Solana is a permissionless blockchain with a high transaction speed compared to its counterpart, Ethereum. It is highly scalable with over two hundred nodes offering a high throughput of over fifty thousand transactions per second.
Solana neither uses the Proof of Work consensus mechanism nor the Proof of Stake algorithm but utilizes the Proof of History system. Using PoH, Solana blockchain inputs different events in different periods, indicating that an event occurred during a particular period in the past. PoH works with the high-frequency Verifiable Delay Function, meaning that several levels of simultaneous steps have to be done before it can evaluate them.
Every event that is verified within the chain is earmarked a peculiar hash, as well as a count that allows it to easily be verified by anyone. With the count attached, people can verify when an event happened, which works as a cryptographic time-stamp.
Every node operating in the Solana blockchain has a cryptographic clock that is designed to verify when every event occurs. Adding this feature has improved the efficiency of the blockchain. The throughput level is high as a result of this.
Solana’s Origin Story
It was the year, 2017, Anatoly Yakovenko decided to partner with Greg Fitzgerald and Eric Williams to officially launch the Solana blockchain. The underlying principle of Solana was to solve the issues noticed in both Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains. A major concern was the low throughput level in both, and the founders of Solana decided that their new creation will do better in that aspect.
Solana’s dream is to be the blueprint for trustless, highly scalable, and distributed protocols. At the moment, it is backed by leading multinational firms like Intel, Apple, Twitter, and so on.
Solana Cluster: Why is it important?
Solana can’t be complete without its important component, which is the Solana cluster. It is made up of computers that are both designed to work together or against themselves for a common goal. Since they are independently managed, they authenticate the transactions. Another use case is that the cluster creates an immutable record of events that can’t be altered.
Solana’s Architectural Features
- PoH (Proof of History)
One reason that Solana blockchain is highly scalable compared to its counterparts like Ethereum is because of its Proof of History consensus mechanism. It has injected a more efficient throughput level into the chain. Keeping historical records of transactions makes it easy for the network to track events seamlessly.
- Turbine Protocol
The onus of transmitting data to the nodes falls on the Turbine protocol because it easily divides the data being transmitted to tinier packets. Doing this makes the chain use lesser bandwidth, while it injects speed into transaction settlement time.
- Tower BFT
With the synchronized clock feature in Solana, the team decided to add a consensus mechanism called Tower BFT, to work hand-in-hand with the cryptographic clock to improve its operations. Consensus is reached quickly because the Tower BFT is designed not to attract transaction latency and large messaging overhead.
- Archivers
They are nodes that are designed to store the data that has been sent from the validators. Regularly, the archivers undergo a thorough verification process to see their level of efficiency.
- Cloudbreak
Solana is known for its high scalability when compared to other networks, and another architectural feature that makes this possible is the Cloudbreak. It is a data structure that permits the network to scale without sharding. Cloudbreak uses every aspect of the hardware in the network to read and write transaction input concurrently.
- Pipeline
Every feature in Solana is designed to streamline its activities and drive a higher rate of throughput, and the pipeline is not different. It permits transactions to seamlessly be verified and sent to different nodes, which store the verified data.
- Gulf Stream
High scalability is also achieved when this protocol pushes the transactions or events to the edge of the blockchain to make it easy for validators to verify the transactions quickly. Without this protocol, Solana’s quest of being a highly scalable platform may have not been realized.
- Sealevel
With this processing engine, Solana easily scales through SSDs and GPUs, thereby permitting the network to have a highly efficient operation speed.
In Conclusion…
- Solana has put in place eight core features that give it the high scalability that it is revered for, and fancied by some dApp developers.
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