A cheat sheet to illustrate details on Investors checklist for Blockchains . Data or stats are not authoritative and picked from scans of tweets, discord , telegram reddit etc 2021 Q4 and some references are provided. In case of any misses do let me know and I will update. These notes are more on under-the-hood engineering look. A separate article will cover the business development viewpoint
I use the trading ticker rather then name and for example for Axie Infinity blockchain game $AXS implies the coin or token and AXS implies the foundation/DAO/founders as appropriate
Status : DRAFT
Basics
Price Action
Stats and Links
Highlight Pro and Con
Technology
Apps Ecosystem
Funds and Promotions
Readings
The Solana ( $SOL) founders Anatoly Yakovenko ex Qualcom and Raj Gokal from health-tech world joined by Greg Fitzgerald and Stephen Akridge from Qualcomml and had knowledge of distributed time clocks in mobile networks.
Solana aims to improve scalability by introducing a proof-of-history (PoH) consensus ( A time-mark on blocks) combined with the underlying proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus of the blockchain. While the idea and initial work on the project began in 2017, Solana was officially launched in March 2020 by the Solana Foundation with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland and Sans Francisco based Solana Labs a core contributor to the Solana network. While main net is still in beta it has been used by many apps and has significant staked and locked value.
Solana main claim is very fast TTF and high throughput was very visible due to support from Sam Bankman Fried (SBF) Almeda research / FTX adopting SOL / SERUM ($SRM) and the growth of traditional finance high frequency traders like Jump ( Backing $PYTH Oracles) and has had a very large growth in NFT and collectibles as gas ( fees) are very low under 0.001 USD . Reported over 1 Billion monthly NFT volume
25-100K tps, 1000 validators, TTF < 3Secs. Note: Numbers from Solana’s blog post.
Outages
There are two main critiques of Solana. First if high capacity hardware almost datacenter class as nodes and frequent outages with DeFi apps
In fairness operations 24X7 for a high performance system is not easy as outages by cloud providers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Facebook Whatsapp etc highlight. Bitcoin has been the best with almost 99.999999% uptime over a decade. Ethereum did a fork after a DAO incident. Solana $SOL , though in beta version at that time had a series of outages, Polygon $MATIC did a hard fork on Dec 5,2021 and has been congested with a NFT Sunflower game, Harmony $ONE and Arbitum had Sequencer issues too among others. However, DEX and dAPPS have worked without a hitch thru major stress days in 2020-2021.
10,157% Return from 2021 low to high.
1.5024USD ( Jan 1) -171.0387USD ( Dec 31 ) for 11,284.33% return in 2021
Community Stats: 125K+ Reddit, 1,400K+ Twitter, 95K+ Telegram
Links Website Medium Github Discord Telegram Twitter Reddit Explorer
Vibrant large developer and app ecosystem
Heavy investments from VC and trading organizations like Almeda and Jump
Outage as mentioned in basics
Hardware needed for nodes esp. connectivity bandwidth approaching Gbps.
Dominance of VC and corporates in ecosystem and acceptance of centralization
Confusion on Token shares . See @Justin_bons and clarification
The network, validated by a set of 1000 nodes, offers record-breaking block times of 400ms and a capacity to handle 50,000 transactions per second (TPS), greatly outpacing the 10-15 TPS of Ethereum.
Solana’s efficiency is driven by 8 core innovations:
a custom Tower Consensus algorithm, which elects block proposers using a Proof-of-Stake mechanism and settles on the most recent state of the network using Proof-of-History (POH) hashes as a global source of time order
Turbine reduces memory pools with highly efficient communications within the network, which involves partitioning blocks into smaller data packets that are broadcasted among nodes and Gulfstream uses forwarding transactions to scheduled block leaders ahead of time. Reduces confirmation times, switch leaders faster, and reduce the memory pressure on validators from the unconfirmed transaction pool. Fast leader rotation is used for collusion of leader and validators.
Sealevel streamlined transaction processing for nodes, which executes non-overlapping transactions simultaneously and pipelines stages of transaction execution for higher throughput. GPU based multi-threaded operations.
Cloudbreak specialized architecture to rapidly maintain and update the state of accounts and specific nodes for concurrent reads and writes across the network.
