Adoption is one the key words used when saying what change could increase the value of any blockchain or crypto. Sadly this isn't always the truth as a great deal of the most normal blockchains won't perform as well or be as welcoming as the fees and network load might be too great. Alot of cryptocurrencies try to tackle this issue in some way, but none defeat it with such grace as Solana does.
The idea was orignally created in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko when he tried to create a blockchain that could have a network of nodes perform just as well as a single node. After two years of the idea being planted the testnet was launched by the company of the same name as the coin. In the form of background not too much has happened apart from the initial launch of the network. One noteworthy event was in 2020 when the mainnet beta prevented blocks from being confirmed preventing any activity on the blockchain. Solana (the company) contacted its validators to perform a restart of the network, this took six hours as the network needed 80% of all staked Solana holders to reach an agreement on the state of the network.
While speaking of the netowrk, why don't we take a quick dive in and see what makes Solana special? The coin and network is a PoS (Proof-of-stake) & PoH (Proof-of-history), the latter network version is quite a bit more rare than the former. The PoH functions as a blockchain wide broadcast that lets all the nodes know of previous messeges and transactions without needing any communication between any two nodes. The time for a transaction to be fully set in stone with the PoH scales as square of the amount of nodes thanks to the PoH's Avalanche protocol which enables the network for staying below one second of response time. Each node also stores the full ledger of the network thanks to this feature.
The Proof-of-stake protocol for Solana is permissionless which means that anyone holding 1 Solana can become their own validator, at the time of writing the netwok has 608 validators. In case they want to recieve compensation they would need to go through a KYC with Solana. The network also throttles the rewards for staking based on the amount of Solana staked. The network also supports smart-contracts meant for Dapps which can utilize the network using the RUST language.
The main use case for Solana is the utilization of decentralized-apps, similar to Ethereum and Binance coin. However the main difference is that thanks to the hybrid PoS and PoH protocol the network can perform actions and transactions at insane speeds over 50.000 TPS. This creates a very powerful tool for investors and developers alike that can create some amazing things without having to worry that the widespread adoption of the network will affect latency, speed or transactions. Retail investors can also very easily stake their Solana and generate a passive income. There's also plans for using the token for governance and voting on changes in the network in the near future. And lastly, of course, you can use Solana to pay for transactions fees which will be burned.
Solana is going very strong today as the project itself is based on some very solid ideas and executes these very well. It has been performing something that is very rare, which is that the network remains healthy as it grows. If you take a look at Bitcoin or Ethereum you can clearly see the difference on the network today as opposed to five years ago. The speed and fees are growing as well as speed being noticibly affected if some movie company want to make some cat themed NFTs and sell them all. The question regarding Solana being centralized is still up in the air, but Solana seems to be here to stay with the big top 10 chains.
