Solana — The ETH Killer

6 min readOct 1, 2021

Solana was introduced as a layer 1 solution with the ultimate aim of becoming the fastest, most secure, and most scalable solution in the crypto world. Most of the blockchain developers had attempted to solve the issues of low transaction speed and the high transaction cost by staying within the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) architecture, while the Solana team started to develop a solution out of the traditional architecture.

It is backed by a solid team including technicians from leading companies like Apple, Google, Intel, and Microsoft. The CEO, Anatoly Yakovenko being a former software engineer in Qualcomm and Dropbox, makes the team behind Solano much stronger.

Solana leverages several innovative techniques to scale as a layer 1 blockchain. It promises to maintain a minimal transaction fee for all the users. Another notable feature is that Solana aims to achieve these without the use of shards or layer 2 upgrades (sharding is a way of distributing the workload off the main network to other networks).

Speed

Solana possesses a blazing speed of 50,000 transactions per second, which is gigantic compared to other blockchain systems. It creates a block every 400 milliseconds. ETH 2.0 aims to achieve higher transaction speeds through sharding (parallel processing using multiple chains — shards), but the target rate is expected to fall below Solana’s rate.

Security

Solana’s validators spanned across the world. As of now (September 2021), the network has over 990 validators who make sure the network is secure. An interesting feature of this network is that anyone can become a validator with any amount of stake.

There are 8 key innovations that make the Solana network one of the most performant permissionless blockchain systems in the world. Each of them is explained below:

Proof-of-History — A clock before consensus

Solana’s team has identified that if they were able to trust the timestamp encoded into a message, a huge optimization could be achieved in the blockchain system. The major drawback of this concept was the fact that the nodes in a blockchain system cannot rely on an external source of time or any timestamp that appears on a network message. Solana was able to address this issue by using an interesting concept called Proof-of-history. This suggests the use of proofs to establish the order of event occurrence, rather than solely trusting on a timestamp.

E.g: Assume you take a photo of yourself with yesterday’s newspaper in your hands. Then this photo creates valid proof that the photo was taken on a date after the newspaper was published.

With the Proof-of-history, Solana is able to create historical records which prove the occurrence of a certain event at a specified time.

Tower BFT — A POH optimized version of PBFT

“Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) is the ability of a distributed computer network to correctly reach a sufficient consensus despite malicious nodes in the system failing or sending out incorrect information. The goal of BFT is to protect against catastrophic system failures by reducing the influence of these malicious nodes.” — crushcrypto

The BFT algorithm possesses significant drawbacks due to arbitrary node failures and due to malicious nodes, which are not tolerated by a blockchain system. Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) was introduced in the late ’90s as an improved version of BFT, by overcoming the above-mentioned drawbacks.

Tower BFT is Solana’s higher-performance implementation of PBFT. The tower consensus mechanism leverages Proof-of-History as a global source of time before consensus is achieved, thus reducing the network latency and messaging overhead massively. This guarantees that both the time and order of events embedded in the data structure are correct.

Turbine — A block propagation model

Propagating large amounts of data to a large number of peers through the network has caused bandwidth limitations in blockchain networks, which in turn have hindered the scalability in blockchain networks. The turbine model was able to overcome the issue, by transmitting data over User Datagram Protocol (UDP).

UDP is a protocol used in transmitting data over a network. It is much faster but less reliable compared to other communication protocols like Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). UDP sends data directly without establishing a prior connection with the target device, which allows a faster transmission with a probability of data loss.

Block producers (leaders) break the blocks into packets and transmit each packet to different validators. These packets traverse through random paths across the network. The validators in turn retransmit the packets to a neighborhood (a group of peers), and each neighborhood is responsible for retransmitting a portion of its data to below neighborhoods. This process continues allowing the network to grow well beyond 1,000 validators.

Gulfstream — Mempool-less transaction forwarding protocol

A mempool is a set of transactions that have been submitted to the network but have not yet been processed by the network. Typically Bitcoin and Ethereum have large mempools, which results in a significant bottleneck effect in the overall transaction speed. Solana validators are capable of managing a mempool of size 100,000, so a throughput of 50,000 TPS can be executed within a couple of seconds without causing any congestion.

This is achieved by Gulfstream, which pushes transaction caching and forwarding operations to the edge of the network. Each validator knows the order of upcoming leaders in advance, thus allowing for reduced confirmation times.

Sealevel — World’s first parallel smart contracts run-time

EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) runtimes are based on a single thread, which allows only one smart contract to modify the state of the blockchain network at a time. Solana has overcome this by making the Solana transactions describe all the states that it will read or write while executing. This has allowed for non-overlapping transactions to execute concurrently.

Pipeline — The transaction processing unit

To achieve sub-second confirmation times, a quick validation of massive blocks and replication across the network is vital in addition to the fast consensus. Solana uses the pipeline technique to achieve this, which is commonly used in designing optimized CPUs.

Pipeline processing refers to overlapping operations by moving data or instructions into a conceptual pipe with all stages of the pipe performing simultaneously. — https://www.pcmag.com

“We needed to find a way to keep all the hardware busy all the time. That’s the network cards, the CPU cores, and all the GPU cores. To do it, we borrowed a page from CPU design. We created a four-stage transaction processor in software. We call it the TPU, our Transaction Processing Unit.” — Greg Fitzgerald, Solana Founder, and CTO

Cloudbreak — Solana’s horizontally scaled state architecture

It is essential to scale memory along with the computation power when scaling a blockchain without sharding. Solana wishes to address this via Cloudbreak, which uses techniques such as memory-mapped files and sequential operations to achieve optimal hardware utilization.

Archivers — Distributed ledger storage

The Archivers store blockchain data of Solana’s distributed ledger. The network is expected to generate 4 PetaBytes of data every year, and archivers are responsible for storing this data. Archivers do not participate in the consensus. They download the data assigned for them and they will be challenged occasionally to prove that they are storing data by completing a Proof-of-replication. Archivers are awarded for their efforts.

Latest Updates

Recently Solana reached its all-time-high, surpassing the $200 mark. Regulatory updates in the US and the rising NFT markets are believed to be the reasons behind this bull run.

With these promising features, Solana’s ecosystem is growing fast and will surely be one of the leading blockchain systems in the near future. Will Solana surpass other high-performing blockchains like Ethereum and Polkadot?