Can Solana Be the New Ethereum?
It was July 30 2015. Bitcoin is rallying towards its new all time high for that week as the trend for crypto currencies start to create minimal sensible noises in the global economy. Millennials are waiting for a new crypto that would create an economic balance in the digital market. Priced at $0.31 Buterin and his colleagues dropped Ethereum, a new cryptocurrency was born during the crypto-market’s rise to popularity.
4 years later, Ethereum has already taken over most of the cryptocurrency economy running closely against bitcoin’s supremacy, plus its never ending altcoin contributions running on ETH Ecosystem through ERC20, and ERC721 offered the technology to almost everyone. 2019 is the year wherein people are starting to believe in crypto. Developers are becoming more keen on getting their hands wet on solidity and other blockchain languages. traders, and whales always on close-watch on getting a better entry than their last. And it’s a clear deja-vu for me when I saw this new ICO that everyone is fussing about. A blockchain that can handle almost 5x what can Ethereum handle in a second. Initially priced at $0.04, Solana claims to be the next rival coin for Ethereum which is better, faster and more efficient than what is ETH as a whole. And everyone is up for that promise.
Background
Solana is a public base-layer blockchain protocol that optimizes for scalability. Its goal is to provide a platform that enables developers to create decentralized applications (dApps) without needing to design around performance bottlenecks. Solana features a new timestamp system called Proof-of-History (PoH) that enables automatically ordered transactions. It also uses a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm to help secure the network. Additional design goals include sub-second settlement times, low transaction costs, and support for all LLVM compatible smart contract languages.
A brainchild of Anatoly Yakovenko dating back in 2017. Solana’s whitepaper was published. It basically detailed a new technique for distributed systems to transact through a new consesnus called Proof of History. Anatoly believed his new technique could automate the transaction ordering process for blockchains, providing a key piece that would enable crypto networks to scale well-beyond their capabilities at the time.
Solana launched on Mainnet Beta in Mar. 2020, shortly after raising $1.76 million in a public token auction hosted on CoinList. The project’s beta network featured basic transaction capabilities and smart contract support. But it did not include any staking rewards as Solana was still determining its ongoing issuance schedule. The current plan is to upgrade from its current beta stage to a more production-ready version in either later 2020 or early 2021.
Is it better?
Context wise yes, A faster, reliable and more efficient blockchain is what most people are looking for and that’s where they usually take their money. A known fact: People invest on what other people may utilize soon. And that’s what Solana is trying to establish. Solana is one of these challengers; an alternative to Ethereum, it’s been around since its development in 2017, though it didn’t get very popular until this past year. Solana is now the fourth-most popular cryptocurrency on Coinbase and carries a $54 billion market cap, though it’s still just a fraction of Ethereum’s size.
Solana is considered one of the most high-performance permissionless blockchain on the market, with a network of 200 distinct nodes that generate a throughput of 50,000 TPS when running with GPUs. The network achieves this due to its unique consensus architecture.
Solana uses a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus model, like Cardano and Tron, except it is reinforced by Tower BFT consensus. Tower consensus enables the network to reach consensus, despite potential attacks from malicious nodes.
People often mistake PoH, one of Solana’s core innovations, for a consensus protocol; however, this is a permission less, globally available source of time on the blockchain that works before the network reaches consensus. Proof of history is not a consensus protocol or anti-Sybil mechanism. Rather, it is a decentralized clock that helps secure the blockchain.
Now with all of that said, As a blockchain developer, I am already working on building my skills on RUST, Solana’s native language. Because I believe that SOL can be bigger than ETH but that’s still a long way to go. As of now, I think, SOL can do Mano-A-Mano with ETH and still survive.
Are you on SOL ecosystem? Let me know! Send me your thoughts on my twitter! here
sources:
www.forkast.com, www.messari.io