Within this solution, transactions specify up-front what state they will read and write when executing. Each shard is held on a separate database server instance, to spread the load. Each section is referred to as a shard or database shard. Side note: a shard is a horizontal partition of data in a database or search engine. Solana is the only chain to support parallel transaction execution in a single shard. With this, it is essential to keep in mind that all other blockchains are single-threaded computers. Sealevel is a hyper-parallelized transaction processing engine designed to scale horizontally across graphics processing units (GPUs) and Solid State Drives (SSDs). Each validator retransmits the packet to a group of peers. Instead, the message is broken down and sent in a packet to a different validator. In this case, when a node produces a message to 500 of its peers, it wouldn’t need to transmit the information 500 times. In a distributed system, increasing the node count will directly increase the amount of time necessary to send all the data to all nodes. Turbine is a block-propagation technique. The Solana consensus layer has no dependence on peer-to-peer messages, which makes it possible to optimize the way blocks are transmitted through the network independently. But since the ledger is also a trustless source of time, nodes can observe and examine timeouts of all validators in the network. In this system, nodes exponentially increase their timeouts to agree. However, unlike PBFT, Tower Consensus prefers liveness over consistency.

In many aspects, this consensus is similar to the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus algorithm ( PBFT). Tower BFT leverages the PoH as a clock before consensus to reduce communication overhead and latency. Solana runs a Tower Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanism on their Proof-of-History protocol. We’ve already discussed one of them, Proof-of-History, so let’s take a look at the rest. The eight technologies or inventions that Solana created were focused on assuring that their network would genuinely be decentralized, permissionless, and matched the performance of a single node. The Solana team is comprised of technologists from companies such as Intel, Google, Twitter, Netscape, and Qualcomm. However, Solana’s Proof-of-History protocol makes it possible to create a historical record that proves an event that happened at a specific moment in time. In distributed networks, agreeing on the time and sequence in which events happened is a challenge, because nodes in a network can’t simply assume that an external source of time or timestamp appears in a message and is truthful. It focuses on the concept that instead of trusting timestamps given on a block, you could prove that a message occurred at a specific time before and after an action. Proof-of-History (PoH) is derived from Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and can be considered the eight inventions of Solana. Therefore we’re taking a look at eight core inventions, proof of history consensus protocol, Solana clusters, and their native asset SOL. While that sounds great, it doesn’t illustrate how exciting and unique this network is. Solana’s mission is to support all high-growth and high-frequency blockchain applications and to democratize the world’s financial systems. In short, Solana was founded in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko and is an open-source project that implements a new high-performance, permissionless blockchain.

So, let’s get started with the number one question in this article, “What is Solana?”. The second part will discuss the latest developments and collaborations of Solana. In the first part of this article, we’ll talk about what Solana is.

Therefore, we thought it’s a good time to introduce the Solana Web-Scale Blockchain to you. Last week, there were many new developments regarding the Solana Network.

Quick node solana