Solana is a public blockchain platform. Open source and decentralized, with consensus, achieved using proof-of-stake and proof-of-history. It can facilitate peer-to-peer transactions with its built-in cryptocurrency SOL and claims to support 50,000 transactions per second.

Anatoly Yakovenko is the founder and CEO of Solana. Bloomberg sees Solana as a “potential long-term competitor for Ethereum,” the world leader in NFT art transactions. Like Ethereum, Solana can interact with smart contracts. Solana’s value rose two hundred times faster than bitcoin in the first nine months of 2021,  increasing more than 13,000% over that period. SOL token was listed on Coinbase on June 17, 2021.

On September 14, 2021, the Solana blockchain went offline for about 18 hours after a transaction surge caused the network to fork, and different validators had different views on the state of the network. The network was successfully brought back online early September 15.

Coin	SOL
Original author(s)	Anatoly Yakovenko, Alevtina Yakovenko
White paper	https://whitepaper.io/coin/solana
Initial release	April 2019
Code repository	https://github.com/solana-labs/solana
Development status	Active
Software language	Rust
Developer(s)	Solana Labs & Solana Foundation
Website	https://solana.com/
Solana Blockchain
Block time	4.5 sec
Block explorer	https://explorer.solana.com/
Circulating supply	293,511,228.57 SOL (as 13st Sep 2021)
Solana Price Details
Solana Price	US$157 (September 2021)
Market cap	$46B (September 2021)

The third-generation blockchain focused on increasing the speed and number of transactions is called Solana, while the network’s utility token is called SOL. Solana is a blockchain network capable of executing thousands of transactions per second. It also enables the creation of smart contracts and decentralized applications on the blockchain.

Solana was founded in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko. Yakovenko has experience working at Qualcomm and Dropbox. The Solana team currently includes experts with experience working at companies such as Apple, Intel, Google, Microsoft and Twitter.

What does Solana (SOL) do?

The focus of the Solana blockchain is to increase the speed and number of transactions. Using Proof of Stake as a consensus mechanism, blockchain significantly speeds up the confirmation time of transactions with a method called Proof of History.

Keeping track of the order of pending transactions is of great importance for cryptocurrencies. In the Bitcoin blockchain using Proof of Work, transactions are grouped in blocks in an unordered manner. Bitcoin miners add a single timestamp to the block they create. These blocks also need to be confirmed by all other nodes, so the verification time of transactions can also take quite a long time. The timestamp can sometimes be wrong.

In Solana’s SHA256 hash feature, the hash of one transaction is used as input for the hash of the next transaction, and the blockchain processes the sequence of transactions into the hash. This eliminates the need for timestamping and significantly reduces the time it takes for nodes to verify the order of operations.

Solana blockchain, which can process thousands of transactions per second, can create blocks in an average of 400 milliseconds. By comparison, the average block time on the Bitcoin blockchain is 10 minutes, while on the Ethereum blockchain it is 15 seconds.

SOL is the intended use token of the Solana blockchain. The transaction fee on blockchain and smart contracts is paid with SOL. The token is also used for staking on the blockchain with Proof of Stake consensus mechanism. SOL can also be used as a governance token in decentralized applications developed on the blockchain.

SOL is based on the SPL protocol, the token standard of the Solana blockchain. Blockchain occasionally burns and removes SOL tokens from circulation to reduce inflation. As of May 2021, the total supply is 494,519,162 and the circulating supply is 272,637,428. SOL hit an all-time high of $58.30 on May 18, 2021, as of May 2021.

Where and how to buy SOL?

As of May 2021, It is possible to buy and sell the token on foreign exchanges such as Binance, FTX, Huobi, Bitfinex, Gate.io, OKEx, HitBTC, and Crypto.com.

Truth really catches up. Not only has the SOL token increased by 2000% in the last 5 months, after a series of hackathons, there are more than 250 projects in the Solana ecosystem. These applications include Solana wallets, DEXs, lending protocols, betting platforms, games, entertainment, storage solutions, NFT marketplaces and much more.

