Solana is a public

blockchain A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that consists of growing lists of records, called ''blocks'', that are securely linked together using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, ...

platform with

smart contract A smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol that is intended to automatically execute, control or document events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement. The objectives of smart contracts are the r ...

functionality. Its native

cryptocurrency A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. It i ...

is SOL.

History

Solana was proposed in a white paper Anatoly Yakovenko published in November 2017. This paper described a technique called "proof of history". On 16 March, 2020, Solana's first block was created. In June 2021, Solana raised a $314 million funding round led by

Andreessen Horowitz Andreessen Horowitz (also called a16z, legal name AH Capital Management, LLC) is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Andreessen H ...

. In December 2021,

Melania Trump Melania Trump ( ; born Melanija Knavs , Germanized as Melania Knauss ; born April 26, 1970) is a Slovene-American former model and businesswoman who served as First Lady of the United States from 2017 to 2021 as the wife of 45th president Do ...

released her first NFT which was reportedly sold for 1 SOL. A Solana representative said that Trump's use of the blockchain was not part of any Solana-led initiative. On 3 August, 2022, it was announced that the Solana ecosystem had been targeted by hackers, affecting 9,231 Solana wallets. Four Solana wallet addresses took approximately $4.1 million in total from victims. All wallets affected were at one point created, imported, or used in the Slope wallet applications on iOS and Android. Security researchers discovered that Slope wallet sent sensitive account data to its remote servers in clear text. In November 2022, the price of Solana dropped by 40 percent in one day following the FTX liquidity crisis since Solana was backed by

Alameda Research Alameda Research was a cryptocurrency trading firm, co-founded in September 2017 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Tara Mac Aulay. In November 2022, FTX, Alameda's sister cryptocurrency exchange, experienced a solvency crisis, and both FTX and Alamed ...

and was its second-largest holding. At the time, FTX held $982 million in Solana tokens.

Lawsuit

On July 1, 2022, a

class action lawsuit A class action, also known as a class-action lawsuit, class suit, or representative action, is a type of lawsuit where one of the parties is a group of people who are represented collectively by a member or members of that group. The class actio ...

was filed against Solana. The lawsuit accused Solana of selling unregistered securities tokens in the form of Solana (SOL) from March 24, 2020, onward and that Solana deliberately misled investors concerning the total circulating supply of SOL tokens. According to the lawsuit, Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder of Solana Labs, lent a market maker more than 11.3 million tokens in April 2020 and failed to disclose this information to the public. The lawsuit claimed that Solana stated it would reduce the supply by this amount, but it only burned 3.3 million tokens.

Design

Solana achieves consensus using a

proof-of-stake Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols are a class of consensus mechanisms for blockchains that work by selecting validators in proportion to their quantity of holdings in the associated cryptocurrency. This is done to avoid the computational cost of p ...

mechanism and its model, known as "proof-of-history" mechanism. Proof of history enables the network to operate faster because nodes do not need to communicate to validate a block. The Solana whitepaper describes this design as a decentralized clock. Proof of history enables network participants to have a high degree of certainty that an event took place at a specific moment in time. An example of proof of history is when a person takes a picture of today's newspaper with the date and time recorded so that it can be used to verify the newspaper in the future. Like various other blockchains, Solana can run

s. Solana's execution environment is based on

eBPF eBPF (often aliased BPF) is a technology that can run sandboxed programs in a privileged context such as the operating system kernel. It is used to safely and efficiently extend the capabilities of the kernel at runtime without requiring to cha ...

, which allows the

Rust Rust is an iron oxide, a usually reddish-brown oxide formed by the reaction of iron and oxygen in the catalytic presence of water or air moisture. Rust consists of hydrous iron(III) oxides (Fe2O3·nH2O) and iron(III) oxide-hydroxide (FeO( ...

, C, and

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

programming languages to be used.

Outages

On 14 September, 2021, the Solana blockchain went offline after a surge of transactions caused the network to

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with which one ...

, and different validators had different views of the state of the network. The network was brought back online the next day on 15 September, 2021. The Solana blockchain again went offline on 1 May, with the outage lasting roughly seven hours due to it being taken offline by bots. The blockchain went offline again on 31 May, 2022, due to a bug in how the blockchain processes offline transactions. This outage lasted about four and a half hours. On 1 October, 2022, the Solana network went down for 6 hours due to a single misconfigured node.

References

External links