Decentralized applications (DApps) are one of the most important use cases of blockchain technology. We have seen how DApps have evolved massively in recent years and become the basis of DeFi.
Blockchains like Ethereum are not prepared to support a large quantity of transactions, congesting the network. Solana (SOL) is a blockchain designed exclusively for DApps that aims to be an alternative to Ethereum for being able to support more than 50,000 transactions per second.
What is Solana (SOL)?
It is an innovative blockchain project based on the code that will drive the development of next-generation DApps. Solana (SOL) intends to offer a highly scalable, secure and as decentralized platform as possible. It aims to have thousands of nodes without the need for expensive hardware that consumes a lot of
energy.
The idea of the developers is to achieve a high-performance network, even though a large volume of transactions are produced, by combining different algorithms to generate a Blockchain, creating a system that reduces the bottleneck that saturates the network. The project is called Solana Labs and was founded in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko. His proposal is a new transaction verification system called Proof-of-History, which has the capacity to support thousands of operations per second. Its working in the beta phase.
SOL, Solana’s cryptocurrency
Like any other blockchains, Solana has a native cryptocurrency named SOL that functions as a utility token. The SOL token is absolutely necessary for the payment of transaction fees and for deploying and interacting with smart contracts.
The SOL shall be used for:
– Pay the commissions of the transactions made in the network or of the smart contracts
– Staking tokens
What makes Solana different from other Blockchains?
The main problem with today’s blockchains is that they support very few transactions per second. Bitcoin supports between 5-8 transactions per second and Ethereum supports between 12-20 transactions per second. When they exceed these figures, the network becomes congested, thus increasing the transaction fees so that they are validated before the rest of the transactions issued.
The big difference of Solana is that it has a higher processing capacity. The developers indicate that it could reach the figure of 50,000 transactions per second. Fulfilling this premise would make it the fastest and most powerful blockchain today.
In addition, Solana generates a block at intervals of 400-800 milliseconds. Bitcoin generates a block about every 10 minutes and Ethereum about every 20 seconds. Transaction fees in Solana are also reduced, moving to an average commission of 0.000005 SOL. These aspects would potentially allow to develop any DApp solutions, DeFi or any games on this blockchain.