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Market stats
Let’s say someone recommended to you a high-performance blockchain where a transaction takes less than a second to confirm and the fee is not even noticeable. Would you use it? That’s what Solana claims to be. Time to find out if this statement is true or misleading.
What is Solana?
Solana launched in 2020 as a competitor to Ethereum. As a newer technology, it offered a throughput of up to 50,000 transactions per second, which was more than enough and sub-cent fees. To put things in perspective, Visa processes around 1,500 transactions per second.
In hindsight, it was definitely enough to convince retail investors. Due to its amazing features and heavy VC backing, Solana became a hub for memecoins and more advanced DeFi applications, slowly taking market share away from Ethereum. Although Solana has experienced a few network outages and the network stopped working, it didn’t prevent it from growing and developing. After all, money goes where the attention is.
Why use Solana?
Solana is affordable and lightning fast. Do you really need anything else? This promise was enough to make the blockchain relevant and capture attention with its brilliant marketing strategy.
Solana’s ecosystem, although not as mature as Ethereum’s, has grown to become the second largest and is regarded in the industry. Thanks to outstanding efforts when it comes to user experience with wallets like Phantom or DEXs like Jupiter, Solana became as simple to use as just clicking a few buttons. Launching tokens was made hassle-free with the start of Pump Fun, which turned out to be a massive success.
The culture and community aspect also played a big role in shaping what Solana is today. Terms like “trenches,” “locking in,” or “degens,” as well as memecoins popping up everywhere, made it appealing for people with big dreams to give Solana a try. While some made life-changing money, others watched their fortunes vanish. This may also explain why so many people refer to it as the largest online casino.
How Solana works
Solana was built on top of blockchain technology. As a result, the Solana network is a public distributed ledger, which is transparent by design. The Solana blockchain uses epochs, during which a specified validator adds transactions. Every epoch consists of multiple slots. At the end of each epoch, the next validator is chosen. Solana doesn’t have a fixed supply, which makes it inflationary but also allows validators (and users who decide to delegate their tokens) to earn staking rewards.
Solana uses its unique consensus called Proof of History, which creates a timestamp for each transaction, reducing communication to a minimum and thus focusing on speed. By making everything optimized, it allows the network to be top-notch in terms of low latency and scalability. Transactions can be processed in parallel, outperforming most of the existing blockchain networks.
Solana's timeline
The concept for Solana originated in 2017 and is attributed to its creator, Anatoly Yakovenko. In 2018, Solana Labs was formed, and testnet started being developed. Multiple funding rounds took place, and funding was secured from reputable investors. The network launched in March of 2020. Later on, many efforts were made to expand its ecosystem, particularly DeFi and NFTs. Solana has improved a lot and focused especially on reducing any network downtime and performing various upgrades. Solana Pay was introduced, and the launch of the Solana Saga smartphone happened, emphasizing the focus not only on the software but also the hardware.
The risks of Solana
In 2022, Solana experienced the fall of FTX, which had a significant impact on the network due to the exchange’s investments in the Solana ecosystem and the percentage of supply owned. At its low, SOL was down 95%, but recovered in the following years.
Solana is still a very immature network. There are many concerns around the topic, like the lack of decentralization. If you do a bit of research, you can come to the conclusion that Solana is not that decentralized with its hardware requirements to run a node, out of reach for many.
Unlike BTC or ETH, Solana is not tradable via ETFs, and there’s still a risk of it being classified as a security. It’s also much more volatile than the blue chips. Although the most popular, it’s not the only Ethereum competitor, and its fate is in question. It will either adapt to new conditions or stay behind. Will it remain at the top in a few years? Only time will tell.
Why Solana matters
Solana achieved what was thought to be virtually impossible—becoming a respectable and viable Ethereum competitor, surpassing expectations. Many users, when asked, choose SOL without a second thought due to its massive ecosystem, new trends, ease of use, and, most importantly, low usage fees. Is Solana destined to flip Ethereum, or perhaps it’s just another project like many others that will fade with time?
