Coming to you from Angkor Wat, Cambodia, this is Episode Four - What is Solana?
Today, surrounded by towering temples, I explained Solana to Pete.
As mentioned in episode two, there are many different blockchains, so you may be wondering why the focus on Solana.
When I began my crypto journey, I was flipping NFTs on Cardano, Ethereum, and Solana—three prominent blockchains.
It quickly became clear that the user experience on Solana far exceeded the others, and it’s therefore where I hung my hat.
In my view, Solana’s speed, cost and ease of use put it on the path to mainstream adoption.
During this episode, I’ll cover the key ideas behind Solana, but there is A LOT to cover. This is going to require some focus!
In crypto-speak, Solana is a high-throughput, low-latency, cost-efficient, smart-contract, Proof-of-Stake, layer-one blockchain.
Back in the real world, Solana is a fast, cheap, and powerful blockchain that uses Proof-of-Stake to run apps and handle thousands of transactions with almost no delay.
Let’s break down the buzzword sentence, one idea at a time, starting off with ‘layer-one blockchain’.
In episode one, we explained blockchain using Bitcoin’s blockchain.
Like Bitcoin, Solana is a layer-one (L1) blockchain, which means it is the foundational layer.
Some blockchains are L2s or L3s, which build upon the infrastructure of the L1.
L1 blockchains typically have a native token. For Bitcoin, this is BTC and for Solana it’s SOL.
The native token is the lifeblood of a blockchain.
SOL, Solana’s native token is used to:
Throughput refers to the number of transactions a blockchain can handle at the same time, and is measured in transactions per second (TPS).
Comparing Solana and Bitcoin again: Bitcoin does 7 TPS, whereas Solana does around 2,000 TPS.
Latency refers to the speed that a transaction is processed and confirmed.
For Solana it’s 1-2 seconds, and for Bitcoin up to an hour.
To use an analogy, let’s imagine Solana’s blockchain as a motorway.