What Is Solana?

Solana is an open-source blockchain project that implements a high-performance, new and permissionless blockchain. The foundation is based in Geneva, Switzerland and it does maintain an open-source project.

A certain centralized database is able to process up to 710,000 transactions per second on a standard gigabit network If the transactions are about 176 bytes. The centralized database can replicate itself and maintain high availability without having to compromise the transaction rate using the system technique known as the Optimistic Concurrency Control. The team here shows that these same limits, in theory, apply just as well to the blockchain on an adversarial network but with one key ingredient. Finding a way to share a time when the nodes cannot trust one another and once nodes can trust time, all of the years’ worth of distributed systems research will become applicable to the blockchain.

The biggest difference between algorithms obtained by the method Solana users and ones based on timeout is that using the timeout produces a traditional distributed algorithm where the processes don’t operate in sync while Solana’s method produces an asynchronous method in which every process does the same thing at the same time. This Blockchain’s method seems to contradict the entire purpose of distributed processing which is to permit different processes and to operate independently and perform different functions but if a distributed system is a single system, then the entire process will have to be synchronized in some way. The easiest way in theory to synchronize processes is to get them to all do the same thing at the same time. That’s why Solana’s method is used to implement a kernel that performs all of the necessary synchronizations and makes sure that two different processes don’t try to modify a certain file at the same time.

Processes could spend only a small fraction of their time and will execute the kernel but in the rest of their time, they can operate independently and access different files. This is a great approach even when fault-tolerance is not required. The method is simple and makes it easy to understand the precise properties of a system which is crucial if one is to know how fault-tolerant the entire system is.

Furthermore, this blockchain can be implemented using a mechanism that has existed in BTC since day one. The Bitcoin feature is called clock time and can be used to postdate transactions using block height instead of timestamp. As a BTC client, you can use block height instead of a timestamp if you don’t trust the network. Block height trust out to be an instance of what is called a Verifiable Delay Function in cryptography. It is a secure way to say that time passed. In Solana, there’s a far more granular verifiable delay function to checkpoint the ledger and coordinate the consensus and with it, the team implements Optimistic Concurrency Control.

The docs for this blockchain show that Solana is an open-source project which is a blockchain built from the ground up for scale. It shows why Solana is useful, how it works and how to use it. The goal however is to show that there are a set of software algorithms that when used in the right combination to implement a blockchain, removes the software as a performance bottleneck and allows transaction throughput to scale proportionally. The architecture goes on to satisfy all of the desirable properties of the blockchain: security, scalability, and decentralization. The architecture outlines an upper bound of 710 thousand transactions per second on a standard gigabit network and 28.4 million tps on 40 gigabit.