project on. Two of the Defi projects are; 8pay network and Afflarium.

8pay

Source

8pay is a Defi project that is aimed at allowing its users to automatically make recurrent payments. It constitutes smart contracts which is aimed at transforming the normal crypto wallet to something more trustless with a high level of reliability. It is unique in that ;

• It allows its users to use BNB, some supported BEP-20 tokens and also stablecoins to make swift and cost effective payments
• Users conveniently execute operations without having to submit their personal details. All the executions are transparent and secured by BSC.
• Users interact and transact among themselves without the service of intermediaries
• It allows users to stake in the yield farm and benefit from the fee charge of transaction carried out in the network.

The 8pay team are;
Benedetto Salanitro being the co-founder and CEO
Allesandro Bellardita being the co-founder and CMO
Mattia Russo being the co-founder and CTO.

8pay has its native token called 8pay. It is currently trading the price of $0.072097 with a market cap. of $1,964,737 and a trading volume of $424,532

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Afflarium

https://afflarium.com/afflarium-token

Afflarium is a metaverse online game that can be played which while earning in the process. It is an NFT game that uses real economy and allows users be in total control of their digital assets. Every transaction executed in the Afflarium platform is secured by the cryptography of blockchain technology. It is a an exceptional place to catch fun and earn at the same time.

Question 3

Sola token

SOLA token also known as SOL is the native token of the Solana network. This token is used to pay for transaction fees on the platform during execution of transactions. On a whole, the SOL token is can be used to achieve so many purposes that is why it is referred to as multipurpose token.

As at the time of writing this post, SOL token was trading at a current price of $158.66 with market capitalization of $47,255,967,559.64 and a trading volume of $4,325,875,467.07 the SOL token is currently ranked #7

Question 4

When did Solana Blockchain see its operations interrupted? Why? Explain.

Twitter

On the 14th of September 2021, Solana encountered a setback which made the network to shutdown for about 18 hours. During this period of non-operation, some of the network's smart contract was greatly affected.

Twitter

According to the official account of Solana, investigation showed that the network was actually overloaded with so much transactions that reached 400,000 transactions and that caused the network's transaction cue to be flooded.

Question 5

Check the last block generated in Solana and make an approximate calculation of How many blocks per second have been generated in Solana, taking into account from the initial block to the current one? Justify your answer and show screenshots.

Twitter

After some hours of work by the devs of the project, an upgrade to a higher version of 1.6.25 was done on the network.

This incidence caused the user of the network to panic because even the price of SOL experienced a dip for some days and that made some of the users to panic that their investment in the network has been jeopardized.

For this task, I visited the Solana block explorer via https://explorer.solana.com/. Then i identified the last block.

explorer.solana.com

I decrypted the block and the following information were displayed.

explorer.solana.com

Slot: 99,448,589
Blockhash : 4imc8b4UWtNt2qmaRqXyi5swXjPAV47pvr1zfhBz1yTH
Timestamp (Local): Oct 2, 2021 at 19:59:46 GMT+1

Timestamp (UTC): Oct 2, 2021 at 18:59:46 UTC

Parent Slot: 99,448,588

To be able to calculate how many blocks has been created so far in tho chain, I searched for block number 1.

explorer.solana.com

Here are the details in the block 1 of Solana.

explorer.solana.com

I then clicked on the transaction hash of the first transactions so that i can see more information.

explorer.solana.com

From here, the date of the block 1 was 16 March, 2021 and the time was 15:30:51 West Africa Standard Time

By calculation, there are 60 seconds in a minute.
For an hour, we have 60 x 60 = 3600 seconds.
For a day, we have 3600 x 24 = 86,400 seconds.

From March 16 2021 till today, we have 564 days.
So 564 x 86,400 = 48,729,600.

This means that 48,729,600 has elapsed from the day of creation of the block 1.

To get the actual number of seconds it took for each block, i further divide the number of seconds that has expired by the number of the last block. So we now have;

48,729,600 ÷ : 99,448,589 = 0.4899 second for each block

So in every 0.4899 , a new block was produced.

Conclusion

Solana has been one of the outstanding blockchain to win the scalability battle without any second layer unlike Bitcoin Network which make use of Lightning Network to handle scalability. Solana has really made waves since its inception and i must say that the future is great for the Solana blockchain.

Thank you

cc
Prof @pelon53