Launched in 2020, Solana is a high-performance blockchain that was brought to life through the vision of Anatoly Yakovenko. He wrote the original Proof of History (PoH) white paper in late 2017. The secretive project, which was originally called Loom, decided to rebrand as Solana after a similar project launched under that name. Solana’s Mainnet Beta officially launched on March 16, 2020, as an innovative and significant development in blockchain technology. What sets Solana apart are its architectural innovations. These are Proof of History (PoH), Tower BFT, and Turbine, all designed to increase throughput, workflow, and scalability.
The Genesis of Solana's Innovation
Anatoly Yakovenko, the chief architect of Solana, attracted a rockstar team. Several team members have extensive experience in high-performance systems, with many coming over from Qualcomm. It was this background in squeezing maximum performance out of systems that led to the development of Solana’s game-changing technology. Greg Fitzgerald, who built the initial PoH prototype and serves as Solana's CTO, and Eric Williams, a co-founder instrumental in network design and data modeling, were key figures in bringing Yakovenko's vision to life.
The foundational team, consisting of Greg Fitzgerald, Eric Williams, and Anatoly Yakovenko, leveraged their collective expertise to address the scalability issues prevalent in existing blockchain technologies. They have great experience building high-throughput, low-latency systems at Qualcomm. This background provides them with a unique perspective to help them maximize performance to achieve excellence in blockchain development. This knowledge was key in designing and executing Solana’s fundamental breakthroughs.
Architectural Innovations
Solana’s unique architecture is centered around a few innovations. Proof of History (PoH) is a cryptographic timekeeping method that provides a way to cryptographically verify passage of time between any two events, drastically accelerating the consensus mechanism. Tower BFT is a novel Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus model. It operates in conjunction with Proof of History (PoH) to keep the network fast, secure, and dependable. Turbine is an application-level data propagation protocol based on breaking data into smaller packets. This process quickly disseminates information throughout the network, lowering latency and increasing aggregate throughput.
As you will soon read, these architectural innovations combine with each other to help Solana process 6000 TPS with fractions of a penny in transaction costs. So Proof of History provides an absolutely trusted ordered list of all events. This allows all nodes to quickly come to consensus on which transactions come first with little communication between nodes. Tower BFT uses this pre-ordering to reach consensus with much less overhead than other BFT algorithms. Turbine takes performance a step further by optimizing the propagation of data through the network.
Mainnet Beta Launch and Ecosystem Development
The release of Solana’s Mainnet Beta on March 16, 2020 would be a key turning point for the project. The network's first block was timestamped at approximately 14:29 UTC, marking the beginning of its operational phase. After that launch, the decentralization of the Solana protocol and its ecosystem progress came under the purview of the Solana Foundation which was created by April 2020.
The Solana Foundation is important in advancing and developing the Solana ecosystem. It helps artists, developers, researchers, and members of the community through its grant programs, educational exhibits and curricula, and so much more. Besides supporting Solana infrastructure development, the foundation focuses on supporting the adoption of Solana technology across industries. SOL, Solana’s native token, has its supply capped at 500 million. You’re able to use SOL to pay transaction fees, stake your SOL, and for governance purposes to vote on network upgrades.