Solana Based Projects: Top Projects on Solana

Let’s take a quick look at some of the best projects built in Solana today.

Raydium

Raydium is an automated market maker (AMM) and liquidity provider built on the Solana blockchain. Unlike other AMMs, Raydium provides on-chain liquidity to a central limit order book, meaning pools have access to all order flow and liquidity in Serum. The protocol has already garnered a lot of attention, recently surpassing the $700 million market for Total Value Locked (TVL). Raydium has also launched one of their projects, Fusion Pools, which offers double lucrative rewards for both liquidity providers and stakers.

Orca

Orca claims to create a more human-centered experience for merchants in Solana. For example, the Fair Price Indicator helps determine if a particular pool is getting a good deal on price drift. It’s still early for this project but some of the planned features include Wormhole (the cross-chain bridge between Ethereum and Solana), collectible tokens for early adopters, analytics, and an expanding selection of trading pairs.

Hedgehog Markets

Still, in closed Beta, Hedgehog is a passive returns prediction market platform for LPs. The prediction market, also known as the information market or the decision market, is a platform where participants can predict the outcome of future events. Users of the platform can hedge or trade a range of results, from election results to sporting events and auction selling prices. After a market expiration, smart contracts interact with data services or oracles to validate the result and automatically distribute the results to users.

Maps.me

Maps.me is a mobile application that provides offline maps using OpenStreetMap data. It has now reached over 140 million users and has recently integrated DeFi features into the app, providing familiar travel rewards programs and discounts, and management features on certain aspects of the ecosystem. As people mostly use the app while traveling, Maps.me is further developing its ecosystem to become a travel-focused crypto wallet, offering features like payments, accommodation booking, funds transfers and asset management.

Aleph.im

Aleph.im is like a decentralized AW or Firebase, enabling dApps and protocols to replace central parts of their stack with a completely decentralized architecture. Aleph.im achieves this by providing decentralized databases (including file storage), computation, and a decentralized identification (DID) framework.

The Media Network

The Media Network is an open source, decentralized and censorship resistant live streaming hosting protocol. It is a new protocol that bypasses the centralized approach of traditional CDN providers and instead offers a decentralized P2P bandwidth marketplace, allowing anyone to join and serve content without any presumption of trust or pre-authentication requirements. Participants earn MEDIA rewards for their bandwidth contributions, a stable supply token printed on Solana’s Blockchain.

SolFarm

SolFarm is a return collection platform with automated merging cashiers strategies. Leveraging Solana’s low-cost blockchain transactions, SolFarm allows for frequent compounding strategies, allowing LP stakers to benefit from maximized APYs without involving active management.

Oxygen

Oxygen is a DeFi Prime Brokerage Protocol built for the next chapter in decentralized finance. The platform allows you to borrow, short, trade leverage, earn returns by reusing the same collateral, and create custom baskets or ETFs to trade.

Anchor

Anchor offers a simple and convenient savings product with wide appeal for everyday users. By generating returns from multiple proof-of-stake blockchains, it offers a better return than any traditional savings product. Anchor gives deposits to borrowers who download liquid stake Proof-of-Stake assets from major blockchains as collateral to generate returns.

Step.Finance

Step.Finance is the front page of Solana. It’s the tab you keep open all day to visualize, analyze, execute and aggregate transactions across all Solana contracts in one dashboard. Users can interact with their favorite protocols from the Step control panel, which can include farming, pools, swaps and automated strategies.

Audius

Audius is a blockchain-enabled music streaming platform that puts power back in the hands of content creators. It has been around for several years and was originally deployed to Ethereum. However, after careful testing, the team recently decided to move to Solana to better serve its rapidly expanding user base and has now grown to over 1 million monthly listeners.

It is undeniable that the Solana Summer will be long and hot.

Most of the projects launched on the blockchain are still in development, but those that have been launched have done so successfully. With a market cap of over $10 billion, price flexibility when most other top coins are red, and a rapidly expanding and thriving community, Solana ranks high in the decentralized economy.