The company’s founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, was looking for a decentralized network of nodes to match the performance of a single node when he came up with Solana in 2017. This is an asset that no major blockchain has come close to achieving. Solana’s North Star is achieving this.
Proof of work-based systems, such as bitcoin and ethereum, can handle around 10 transactions per second (TPS). Tendermint and other practical Byzantine fault tolerance-based (PBFT) proof-of-stake (POS) systems support 1,000 TPS with 100-200 nodes. On current testnet iterations, Solana, a PBFT-like PoS blockchain, can support 50,000 TPS with over 200 nodes, making it the highest performing blockchain and the world’s first web-scale decentralized network.
Since its inception, the Solana team – consisting of leading technologists from Qualcomm, Intel, Netscape, and Google – has focused on developing technology that will allow Solana to meet these industry-leading performance standards.
The Solana team developed eight key technologies for Solana blockchain app development that matches the performance of a single node. Each of the above will be briefly explained in this essay. If you’d like to learn more about each, we’ve created detailed explainers that you can find by following the links above.
Evidence of History
If an entire blockchain network can match the performance of a single node, bandwidth may not be the bottleneck; Instead, there should be a computation constraint. To do this, we must first improve the way the nodes of the network communicate.
In the same way that blockchain-based networks have long focused on network communication optimization, wireless cellular networks have. Telecommunications companies need “multiple access technologies” to cram multiple phone calls on the same frequency because no single radio tower has enough bandwidth to give each cell phone its own radio frequency to broadcast on its own scale.
There are clock issues in today’s blockchain-based networks. Their clocks “tick” when a new block is created. In Ethereum, this occurs once every fifteen seconds, and there is only so much data that can fit in a single block. The TDMA equivalent in a blockchain-based network would be a clock with a sub-second granularity at which all valid nodes agree so that transactions can be processed faster.
Solana’s main innovation is Proof of History (PoH), a source of time in a globally available, permissionless network that operates before consensus. POH is not an anti-civil or anti-consensus mechanism. POH, on the other hand, is a time-keeping solution.
Due to historical evidence, leaders spin and the network as a whole progresses regardless of network conditions. This implies that the network is never turned off. The network may decide to rotate the validators if no validators communicate with each other. This is a minor but significant change. There is no other blockchain with a mechanism like this. In order to reach a decision, every other chain validator must communicate. Solana’s leader rotation decisions are made asynchronously.
By going to the top of the pile, this main innovation opened up the design space. In addition to providing a clock to the POH Solana, it allows maximizing the available block time (800ms), block spread (log200(n)), bandwidth (50K-80=K TPS), and ledger storage (petabytes) on the network. gives. Can be used for timestamping.
BFT Tower
Solana uses Proof of History, a PBFT-like consensus algorithm that takes advantage of a synchronized clock, to run Tower Consensus. In contrast to PBFT, tower consensus prioritizes livability over consistency. Nodes increase their timeouts rapidly to reach an agreement, similar to PBFT, but because the ledger is also a reliable source of time, nodes can monitor and check the timeouts of all other validators in the network.
Turbine
Because the Solana consensus layer is not reliant on peer-to-peer messaging, it can optimize block transmission regardless of consensus. Turbine, Solana’s blockchain-propagating technology, takes a lot of inspiration from BitTorrent. When a block is streamed, it is divided into smaller packets using eraser codes and then distributed among a large number of randomly selected peers. With a fan of 200, the network’s second layer can cover 40,000 validators. As a result, validators can propagate blocks with a log 200(n) effect on the previous block. If each connection takes 100 milliseconds, replication will take 400 milliseconds, and finally, replication will take 500 milliseconds for a 40,000 node network.
Gulf Stream
In a high-performance network, mempool management is a new type of problem that other chains don’t have to deal with. By bringing transaction caching and forwarding to the network’s edge, Gulf Streamworks. Because every validator in the Solana architecture knows the order of upcoming leaders, clients and validators send transactions to the expected leader ahead of time. Validators can now execute transactions ahead of schedule, reducing confirmation times, switching leaders faster, and relieving validators of unconfirmed transaction pool memory pressure.
sea level
We’ve built Seal level, a hyper-parallelized transaction processing engine designed to scale horizontally across GPUs and SSDs, to take advantage of Solana’s high-performance networks. All other blockchains are also single-threaded computers. Solana is the only chain that allows multiple shards to perform parallel transactions (not just signature verification).
Pipeline – A TPU (transaction processing unit) For Valid Optimization
On the Solana network, the transaction validation process makes extensive use of pipelining, a CPU design optimization. When a stream of input data needs to be processed in a series of steps, and each step requires different hardware, pipelining is an appropriate process.
Horizontally Scaled Memory — CloudBreak
Simply scaling the count is not enough. The memory used to keep track of accounts becomes a bottleneck very quickly, both in terms of size and access speed. For example, it is widely believed that LevelDB, the local database engine used by many modern chains, can only support 5,000 TPS.
Archives
For bookkeeping, a blockchain network with 1 gigabit per second would generate 4 petabytes of data per year. Data storage would quickly become the primary centralization vector, defeating the purpose of blockchain implementation in the process.
Validators delegate data storage to archivers, a network of nodes, on Solana. Consensus meetings are not attended by archivists. In many ways, the state’s history has been fragmented and erased. Archivists keep a small portion of the state. The archives will be required to demonstrate that they are regularly storing data from the network. Proof of Replication (PoRep), which is heavily influenced by Filecoin, is used by Solana.
Summary
The Solana network is a lightning-fast distributed ledger technology that will always keep going as a result of these eight major innovations. Consensus does not slow it down. Furthermore, the system optimizes data propagation, makes extensive use of parallel GPUs for transaction processing, and does not burden validators with a large chain history.
Solana’s software is built to stay out of the way and let the hardware do its job. As a result, Solana scales with bandwidth, SSDs, and GPU cores naturally. Surprisingly, Solana is the only blockchain platform that has achieved 50K TPS on a global network. So what are you waiting for? Contact the leading Blockchain Software Development New York to develop apps for handling finance services.
