What is Solana? | Cryplogger

What is Solana?

Solana is a project developing a scalable blockchain protocol for creating decentralized applications and smart contracts.

Who created Solana and when?

The founders of Solana are ex-Employee of Qualcomm Anatoly Yakovenko, former BREW developer Greg Fitzgerald and Doctor of Science in particle physics Eric Williams.

In 2017, Yakovenko published a draft white paperin which he introduced the Proof-of-History (PoH) blockchain synchronization algorithm. Later, Yakovenko, together with his former Colleague at Qualcomm Greg Fitzgerald, created a blockchain in the Rust programming language, using PoH as an “internal clock”. In February 2018, Yakovenko and Fitzgerald published the official version of the project’s white paper and launched the first internal testnet.

In 2018, Yakovenko and Fitzgerald founded the company now known as Solana Labs. The project team includes former programmers from Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Apple, Intel and Dropbox.

The founders of the project called it Loom, but later renamed it Solana to avoid confusion with the second-level solution loom Network. The project is named after Solana Beach, a town thirty minutes from San Diego, where Anatoly Yakovenko lives.

From April 2018 to July 2019, the project attracted more than $ 20 million of venture capital investments during several closed token sales. In the third quarter of 2020, the public test network of the Tour de SOL project was launched. In March 2020, the beta version of the main network started.

In June 2020, the project created the Solana Foundation, an organization aimed at developing the Solana ecosystem and adopting decentralized technologies. Solana Labs has transferred 167 million SOL tokens and rights to all intellectual property to the Solana Foundation.

How does Solana work?

Solana aims to ensure that the decentralized network of nods matches the specified characteristics of the unit nod. To do this, the interaction of the nods must be optimized. Solana solves this problem with the help of eight key technologies.

Proof-of-History blockchain synchronization algorithm

One of the problems of cryptocurrencies is the synchronization of nodes. The speed of synchronization affects the bandwidth of the blockchain. The faster it is, the more transactions per second the network processes. To use time synchronization, you need a clock. Cryptocurrencies have their own clock and internal time – timestamp. It’s not accurate because there’s no central clock to check. This synchronization is not excellent: if you focus on the timestamp (timestamp), a new block may appear earlier than the previous one.

The Proof-of-History protocol is not a mechanism for achieving consensus, but a way to optimize the time spent to confirm an operation when organizing the order of transactions. It is used in tandem with Proof-of-Stake.

This is a decentralized clock that solves the problem of synchronization. Proof-of-History allows you to create a chronological record confirming that the event occurred at a certain point in time. PoH is a high-frequency Verifiable Delay Function (VDF). It requires an estimate of a certain number of sequential steps, but produces a unique output that can be publicly verified.

Other blockchains require communication of validators, who must agree that time has passed. Solana requires validators to maintain their watches by constantly solving VDF based on the SHA-256 hash function. The choice of validator is planned in advance for the entire era, which lasts thousands of blocks. For the work done, the validator receives a reward.

Proof-of-History ensures continuous operation of the network due to automatic rotation, without the participation of validators. PoH also allows Solana to optimize the time of block creation, its reproduction, bandwidth and data storage in the registry.

• SHA-256 closes as quickly as possible, each output serves as the next input.
• Samples of the chain are taken, the number of iterations and the state are recorded.

The recorded samples represent elapsed time encoded as a verifiable data structure. You can also use a circuit to account for events.

• A message that references any sample is guaranteed to be generated after the sample is created;
• Messages can be embedded in a chain and hashed along with the state, ensuring that the message is created before the next insertion.

This data structure guarantees the exact time and sequence of events.

Tower BFT

Tower BFT is an implementation of the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance(PBFT)algorithm. To achieve consensus, Tower BFT uses PoH as a clock, which reduces computing costs and latency.

Turbine

The Turbine transaction transfer protocol solves the blockchain scalability trilemma by analogy with BitTorrent. Most blockchains have a fixed nodal bandwidth. An increase in the number of nods leads to an increase in the time of data transfer to each of them. Turbine solves this problem by transmitting data using the UDPprotocol. Each packet of user data is transmitted by using a randomly selected path.

The creator of the block(leader)divides the block into smaller packets (no more than 64 KB). For example, for a block of 128 MB, the leader creates 2000 packets of 64 KB, and then sends them to different validators. They forward the packets to a new group of validators closest to them (in Solana they are called neighborhood). This allows each environment that includes 200 nods, through a third-level network, starting with a new leader, to increase the number of participants to 40,000 validators in about 200 milliseconds.

Gulf Stream

Gulf Stream is a protocol for transferring transactions without the use of a mempoul, thanks to the early detection of validators. Each Solana validator knows the order of change of future leaders, so it can direct transactions to the expected leader in advance. This allows you to perform transactions in advance and thereby reduce the confirmation time, change leaders faster and reduce memory pressure on validators from the pool of unconfirmed transactions.

Sealevel

The Sealevel virtual machine processes transactions in parallel, which scale out across GPUs and SSDs. Most other blockchains are single-threaded. Solana supports parallel execution of transactions and signature verification in a single shard. This is possible thanks to the scatter-gather technique of the operating system driver.

