Solana $SOL Wiki: Coin History, Techstack, and Crypto News

Solana is an open-source, permissionless, public blockchain platform that includes smart contract functionality. The headquarters of the Solana foundation is in Geneva. The platform runs on a Proof of History consensus which vastly improves the scalability of the blockchain. It is designed to facilitate the formation and running of decentralized applications. It was also designed to be trustless and permissionless to improve the scalability capacity. The native cryptocurrency of Solana is known as SOL. It is used as both a governance token and a transaction token.

History

Solana was proposed in November 2017 in a whitepaper published by Anatoly Yakovenko. The first Solana bloc was created on the 16th of March 2020.

Solana raised $12.6 million in their initial funding round in June 2018. Investors included companies like Rockaway ventures and Blocktower capital. It raised $20 million in funding in July 2019 from Distributed global, Kevin Rose, and others.

Solana carried out an auction in 2020 during which they sold for $0.22 per SOL token. This auction raised $1.76 million from 8 million SOL tokens. This price went up by 500% once Solana went up on Binance.

Biggest Claim to Fame

Solana has been described as a possible competitor to Ethereum. Compared to Ethereum, Solana offers faster transaction speeds and lower transaction costs.

Solana’s proof of history consensus makes the network highly scalable. The Proof of History consensus enables people to create historical records proving events have occurred at specific times. Transactions that have been evaluated can then be assigned a specific hash that can then be publically verified. The hash functions as a cryptographic time stamp for transactions. This makes it easy to follow the order of events as well as track transactions.

Solana solves the blockchain’s impossible triangle situation. The main building blocks of cryptocurrency are scalability, security, and decentralization. Most cryptocurrencies today do not have all three. For example, Ethereum has security and decentralization, while the Binance Smart Chain(BSC) has Security and scalability. Neither one of them has all three. Solana is a blockchain that works with all three

The impact created by Solana has made waves and has brought in interest from several global organizations including Apple Google, Qualcomm, Dropbox, and more. They also have globally known and globally trusted investors to back them including Multicoin Capital, CMCC Global SLOW capital, and many others.

Biggest Criticism

The Solana blockchain has gone offline several times. This has been due to surges in transactions as well as other factors. It has also on all the times it has gone offline, been off for a significant amount of time. The uncertainty caused by these occasions has made people afraid of investing with or using Solana in the handling of their cryptocurrency as people are afraid it may one day offline and not come back online leading to a significant loss of finance.

Solana’s validator requirements are very high. The equipment needed to purchase and run a validator is very expensive. Though anyone can theoretically run a validator, the high cost of obtaining one that meets Solana’s requirements removes much of the population from being able to. This causes an issue with decentralization since people who can afford to run a validator will likely be able to purchase and run several.

Solana’s programming language, Rust, has few developers who can code in it. Rust is also not compatible with other programming languages like Ethereum’s language or BSC’s programming language. This reduces the number of developers who can work on it to those who are willing to completely learn a new programming language. These are few ads far between. This means Solana’s market is reduced by proxy.

Solana’s cryptocurrency SOL is concentrated among a very small percentage of people. Since it is a governance token, this means a few people could band together and vote for changes in the system that a large number of Solana holders do not approve of. This is an issue considering one of the main founding principles of cryptocurrency is to prevent such blatant manipulation of currency by the ruling few.

Team

The Solana white paper was written by Anatoly Yakovenko in 2017. Yakovenko had experience in working with compression algorithms from his previous jobs at Dropbox as a software engineer and his experience at Qualcomm.

Greg Williams is Solana’s CTO. He together with Yakovenko and  Eric Williams created a process that dealt with the output issues that made the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks slow and expensive to use.