The information and opinions provided are not intended as a recommendation to buy nor financial advice but are provided solely as an educational resource. Past price trends are not indicative of future trends and there is no methodology that can guarantee profits or freedom from loss. The author is not liable for any damages of any kind that you may suffer from or in connection with the information obtained in this report. Trading cryptocurrencies is at your own risk and you must be aware that cryptocurrencies can also lead to a total loss and you should never trade with more than you can spare to lose.
The author was not paid by Solana or any other organisation or individual to maintain independence and integrity.
Investment Disclaimer:
The author owns 285 SOL at the time of writing and has staked them to test the network, staking mechanism and the SolFlare wallet.
Solana is a permissionless, open-source blockchain with a focus on high-performance. The current peak capacities are 65,000 transactions per second (tps) with an average block time of about 400ms. Solana achieves this without sharding.
The Solana Foundation is an NPO based in Geneva. Its mission is to develop, support, and promote the Solana network and its community, including advancing the adoption of blockchain among the mainstream.
At the heart of Solana is Proof-of History (PoH), which was developed in late 2017. Using Verifiable Delay functions, PoH allows each node to generate timestamps locally using SHA256 hashes. This eliminates the need to send timestamps across the entire network, improving overall network efficiency. This network synchronisation allows Solana to scale enormously.
Solana targets high-frequency blockchain applications in particular with very low transaction costs. Thus, 1 million transactions are expected to cost about $10. Especially decentralised exchanges (DEX) can benefit from such conditions.
The native token of the Solana network is SOL. The smallest unit, 1 lamport, is equal to 0.000000001.
Token use-cases:
- Transaction fees & executing smart contracts
- Staking
- Governance
SOL tokens are currently traded on Binance, FTX, Huobi, Serum DEX, OKEx, BitMax, Gate.io, Crypto.com and Bithumb Global, among others. You can store the SOL tokens on Ledger Nano S, a mobile wallet such as Trust Wallet, or a community- developed, web-based, non-custodial wallet called SolFlare among others.
What is special about Solana’s token release schedule is that from December 2020 to January 2021 the total circulating supply will jump from about 15% to almost 95%. A similar schedule from other projects is not known and this leads to a lot of uncertainty among investors, but also node operators. From January 2021 to December 2022, only the remaining team tokens will start to circulate.
With 46.5 million of over 488 million SOL tokens currently in circulation, Solana is ranked #126 on Coingecko. With the fully diluted valuation, Solana would currently rank #35 behind platforms like Cardano, Stellar, EOS, Nem, Tron, Tezos, and Neo.
Anatoly Yakovenko (Co-Founder & CEO): Anatoly spent 12 years as an Engineer and Senior Staff Engineer Manager at Qualcomm responsible for emerging technologies. He was then a Software Engineer at Mesosphere and Dropbox, where he was involved in two patents during his time ( #1, #2).
Greg Fitzgerald (Co-Founder & CTO): Greg spent 13 years as a Software Engineer and Staff Software Engineer at Qualcomm Boulder responsible for web and messaging infrastructures, among other things.
Stephen Akridge (Co-Founder): Former Senior Engineer at Salesforce. 10 years of GPU optimization experience at Qualcomm and Intel.
Akash: Integrate their serverless supercloud infrastructure with the Solana network to provide users with high-performance, cost- effective nodes and scaling for their application.
Anchor Protocol: A savings protocol that aims to create a simple and convenient savings product with broad appeal to everyday users.
Arweave: Together with Solana, work is being done on the Arweave-Solana bridge SOLAR. The aim is to enable decentralised, truly permanent data storage of ledger data for the first time, which can be retrieved at any time.
Audius: A dApp reminiscent of Spotify, already drawing 1 million monthly listeners to the platform.
Chainlink: Together with Solana, Chainlink will work on high-traffic oracles to benefit from 400ms block times in addition to low transaction costs.
Frontier: A blockchain-agnostic DeFi aggregation layer that already supports Ethereum, Binance Chain, BandChain, Kava and Harmony. In addition to the Polkadot ecosystem, Serum and Solana will also be integrated.
Magic: Integration of Magic SDK with Solana to provide users and developers with easy-to-use alternatives to Web3 wallets. Allows logins through phone numbers or email addresses.
Moonpay: A fiat on-ramp that allows users to integrate cryptocurrency payments into their applications.
USDC by Circle: One of the most popular stablecoins, USDC, is already integrated on the Solana mainnet and has been integrated into Project Serum.
Terra: Form a high-speed bridge to integrate Terra stablecoins into Solana dApps.
Tether: USDT is integrated into the Solana network as a stablecoin.
Torus: Enables one-click logins to dApps by connecting to Google, Facebook, Reddit, Discord and Twitch accounts without requiring registration.
Wormhole: The first bi-directional bridge connection Ethereum to Solana.
One of the current key drivers of the Solana ecosystem is Sam Bankman-Fried, who is not only a thought leader, but also the CEO of the blockchain exchange FTX and Alameda Research. FTX in particular has been able to attract attention in the recent past, be it through prediction markets or the listing of tokenized stocks such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, PayPal, but also AirBNB.
With Alameda Research, he has invested primarily in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) projects and is a frequent guest on DeFi roundtables, most recently the one with Vitalik Buterin. He is also Co-Founder of the Serum Foundation and Project Serum, which is a decentralized, high-speed, non-custodial exchange on Solana. Serum addresses all the weaknesses of previous known DEX, such as Uniswap and IDEX.
Serum will not rely on an automated market maker (AMM) like Uniswap, but on order books like IDEX. While on-chain order books on Ethereum and thus IDEX are currently very expensive, Serum offers all the advantages of Solana and thus extremely low transaction costs in addition to very fast block times. In combination with the adoption of stablecoins such as USDC, Tether and Terra, but also the Wormhole bridge to Ethereum, Serum and thus Solana can possibly act as a scalable layer for the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem.
Even projects that were previously firmly rooted in Ethereum, such as Compound, are currently looking for solutions and are increasingly realizing that the future will focus primarily on interoperability between different layer 1 blockchains. Also, the role of Robert Leshner, CEO of Compound, as an advisor for Serum is a strong signal that DeFi will not only happen on Ethereum. The problem with most DEX outside of the Ethereum ecosystem currently is liquidity, and that is currently true for Serum. For example, Serum DEX currently offers 24-hours volume of just under $2.4 million, while Uniswap currently has a 24-hours volume of over $300 million, on some days surpassing even Coinbase. However, Serum is still in the beta phase and brings along a strong team as well as a solid foundation to unburden Uniswap and similar DEX in the future.
- Website
- Documentation
- Github
- Whitepaper
- Ecosystem overview
- Telegram
- YouTube
- Anatoly Yakovenko Twitter
- Sam Bankman-Fried Twitter
- Serum Twitter
- 2019.07.30 8 Innovations that Make Solana the First Web-Scale Blockchain
- 2020.06.20 Solana Foundation Transparency Reports
- 2020.11.19 Solana Foundation Grants — Wave One
- 2020.11.24 Announcing the Winners of Solana’s Inaugural Hackathon
- 2020.12.16 Mainnet Beta Stall — Postmortem
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BTC Address: 1Kmf6bSFxCsv5FzX6AJkLwMhp6Q46Ksdzv
ETH Address: 0x1838aB8Cc6031D3b1C3D7A7ABc4B64278F25C0F9
SOL Address: 6habUvtZAD2qJKBtFLdfDYn8JKRkfAwFCd6DGPfjEpyz