Transactions inform you in advance what state they will read and write as they run. Sealevel finds non-overlapping transactions in a block and schedules them to run. The execution process is carried out by hardware using native Berkeley Packet Packet Filter (BPF) bytecode.

Pipeline

Pipeline is a Transaction Processing Unit (TPU) used to optimize the validation process. In the process of validating transactions in the Solana blockchain, the pipeline optimization method (pipelining) is used. It is effective within a model with a stream of sequentially processed incoming data. Specific hardware is responsible for operations at each stage.

Pipeline collects data at the core level, data is verified at the GPU level, banking is at the CPU level, and written at the core level.

When Pipeline sends blocks to validators, it gets access to the next set of packets, verifies their signatures and proceeds to accrue tokens. The parallel principle of data processing at the GPU level allows the Solana TPU transaction processing device to work with high performance.

Cloudbreak

Cloudbreak is a scale-out database of accounts. It allows you to optimize parallel reading and writing to solid-state drives. Each additional disk increases the memory capacity available to on-chain programs, as well as increases the amount of parallel reading and writing.

This allows you to pre-select accounts from the disk and prepare the environment for transactions. The odes can start executing transactions before they are encoded into a block. This reduces block mining time and execution delays.

Archivers 

Archivers are a distributed ledger store. Storing data on a high-performance network requires centralization. If the cost of storing data is high, only resourced users can act as validators and participate in the consensus-building process. In Solana, data storage is not carried out by validators, but by a network of nods called archivers.

Archivers are not involved in the consensus-building process. The state history is divided into many fragments and noise-resistant codes. Archivers store portions of the state. Solana uses Proofs of Replication (PoRep) technology borrowed from Filecoin. So far, archivers have not been implemented, but are provided for by the long-term roadmap of the project.

What consensus mechanism does Solana use?

Tower BFT — a Proof-of-Stake-based consensus engine — uses Proof-of-History as a clock, reducing bandwidth loss and data latency.

When a validator votes for a particular fork, voting is limited to a fixed hash period – the slot. The duration of the slot is approximately 400 milliseconds. Every 400 milliseconds, a potential restart point is created. Each subsequent vote doubles the time interval that must pass before the network can block that vote. Additional voting makes it difficult to cancel transactions performed on a particular slot.

Therefore, a multi-vote bloc has a great chance of remaining part of the network. For example, each validator voted 32 times in the last 12 seconds. The 12-second-ago vote has a timeout of 2³² of the slot at approximately 54 years. Accordingly, the network will never cancel this vote.

At the same time, the most recent voting has a timeout of two slots – about 800 milliseconds. As blocks are added to the registry, the chances of confirming old blocks increase. This is because the number of old slot voting doubles each slot.

Finalization occurs after two-thirds of validators vote for a certain sequence of events. Once finalized, the transaction cannot be reversed.

Token holders can participate in the block production process as stakeholders and validators, and receive a reward for it. They also have the ability to delegate tokens to trusted validators.

There is no minimum of steakable tokens. The right to choose a leader – a validator offering another block – depends on the number of tokens in the steak.

What role does the SOL token play in the Solana ecosystem?

SOL is a native utility token of the Solana blockchain. SOL uses SPL, a token standard on the Solana blockchain, similar to the ERC-20 standard on the Ethereum blockchain.

The share of the SOL token is called lamport, after the American computer scientist Leslie Lamport, whose research laid the foundations for distributed systems theory. One lampport is equal to 0.0000000000582 SOL.

There are three scenarios for using SOL:

• Transaction fees;

Solana’s deflationary model involves burning SOL tokens.

You can store SOL tokens in sollet.iodeveloped by Serum Academy, in Trust Wallet for mobile devices and in other wallets that support the SPL standard. Some wallets support tokens being steaked – for example, SolFlare.

How is Solana evolving?

In August 2020, the decentralized exchange Serumwas launched on the Solana blockchain. Serum is involving Optimistic Rollup, a second-tier solution for Ethereum. With its help, crosschain swaps and tokenization will be introduced.

In October 2020, the Solana project introduced the Wormhole crosschain solution, connecting the tokens of the Ethereum and Solana networks.

In May 2021, the Solana Foundation launched five funds with total assets of $ 100 million for the development of applications in China. In this she was helped by Huobi, Gate.io and NGC Ventures, MATH Global Foundation and Hash Key.

That same month, the project raised $60 million from Hacken, Gate.io, Coin DCX and BRZ. The funds will be received by three funds focused on expanding the ecosystem in Ukraine, India, Brazil and Russia. The funding will be used to support the development of blockchain applications in DeFi, NFT and cybersecurity.

In June 2021, Solana Labs raised $314 million as part of a private token sale. The round was led by venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Polychain Capital with the participation of Alameda Research, CMS Holdings, CoinShares, Jump Trading, Multicoin Capital, Sino Global Capital and others. Solana Labs will direct the raised funds to create a venture unit for investments in its own ecosystem and launch a studio for the development of projects based on Solana.