Solana (SOL) is a next-gen programmable (smart-contract-centric) blockchain that promotes itself as a high-performance platform for decentralized applications. While initially proposed in 2017, Solana was officially introduced in March, 2020 by the Solana Foundation.

Renowned developer Anatoly Yakovenko is an inventor of Solana and founder of Solana Foundation, the non-profit that curates the progress of the platforms’ solutions.

Solana is amidst the small cohort of blockchains that established itself as a viable alternative to Ethereum. SOL utility token is a pivotal element of Solana ecosystem tokenomics.

In early June, 2021, Solana secured about $314 mln in a funding round co-led by iconic VCs Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital via closed SOL tokensale.

Solana’s approach to blockchain integrity and performance is different from that of Ethereum and EVM-compatible blockchains like Binance Smart Chain, Huobi Eco Chain, Polygon and so on.

On a macro level, Solana dismisses using sharding and L2 add-ons for high scalability. Instead, it utilizes its own Proof-of-History consensus secured by Tower BFT protocol. Proof-of-History (PoH) should be referred to as a cutting-edge mechanism of transaction verification.

Despite being totally different to Proof-of-Work and classic Proof-of-Stake, it includes a staking concept, so SOL holders can contribute to keeping the entire network secure.

Turbine block propagation mechanism addresses scalability in a BitTorrent-like manner while Sealevel runtime optimizes the usage of CPU and RAM to process previously unmatched number of smart contracts simultaneously.

Gulfstream transaction forwarding protocol allows to include transactions into blocks with low-to-no latency while Cloudbreak database makes the utilization of memory resource-efficient. Finally, Archiver's distributed ledger storage ensures the unmatched level of decentralization for Solana.

The whole mechanism of smart contracts execution in Solana is dubbed ‘’Low-level Virtual Machine (LVM)”. Developers in the Solana ecosystem don't need to be experts in Solidity as the blockchain is written in Rust and C++.

Typically, Ethereum (ETH) killers are bragging about hundreds of thousands transactions per second. With Solana, this indicator can be verified on-line through its official explorer website.

As of Q3, 2021, Solana processes 760-810 transactions per second. Its security is protected by 794 validators, so, right now, SOL staking is available with 6,55 % in APY. Solana’s validators reached 0,4 sec/block speed while average transaction is charged with $0.00025 in fees.

In theory, Solana design allows it to process 50,000 transactions per second without significant upgrades.

Solana blockchain is suitable for the wide range of decentralized applications including decentralized finances (DeFis), decentralized games, marketplaces for non-fungible tokens, and so on.

Serum DEX, a first-ever decentralized exchange for crypto derivatives, is among the top dApps of the Solana ecosystem. It is backed by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Also, it boasts Metaplex, an NFT trading environment.

The Solana team is working on an instrument (compiler) for dApps migration from Ethereum (ETH) and similar blockchains.