Solana

Note: Data in this section last updated August 26th, 2022

Founded by former Qualcomm, Intel, and Dropbox engineers in late-2017, Solana is a single-chain, delegated-Proof-of-Stake protocol whose focus is on delivering scalability without sacrificing decentralization or security.

Core to Solana's scaling solution is a decentralized clock that uses a process known as Proof-of-History (PoH). Although this is vastly oversimplifying the concept, the thinking behind PoH goes like this:

The concept of time is extremely important for computer networks, as it is necessary to track the passage of time accurately to put transactions in the correct order. For instance, if Alice, Bob and Charlie are all making transactions with one another, we need to know the order in which they occurred to route the funds correctly and ensure that Bob didn’t send all his Ethereum to Alice and then try to send it again to Charlie.

Centralized networks resolve this issue by maintaining a central clock and timestamping all transactions. Unfortunately, decentralized systems cannot rely on a centralized clock, and because we can’t trust the actors, it’s surprisingly difficult to agree on time (after all, Bob could create fake timestamps if he wanted to trick the network).

Many argue that the most important benefit of traditional consensus mechanisms such as Proof-of-Work is that they act as a de facto “clock” for decentralized systems, relying on validators to arrange transactions in the correct order. Unfortunately, this wastes a lot of time, as validators and miners need to chat back and forth until they agree on the order of transactions.

Solana’s Proof-of-History function steals a page from the centralized playbook by allowing each validator to maintain their own clock and timestamp their transactions. To prevent the problems discussed above, the accuracy of this clock is verified through a cryptographic proof.

This saves validators from wasting time on ordering transactions – they can simply check the timestamp, organize them and go

This innovation allows Solana to be unbelievably fast and cheap, boasting a theoretical TPS of 65,000 to 710,000 and fees under $0.00019 without resorting to sharding.

Notable dApps in the Solana ecosystem include:

Solana Ecosystem Overview

Source: @solanians_ via Twitter

While growth and market share has recently declined, the project showed incredible transaction in 2021, growing from 70 to over 500 dapps and generating almost $12B in TVL. In addition, the market cap of NFTs sold on Solana’s platforms was nearly $1 billion, and the project partnered with high profile personalities such as Michael Jordan and Snoop Dogg.

Like most smart contract platforms, Solana has its share of supporters and detractors. Some of the more common praises and criticisms are listed below:

Solana is unique among the “Ethereum Killers” in that it has chosen to eschew sharding and retain its single-chain structure. While critics argue that so called monochains are inferior and risk becoming irrelevant, this might ultimately prove to be Solana’s biggest long-term competitive advantage. As discussed above, monochains allow for very efficient communication between dapps and may be able to support products and uses cases -- such as flash loans – that wouldn’t be possible in a modular architecture.