Buy Solana (SOL)

Work on this illustrious project began in 2017. Anatoly Yakovenko often sat on Solana Beach in California while working. In addition to working, he also engaged in pondering and musing. Beaches do that to you. He had already worked at Dropbox and Mesosphere and was currently working at Qualcomm. One day at about 4 a.m., after consuming a few pots of coffee, he was back on this beach contemplating Bitcoin and its hash function. And he actually had a very clever idea: Bitcoin's hash function, SHA-256, could create a decentralized clock on a blockchain. Everyone is different, shall we say, Anatoly himself called this a "caffeine-induced fever dream at 4 AM." Apparently, he had been brooding on this for quite some time.

Now, of course, this needs some explanation, for those of you with a bit of a normal mind. Bitcoin uses two timestamps to generate a block, one as a block header and one at the end of a block. If you reduce this to one timestamp based on atomic time and use it to know if a block is valid then you are a lot faster.

The intent of this concept, which Anatoly called Proof of History, is to create a blockchain that is much faster than Bitcoin, much cheaper and much more scalable. Anatoly understood at that moment that he might have something very special on his hands. He began a research project. In November 2017, he wrote a white paper about his Proof of History concept. In it, he explained that if working with an atomic clock instead of timestamps based on moment of creation, as with Bitcoin, a blockchain would become much faster and more reliable. With this method, a simple check of time can ensure that computers know which block is valid, limiting synchronization only by bandwidth. The block height is then the only determining factor to create a new block. This is a Verifiable Delay Function, or cryptographic way to be sure that time has elapsed. With Optimistic Concurrency Control, the speed is increased some more (this is a method that checks if a large amount of transactions are true, so that it is not necessary to verify every single record). Anatoly understood that Bitcoin and Ethereum were far too slow to generate a global payment system (Bitcoin) or supercomputer system (Ethereum).

He started coding in C programming language. Not much later, Greg Fitzgerald joined him, who had also worked at Qualcomm. He recommended programming in Rust because it would make software more productive. Anatoly tried it out, and two weeks later the whole mess was in Rust. He named their project Loom. Feb. 13, 2018, Greg went to work on the prototype open source implementation of Anatoly's white paper. A publication followed in GitHub under the name Silk. The next Qualcomm collaborator, Stephen Akridge, had another improvement that had huge implications for speed: let graphics processors (GPUs) do the signature verification. This worked and he adopted it. These three Qualceteers hired three more people to take a closer look at Loom. Around that time, there was an Ethereum-based project called Loom Network. You'll see. People were wondering who was doing what.

Not to worry, the place where Anatoly, Greg and Stephen had surfed together was called Solana Beach, California. March 28, 2018, they created the Solana GitHub organization and named Loom Solana. A demonstration of the speed of their protocol followed in June 2018. With 50 permissioned nodes (self-appointed), they managed to process 250,000 transactions per second. Another test followed later that year in December, where they used 150 nodes that could handle an average of 200,000 transactions per second in a gigabit network, occasionally hitting speeds of 500,000 per second.

A series of private token sales followed in 2018 and 2019 in which they raised $20 million. Their Tour de SOL, the first public test net, went live in early 2020, followed by the launch of their beta mainnet in March 2020.

Solana has established a partnership in this relatively new world of GameFi. This is an amalgamation of Games and Finance. So the idea is that new games with a finance component can have a place in the Solana network.

A big hype is the metaverse environment, such as Decentraland or TheSandbox. You can play a game in a metaverse in a computer-generated world. Most of these games work with in-game items, known as NFTs (non fungible tokens). Solana allows you to buy these NFTs on their blockchain, so you can get started with little transaction cost. An in-game NFT comes in many shapes and sizes. For example, you have the unique NFT, which is usually very pricey, of which there is only one. Then you have, for example, a common, a rare and an uncommon. This is somewhat similar to the tactic of Magic the Gathering, which was also used here, but with real world pictures. Beautiful game, by the way.

Solana GameFi funds game studios where games are invented and technology companies in the gaming world, among other things. Virtual Reality is becoming a better and more interesting way of gaming, and that has not gone unnoticed by Solana, who provide the space for its development here.

The Solana ecosystem has many partners and participants. We will highlight a small part of them.

In the area of DeFi: Orca, Raydium, Hubble Protocol.

Lending: Solend, Francium, Port Finance.

NFT: Solsea, Magic Eden, Exchangeart.

Web3.0: Audius, Panzer Dogs, Phantasia.

DEX: Solend, Lumos Exchange, Hydraswap, 01.

Metaverse: Space Falcon, Star Atlas, Afflantium Metaverse.

dAPPs: Tatum, StarLaunch, Kin.

Solana also works with Binance, Kraken, PancakeSwap, UniSwap, CoinGecko, Brave Browser and many more, too many to mention. It is safe to say that Solana has built a huge network.

The Solana Foundation, based in Zug, Switzerland, keeps an eye on the entire project. It ensures that Solana maintains a good name and that new, good developments are put on the roadmap. It also keeps an eye on keeping the network decentralized and helps new validators get started. Anyone who wants to develop a project on the Solana blockchain can also always turn to this foundation for a grant.

An important task of hers is keeping an eye on energy-neutral operations. Solana already uses very little energy, but on top of that the foundation wants to offset what little they use, by having old refrigerators destroyed, encouraging the proper disposal of CFCs. They publish open source data from the Energy Use Report, so anyone can see what they themselves can do for the environment. They also urge validators with heavy equipment to do something about their footprint. If people have an excellent idea to make Solana or themselves more energy efficient you can ask the Solana Foundation for a grant for your project or idea. They even want to encourage you to get outside more through NFTs, so Solana is good for your health too! The Solana Foundation's goal is to have a footprint of 0. You can check their website under environmental impact to see if it still says 0 there. At this moment it says 0.

Currently, there are around 500 million tokens on the market. Around 200 million more will be added over the next 10 years. The idea is that relatively fewer coins will be added with a flattening curve, so the price will not collapse as a result.