Solana
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About Solana

Solana is a blockchain platform that was founded in 2017 and is designed to host decentralized, scalable applications. It is an open-source project currently run by Solana Foundation based in Geneva, while San Francisco-based Solana Labs built the blockchain. Solana is much faster regarding the number of transactions it can process and has significantly lower transaction fees than rival blockchains like Ethereum.

The cryptocurrency that runs on the Solana blockchain, also named Solana (SOLUSD) and using the ticker symbol SOL, has seen tremendous growth in 2021, soaring almost 12,000% and at one point having a market capitalization of over $66 billion, making it the fifth-largest cryptocurrency at the time.

Solana is a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain but improves on it with a mechanism called proof-of-history (PoH), which uses hashed timestamps to verify when transactions occur. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko published a white paper in November 2017 describing the PoH concept. In the white paper, Yakovenko notes that blockchains that were then publicly available did not rely on time, with each node in the network relying on its own local clock without knowledge of any other participants' clocks in the network.

PoH gets past this hurdle, with every node in the network able to rely on the recorded passage of time in the ledger on the trustless basis that is key to blockchain functioning. Yakovenko surmised that using proof-of-history would speed up the blockchain tremendously compared with blockchain systems without clocks, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

In conclusion, Solana is a blockchain platform that has seen tremendous growth in 2021, with its cryptocurrency soaring almost 12,000% and, at one point, having a market capitalization of over $66 billion, making it the fifth-largest cryptocurrency at the time. Solana is a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain but improves on it with a mechanism called proof-of-history (PoH), which uses hashed timestamps to verify when transactions occur. Solana also has its own standard for tokenization, SPL Token, similar to Ethereum's ERC-20.