Anatoly Akavenko is the person behind some of the first white papers regarding Solana. Anatoly has spent a significant number of years in the IT Industry, he has worked for almost a decade for Qualcomm. In the past few months the price of Solana has been touching highs.
What makes Solana special?
The Block Time of Solana is 400 milliseconds which makes it faster then other cryptocurrency coins such as Ethereum which has block time of 10 seconds and Bitcoins which has a block time of 10 minutes. Due to its faster Block Time Solana claims that it can handle upto 710,000 tractions per second, that is 30 times the transaction that the Visa had handled. Though Solana claims that it can go upto 710,000 tractions per second but they have only touched 50,000 transactions in a second up till now. Solana is quite fast but it also uses less money for the transaction fees. Next up we will be looking at how the Solana network works.
Solana uses a consensus mechanism. Solana like others does not use proof or work or proof of stake. Anatoly described a newer mechanism for Solana and that is proof of History. The Proof of History is a better version of proof of stake but has a special variable of time that is added to it as an extra layer.
How is Solana so fast?
The Consensus mechanism adds time in the blockchain data. This mechanism adds specific date and time to each block that allows the validation process to occur much faster without the need to communicate back and forth as in proof of work.
In the real world, to validate a time the computers have to ping other servers that have an actual time counter mechanism working day and night. But this can also lead to a lot of chatter back and forth over the blockchain network taking a lot of processing power and time delays. Therefore to solve this problem by assigning the time stamps to each of the blocks on the network so they do not have to cross confirm about the time stamps. These timestamps are present in the block with the help of cryptographic proof, so now we don’t have to wait for the validators, we will have to check for the organisation of the data in the block itself.
How is Solana different from Ethereum?
Ethereum coins use the Proof of Work (POW) mechanism as compared to Solana which uses the Proof of Stake mechanism. The Proof of Stake mechanism uses a lot less power and is environmentally friendly. The Ethereum energy consumption is over 26 TWh and which is much more than Proof of Stake consumption.
