Solana Metrics is a highly functional open source project that banks on blockchain technologies permissionless nature to provide decentralized finance (DeFi) solutions. In March 2020, the Solana Foundation officially launched the Cryptocurrency with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. The idea and initial work on the project began in 2017.
As of August 1, Solana was selling for $31-33, but as of September 3 it had peaked at $139.5. About 450 percent of the token’s value has gone up during the month. It is currently at 200$.
Since last week, Solana has grown more than 70 per cent in value, surpassing Dogecoin to become the seventh largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
None of this content is financial advice, individuals, who are reading this, should do their own research.
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A prominent feature of Solana is its supposed high transaction volume, low block time, and low transaction costs. There is however no evidence to support any of the metrics.
- Using a balanced voting system, consensus voting, to identify the consensus opinion and is included in the transaction count. Voting is included as transaction per second ps, this draws “real transaction per second” down. In simple words,voting is taking up the majority of transactions.
- Solana’s block time is fast, but this is very different from transaction finality. It usually takes several blocks before the transaction is included in a block and committed to consensus state. Hence the 50,000 transactions per second could be vague.
- Solana’s Proof of History technology addresses a problem that other Distributed Ledger Technologies don’t even have to begin with. Due to the fact that blocks must be produced serially, Proof of History introduces a verifiable delay to adjust the production of blocks.
- To achieve low latency, Solana makes yet another security tradeoff. There is not only a leader, but he/she is also known in advance! Due to this, it is uniquely vulnerable to denial of service attacks.
- As a final note, Solana’s low transaction fees are a marketing ploy. The network operating costs are not covered by this fee, so staking rewards must be subsidized by inflation.
- Its ecosystem is heavily reliant on Alameda Research, who essentially also control the FTX exchange as well. So it’s kinda not about the decentralization.
Additionally, blockchains are leader-based networks. The block producer (leader) decides which transactions to include and in what order to include them. Solana’s target market and most significant use case are decentralized exchanges, which suffer from this lack of fairness.