A blockchain for everyone, Solana is a high-throughput platform that’s fast and scalable, designed from the ground up to support decentralized applications built on trustless smart contracts.
You may have heard of other platforms like Ethereum in the news lately. Still, Solana is different because it uses a novel consensus mechanism that solves the fundamental scalability challenges faced by all blockchains today.
What Makes Solana Better Than Ethereum?
By building its network of validating nodes, Solana ensures nodes are protected against common vulnerabilities like DDOS attacks and double-spend attempts. Solana achieves this level of security while also processing transactions at speeds comparable to centralized payment processors like Visa or Mastercard.
You can think of Solana as a new internet where decentralized apps run fast, cheap, and secure on our blockchain infrastructure. Now that your question, what is SOL, is answered, let’s move to another question: why should I buy SOL, and why it is better than Ethereum.
Solana’s Protocols Process More Transactions per Second Than Ethereum
When it comes to smart contracts, most enthusiasts will immediately think of Ethereum. The platform’s native coin, Ether, is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap. It’s not hard to see why so many people are excited about it.
Ethereum provides a decentralized virtual machine that allows you to write and execute your code, which can interact with other smart contracts on the network (in a way similar to how apps on a smartphone can talk to each other). This effectively gives you more control over your assets than was previously possible.
The downside to this flexibility is that every node in the network must process every transaction made by these smart contracts. Ethereum processes about 15 transactions per second at its peak—compared with Visa’s average of 2,000 transactions per second.
The scaling issue isn’t just theoretical; several recent events have shown that as more people have tried using Ethereum for their projects, transaction times have slowed significantly (sometimes taking multiple hours), incurring high fees from users eager to jump the queue or use another currency altogether.
A similar issue has also been reported with Bitcoin; despite being touted as the “fastest payment system ever devised” by its creator Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, Bitcoin is nowhere close to Visa’s speed and only manages about 4 TPS.
With issues like these already surfacing in two of our most popular cryptocurrencies, how could we make Solana different?
Solana Is More Energy-Efficient Than Ethereum
Before we begin, it’s important to understand just how computationally expensive Ethereum is. The network consumes roughly 8,000 terawatt-hours a year (approximately 10% of the world’s electricity), or enough energy to power 3 million homes. All that energy that Ethereum uses costs money.
To use Ethereum, you must pay “gas” for each computational step taken by the system, and this fee is paid in ETH tokens themselves. By design, the amount of gas you pay increases along with usage on the network; as more people use it (and thus more transactions happen), the network costs more money to run.
For Solana, things are different because we’ve designed our PoS blockchain from scratch with efficiency from day one. Our design removes unnecessary intermediaries from all chain parts by making every node an equal participant in processing every transaction (instead of mining pools).
Instead of using Proof-of-Work mining for security, we use a “stake weighted” reputation system that does not require any active participation; instead of paying per computational step like PoW chains do, users stake their coins against possible misbehavior and lose them if they misbehave dishonestly.
Solana also uses a new consensus protocol called roll-DPoS which allows us to achieve 2 second block times while avoiding wasteful hashing computations and securing the network with zero percent inflation.
Solana Has the Highest Tps of Any Blockchain
If you love Ethereum (and who doesn’t?!) but wish it could do more, you’re in luck: Solana is the scalability solution you’ve been looking for. The creators of Solana are so confident that this blockchain will be able to handle near-infinite transaction throughput they say that it’ll have a peak capacity of 710k transactions per second.
What’s the secret to Solana’s crazy high TPS (transactions per second)? When other blockchains like Ethereum use a Proof of Work consensus mechanism, which requires every node in the network to validate each transaction before adding it to the blockchain, they can only process a handful of transactions per second.
Solana uses a Proof of History (PoH) consensus mechanism, which relies on its unique time-based algorithm. For example, suppose two blocks are created back-to-back on Ethereum, and neither has any delays in processing. In that case, the contract inside one Ethereum block will take about 16 seconds to reach all nodes—and for larger contracts, this delay increases exponentially.
On top of that, every new block added to the Ethereum chain makes all previous blocks even slower and more cumbersome because each additional block increases the amount of data each node must download from its peers.
Solana avoids these problems by using trusted execution environments (TEEs), which are protected walled gardens with access granted by an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC).
By relying on TEEs instead of running smart contracts directly on blockchain nodes’ CPUs and networking equipment like hard drives and routers, downtime is eliminated since there aren’t any moving parts in TEEs—the only thing that affects them is power outages or loss of internet connection due to natural disasters or human error!
A Lot of Newer Blockchain Projects Are Better at Scaling Than Ethereum
Suppose you’ve spent any time reading about blockchain technology or following the news. In that case. In that case, it won’t surprise you to learn that most of them are trying to find a solution to one problem in particular: Ethereum’s scaling. As an open-source platform, Ethereum is constantly being worked on by developers from around the world—the benefit of this is its inherent flexibility as new projects start up and older ones make improvements.
The downside, however, is that there are so many ongoing projects that it’s harder for any single one to gain mainstream traction; even if one thing becomes more popular than Ethereum, there are many other options for people looking for something different.
A lot of newer blockchain projects are better at scaling than Ethereum is. They’re trying different methods (zk-SNARKs vs. POS vs. POW) and have found solutions that have yet to be implemented by Ethereum (sharding).
Even though most still have low transaction speeds and fees compared with what we’re used to in the digital age, they do a much better job of staying decentralized than other blockchains due to their superior consensus mechanisms (proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work). As long as these projects continue making strides towards decentralization without sacrificing speed too much, they will be able to catch up with or surpass Ethereum in popularity over time.
Conclusion
“Why is the Solar DAO the best blockchain?” It’s not. But we like to think it is. “What makes you think that?” Well, we’re glad you asked! We’ll break it down for you. The SOL ecosystem has been designed with developers in mind, so building on SOL will be significantly more accessible than other smart contract platforms. SOL has the most efficient consensus algorithm out of all blockchain projects.
SOL has a significant emphasis on Defi applications and support from exchanges. SOL is extremely friendly to NFTs and other non-fungible tokens (to the point where it could become Ethereum’s main competitor). And lastly, if you build something extraordinary with SOL, we’ll reward you for your efforts!
You may now be tempted to invest in Solana and might be wondering how to buy Solana. Well to answer your question I recommend checking out the Solana crypto price charts and relevant information on relevant trading platforms. Each platform functions differently so look at the site for how to buy SOL and you will find your answer.