Archival nodes to reduce data to be synched to new nodes joining the network and for analytics.
Consensus
Input of transactions to the POH Selected Leader
Leader will sequence the messages and orders them efficiently so that it can be processed by other nodes
The leader then executes the transactions on the current state that stores in the RAM
Leader will then publish the transactions and signature of the final state to Verifiers (replication nodes)
Verifiers will then execute the same transactions on their copies of the state and publish their signatures of the state if it receives confirmation
Published confirmations will then serve as votes for the consensus algorithm
Proof-of-History ( POH )
POH allows Solana to optimize the block creation time, its reproduction, bandwidth and storage of data in the registry. POH is a high-frequency verified delay function (VDF). It requires each validator support their watch, constantly solving VDF based on the SHA-256 hash function. The choice of validator is scheduled for the entire era, which lasts thousands of blocks. For the work done, the validator receives a reward. POH Generator is primary and a secondary is designated based on stakes . POH generator injects invalid data to ensure validators are checking inputs.
When the validator votes for a certain fork, the voting is limited to a fixed period of haze – slot. The duration of the slot is approximately 400 milliseconds. Every 400 milliseconds creates a potential restart point. Each subsequent voting doubles the time interval that must pass before the network can block this vote. Additional voting makes it difficult to cancel transactions performed in a specific slot. Finalization occurs after two thirds of the validators vote for a certain sequence of events.
A validator rejects blocks that are not signed by the slot leader. The list of identities of all slot leaders is called a leader schedule. The leader schedule is recomputed locally and periodically. It assigns slot leaders for a duration of time called an epoch. The schedule must be computed far in advance of the slots it assigns, such that the ledger state it uses to compute the schedule is finalized.
Code
Rust C, C++ for Smart-contracts. JSON RPC API is the preferred way for clients to interact with the blockchain. Solana Labs promotes solana-web3.js SDK . There are many 3rd party SDKs top of the JSON RPC API such as Java, C#, Python, Go, Swift, Dart-Flutter and Kotlin.
Solana Program Library (SPL) is used for Solana version of ERC-20 tokens (SPL) . Conceptually Solana may require a rent from accounts to maintain state in the system ( Cost of storage, currently exempted)
There is a large developer community on Solana and significant VC and corporate projects ( mostly from trading community of financials, derivatives , forex markets). The Solana Ecosystem is filled with a wide range of Dapps, Defi projects, and NFTs. The Project explorer helps with over 290+ active
Some Solana projects are Serum ($SRM) a rare on chain DEX using a CLOB ( Central Limit Order book ) and also provider of toolset and liquidity used by most DeFi apps on Solana. Oxygen.org ( $OXY) is a DeFi Prime Brokerage Protocol. Raydium ( $RAY) is a full-featured DeFi project
Star Atlas ( $ATLAS) is a much awaited game with 4K and Unity level visuals. Solanart is the largest NFT marketplace based on Solana. Audius ( $AUDIO ) is a decentralized streaming platform that facilitates direct payments between artists and listeners using Solana-based tokens,
Phantom is the ‘official’ wallet.
Tokens 1,075 Mill supply with 608 Mill in circulation. 27% investors, 12.5% team, 12.5% Foundation, 38% reserve
Funding
Raised a little over $20 million in various private token sales. They announced the sales as a single Series A in late-July 2019 and $1.76 million before Mar 2020 mainnet beta in a public token auction hosted on CoinList.
In May 2021, Solana Foundation launched five funds with a total assets of $ 100 million for the development of applications in China. In this, Huobi, Gate.io and NGC Ventures, Math Global Foundation and Hash Key helped her.
Promotion
Solana Foundation is active and large Solana ecosystem has many events and some notable with youtube video are listed below Solana Breakpoint Nov 2021 Lisbon
Conversations From The 2021 Multicoin Summit
Messari Mainnet 2021: The Future of Solana
Readings
POH u tube https://coinstack.substack.com/p/solana-deep-dive
https://crypto-wikipedia.com/what-is-solana-sol/
Spamming Solana: a Trip Report
A AMM Load speed test using Uniswap V2 transactions