Over the years, a lot of block chain and crypto currency projects have emerged and are still emerging . Since the bitcoin project came and paved thee way , some other projects were anle to keverage on this new market of cryptography and one of thesee new projects is the Solana Blockchain.
What is Solana Blockchain?
This is a third generation open source blochchain network and is one of those recent projects . It published its whitepaper in 2017 and was not available on the testnet up until 2020. Solana blockchain aims to be the worlds pace setter in terms of speed and scalability in the block chain technology and it is not slowing down.
Solana blochchain was and is the brain child of Anatoly Yakovenko.
Solana has a delay function which is a type of Verifiable repelling hash . This hash function has a system that takes in or accepts loads of data and is made to only give out a very little output . The Solana block chain is fmdesigned in such a way that it has a fixed output. One unique feature of this blockchains network is that it is a very secure one .
Also, this blockchains uses a system whereby no one knows the exact result or solution of the hash is attained thereby making it very difficult for havkers to penetrate and making the block chain network almost imoregnable .
Bitcoin ,the first blockchains network , uses the proof of work consensus protocol which rewards miners with the token ,and this protocol consumes a lot of Electrical energy and is not environmentally friendly , but you see , this Blockchains network ( Solana) uses a new consensus protocol known as the Proof of History .
consensus known as Proof-of-History.
What is the proof of History consensus protocol ?
The proof of history consensus protocol allows for the tracking of transactions or trades and it gives a concise detail down to the time which the transaction occur.Since the Protocol is based on the time the transaction took place , it means validation doesn't have to go through a lot of phases or stages .
It usually takes time before hash functions are balidated and new blocks are formed ; which is the reason for reduced scalability of Bitcoin and other altcoins but the Solana blockchain allows for the independent validation of transactions.
All nodes unanimously approve the data sent to the blockchain network without need for verification since the data is presented because of its Dependability and the valid nature of the data sent. The Solana block chain an enormous capacity to process about 50000 transactions per second and has about 200 network nodes .
Did you just hear 50000? Yes you did and this processing speed is second to none in the cryptographic space . Typically before validation of transactions , validators communicate with each other before validating a transaction and before new blocks are added to the network but in the Solana blockchain , validators must take note or conserve the the clock by solving some variable hash functions.
Validators then wait for a fresh block to be added on the network before deciding on voting a block . When validators receive signals or testimony from the network that time has passed , the new block is voted on.
Some use case of the Solana blockchain
Solana blockchain is fast becoming the bride of investment and there are a lot of projects that have been built on this blockchain already . We will be considering some two use cases of the Solana blockchain.
Raydium
Built on the Solana blockchain is an automated market marker(AMM) called Raydium .Radium ensures super fast transactions or trades and this is achieved by the use of central order book of a decentralized exchange known as serum.
Aside from super speed, Raydium has a shared liquidity and new provisions for procuring yields.
Why is Raydium unique?
Other AMM DEXs and DeFi conventions are simply ready to get to liquidity inside their own pools and have no admittance to a central order book.Furthermore, with most of stages running on Ethereum, exchanges or are slow and gas expenses are high.
##Some benefits of Radium
Quicker and less expensive: We influence the proficiency of the Solana blockchain to accomplish trade or transaction sizes quicker than Ethereum and gas charges which are a small compared to ethereum charges.
A central order book for system wide liquidity: Raydium gives on-tie liquidity to as far as possible request book of the Serum DEX, implying that Raydium permits admittance to the request stream and liquidity of the whole Serum environment.
Exchanging interface: For merchants who need to have the option to see TradingView outlines, put forth line orders and have more command over their exchanging.
Exchange and trade :Raydium's trade permits two tokens to be exchanged rapidly through Serum, while the Decentralized user interface takes into consideration further developed exchanging elements, for example, limit orders. These make for a superior exchanging experience for clients.
Audius
Audios is also a project built on the Solana block chain and it offers services regarding the distribution of audio contents on the platform . Can you imagine producing contents that goes directly to the audience without having to sell your Masters and going through marketers and middlemen? That is what Audios offers .
An artist or musician can produce contents that are secured using blockchain technology meaning that the issue of piracy will be greatly reduced if not eliminated .
Audius is an open source decentralized network and has a feature for a way contents are curated by using the local token of the network ; the $AUDIO . In Audios content creators are rewarded by $AUDIO and the users or nodes are involved in the governance .
HAS THE SOLANA BLOCKCHAIN EVER BEEN COMPROMISED?
The Solana blockchain was compromised very recently and precisely on the 14th of September ,2021. The capacity of Solana block chain is around sixty five thousand transactions per second (65,000TPS) but on the 14th of September when the network faced a denial of service(DoS) attack the transaction on the block chain network exceeded 400000 TPS and the network literally stopped and this blackout lasted for 17 hours .
Validators were unable to validate transactions during the blackout as a result of a Grape protocol and the point of compromised was through one of the projects on the blockchain, Raydium. During the blackout , all investors were denied access to their funds and consequently the price of the SOL token fell from $171 to $142 but then something very interesting happened during that compromise .
Now the organizers said that the network was able to be restarted by the validators in a short period of time; although imoressive , but this brought up a very vital question . How decentralized is the Solana Blockchain?
CALCULATING THE NUMBER OF BLOCKS GENERATED BY THE SOLANA BLOCK CHAIN PER SECOND
Putting the details above into consideration , and the fact that the Solana block chain has been around for about 18 months and the Total blocks are 99084757 , we can work out these parameters to calculate the average transaction per second on the Solana block chain right from it's point of creation up until now . Isn't that interesting?
Solana's total duration from Blockchain creation = 18 months ; converting to seconds ,
18×2630000 =47340000 . To get the average time for each block to be validated , it will be the time of activity in seconds divided by the slot which equals 47340000/98,851,388 = 0.4789007110350337 this will be roughly 0.5 secs for a new block to be added or validated on average .
Conclusion
In view of the Blockchain's demonstrated scalability and interoperability, the development of the Solana blockchain has drawn in countless DApps. Subsequently, a lot of Defi organizations have decided to base their project on this Blockchain Besides, the quick time consensus connected with the Solana blockchain has attracted various activities to it.