In 2021, the price of the SOL cryptocurrency of the Solana blockchain platform has grown in price 45 times. At the same time, in the last month alone, the cost of SOL increased 2.6 times, and on August 17, it even reached its all-time high at $ 74 per coin. As a result, the Solana project entered the top 10 in terms of capitalization on CoinMarketCap. Against the background of this rally, we decided to understand the reasons for the growth in the value of the SOL token, and also learned what the features of Solana are and what are the prospects for the development of this project.
Solana is an open source high-speed blockchain platform for running decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts , one of the main competitors of Ethereum. Solana's key competitive advantage is high scalability and low fees. During the tests, it was found that the network bandwidth is from 50,000 to 191,000 transactions per second , the block generation time is from 400 ms, and the average transaction fee is $ 0.00025 . In the future, the developers promise to achieve a speed of over 700,000 transactions per second. For comparison, in Ethereum, the throughput is 30 transactions per second, and the block generation time is 12.5 seconds. Already, anyone can be convinced of the high speed of Solana by playing a special game. Work on Solana began in 2017. Then the former developer of Qualcomm Corporation and Dropbox company Anatoly Yakovenko first published the white paper of the Solana project . In the document, he described the Proof-of-History consensus algorithm developed by him, which will be discussed below. Soon, Yakovenko, along with his former colleague from Qualcomm Greg Fitzgerald, now the chief technology officer of Solana, and Ph.D. Eric Williams opened the company Solana Labs, which was engaged in the development of the project. The project got its name in honor of the Solana Beach near San Diego, which was often visited by Yakovenko. The project team is based in San Francisco, California. It includes former employees of Qualcomm, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Dropbox. In April 2018, the developers launched the first version of the Solana testnet. At the same time, Solana Labs held a seed round of investments, and in July 2019 raised more than $ 20 million from venture investors in a series A round. The Solana developers launched a beta version of the testnet with basic transactional capabilities and smart contract functions in March 2020. In the same month, the Solana team conducted an initial SOL coin offering (ICO), during which they managed to raise $ 1.76 million. In June 2020, a non-profit organization Solana Foundation was created, which was engaged in the development of the project ecosystem and its popularization, as well as attracting third-party developers. A year later, in June 2021, Solana Labs raised another $ 314.15 million in a private round of the coin sale. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital. The Solana platform is still in beta today, but this does not interfere with the fact that more than 350 projects have already been launched on it. The largest of the DeFi projects : the automated market maker Raydium, the Serum decentralized exchange owned by the youngest crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, and the aggregator Solfarm. Solana also runs such dApps as the O3Swap cross-chain aggregator, the SolStarter Launchpad platform for Solana projects, the Arweave decentralized data storage protocol, and the Oxygen broker protocol. Since March 2020, Solana has partnered with blockchain oracle Chainlink to develop a super-fast and low-cost oracle. And in September, the USDT stablecoin was launched on the Solana blockchain. In October, a cross-chain bridge was developed between Solana and Ethereum, allowing assets to be transferred from one blockchain to another. At the same time, in partnership with Circle, the issuer of USDC, USDC was launched on the Solana blockchain.
