Background

Blockchain is rapidly evolving as a new distributed computing paradigm in areas such as digital finance and cryptocurrency. Existing block-chain projects, on the other hand, employ different blockchain architectures and protocols, finding it challenging for different block-chain system to exchange values or communicate information, and different blockchain systems become isolated islands. As a result, the usable range, function, and scalability of blockchain technology have been limited.

Why Choose Solana

The Solana Program Library (SPL) is a collection of on-chain programs targeting the Sealevel parallel runtime. These programs are tested against Solana's implementation of Sealevel, solana-runtime, and deployed to its mainnet. As others implement Sealevel, we will graciously accept patches to ensure the programs here are portable across all implementations.

Quick facts about Solana

• Solana is a proof-of-stake cryptocurrency with smart contract capabilities including DeFi dApps and NFTs.

• Solana boasts a theoretical throughput of 65,000 transactions a second with near zero fees.

• The boom in the DeFi and NFT spaces have pushed fees on Ethereum extremely high causing crypto users to seek other options like Solana.

• Solana has been at the center of controversy in the crypto industry as skeptics claim its transaction speed are only possible because the chain has sacrificed decentralization.

The founders aimed to create a brand new blockchain that could scale to global adoption. At the time, blockchain transaction speeds were limited to around 15 per second, a throughput that paled in comparison to Visa and Mastercard’s ability to process roughly 65,000 transactions per second. Yakovenko and Gokal sought to make a new blockchain that could meet demand at a global scale.

Solana now boasts a theoretical peak capacity of 65,000 transactions per second and has become one of the most highly used blockchains today due to its speed and cheap transaction costs.

Like almost any blockchain system today, Solana is still very new and not without controversy.

What makes Solana different?

Solana parts ways with other blockchains in the way consensus is formed among the nodes. While proof-of-history has its benefits, there are some concerns around Solana’s voting mechanism and whether or not it causes centralization.

With Solana, nodes must vote on blocks and their transactions’ legitimacy in order for them to become part of the chain. Nodes send votes to the leader and the leader is then responsible for tallying the votes themselves and signing off on the block.

In a typical blockchain, validators are chosen via proof-of-stake. They then create the next block of transactions and broadcast this to all the other nodes in the network. The rest of the network then audits the new block against their version of the ledger. Each node then checks its version of the ledger and the new block against all other nodes in the network. From here, nodes individually choose whether to agree that this new block is legitimate or not.

The process continues until a majority of nodes have agreed on one new version of the chain. While it is time-consuming, letting nodes come to an agreement without an intermediary tallying votes has been core to decentralized blockchains since Bitcoin was created.