Solana is one of the fastest growing smart contract chains, capable of processing up to 50,000 TPS (transactions per second) for a fraction of the cost.
In this post, I will share with you everything you need to know about Solana, as well as what I think the price of SOL coin could be in the next 2 to 5 years.
So without much ado, let's get started.
What is Solana (SOL)
Solana is a highly efficient, fully secure and decentralized smart contract blockchain that combines its novel Proof of History (PoH) with Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithms to achieve high transaction performance and near-zero transaction fees.
Solana is the only major smart contract chain that is completely secure and decentralized without sacrificing scalability, speed and cost-effectiveness.
Ethereum is known for its security and provable decentralization, but it lacks scalability and transactions are slow and expensive.
Binance Smart Chain (BSC) came to the rescue with its 3 second block confirmation time and sub-dollar transaction fees, but it is not fully decentralized and thus less secure.
Solana has none of these trade-offs as it provides developers and users with a fully decentralized blockchain that is fast, secure and censorship-resistant.
In doing so, we provide the open infrastructure needed to build decentralized applications (dApps) for mass adoption.
SOL is the native cryptocurrency that powers everything in the Solana ecosystem.
Solana (SOL) fast facts
- Solana solves the problems of the blockchain trilemma of scale, security and decentralization. Why trade one for the other when you can have them all plus more?
- Solana can handle up to 50,000 TPS
- Solana's average transaction fee is $ 0.00025
- Solana achieves complete decentralization, security without sacrificing scalability, speed or cost effectiveness.
- Solana has a block confirmation time of under 1 second by comparison.
- There are over 1,029 nodes running the Solana blockchain software
- About 20 billion transactions have been executed on the Solana blockchain so far and it is still accelerating as more projects and users gain.
- The price of SOL has risen by over 6000% in the past year as the chain begins to gain more traction.
- SOL has a maximum supply of 488,630,611 coins, more than half of which are already in circulation.
- You can build on top of Solana using your favorite programming language like Rust, C and C++, with more on the way.
- The Solana blockchain makes it impossible for miners and bots to reorder transactions and foreground users. Thus, it enables greater security and resistance to censorship.
- There are currently around 188 (and counting) projects upgrading Solana.
- Currently, about 147 developers contribute to the development of the Solana chain
The Solana Team (SOL)
Solana was founded in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko.
As an open blockchain, the project is maintained and continuously developed by the community of developers, token holders, validators and members supporting the protocol.
However, the Solana Foundation is the core project team responsible for overseeing the development of Solana.
The Solana Foundation is a non-profit organization operating in Geneva, Switzerland. Its mission is to build, maintain, and grow the Solana network and its community while driving blockchain mass adoption.
Anyone, including you, can support the chain by building on it or apply to support the core team through community and marketing efforts .
Main features of Solana
How Solana blockchain complete decentralization without sacrificing security and scalability?
The performance of Solana is due to the following 8 main innovations.
- Proof of History (PoH)
- BFT tower
- Turbine
- Gulf Stream
- Sea level
- Pipeline
- Cloudbreak
- Archivists
1. Proof of History (PoH)
His new proof of history (PoH) helps create greater efficiency and high transaction speed.
PoH arranges blockchain transactions into hashes, which ensures that validators have to process and transmit less information in each block.
In this way, you save the space and time required to perform a transaction on the network.
2. Tower Byzantine Fault Tolerance (TBFT)
TBFT is a PoH-optimized version of Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) that was designed to take advantage of the synchronized clock.
Tower BFT uses PoH as its cryptographic clock, which allows consensus to be reached without having to impose massive messaging overhead and transaction latency.
3. Turbine
The Turbine protocol helps Solana achieve bandwidth efficiency and increases its capacity to settle transactions faster.
Facilitates the transmission of data to blockchain nodes by breaking chain data into smaller packets to conserve network resources needed to distribute data to blockchain nodes.
4. Gulf Stream
Gulf Stream is a non-mempool transaction forwarding protocol that plays an important role in pushing transaction caching and forwarding it to the edge of the network.
Thus allowing validators to execute transactions ahead of time, reducing confirmation time, faster leader switching, and reduced memory pressure on validators from unconfirmed transaction pools.
The Gulf Stream protocol is what allows Solana to be able to process up to 50,000 transactions per second.
5. Sealevel
Sealevel highly efficient transaction processing engine that allows Solana to process transactions simultaneously on a single state blockchain.
6. Pipeline
Pipeline mechanisms allow transaction information on the Solana chain to be quickly verified and replicated across all nodes in the network.
7. Cloudbreak
Cloudbreak is a data structure that is optimized for simultaneous reading and writing of data across the Solana network.
8. Archivers
Archivers are used to store data. Solana data is offloaded by validators to a network of nodes known as archivers.
These nodes can be lightweight (eg Laptops) and they will be subject to verification every so often to ensure they are storing the correct data.
Solana community
The Solana community is a globally distributed home for developers, token holders, validators and members supporting the protocol.
A project's community consists of its investors, partners, developers and relevant industry stakeholders.
The Solana community is getting stronger and bigger every day as more projects are built on the network and users from other chains discover its many benefits.
Solana has some of the fastest growing community members with over 80,000 Telegram group members, around 18,000 Discord members, 265,000+ Twitter followers, and 16,900+ Reddit subscribers.
Moreover, the number of projects upgrading Solana is growing rapidly. Total to date 189 projects have been launched and are building on Solana .
Solana Coin (SOL)
SOL is the native cryptocurrency that powers the entire Solana ecosystem.
The coin has a maximum supply of 488,630,611, with over 50% of that (272,637,122) already in circulation, according to CoinGecko .
SOL Coin Use Cases
The following are examples of using the SOL coin.
- SOL is used to pay all transaction fees on the Solana blockchain
- SOL is used for staking by users and validators to win prizes
- SOL is a governance coin that empowers holders to propose and vote on proposals to help shape the future of the Solana chain.
As of this writing (June 18, 2021), the Solana circuit management system is still under development, but is scheduled to launch soon
Solana (SOL) Price Predictions 2021-2025
At the same time last year (2020), SOL coin was exchanging hands for about $ 0.5. It is above $ 37 today after falling more than 35% from its high (ATH) of 58.03 $ in the last bull run.
That's over 6000% of profit year to date (YTD), but the coin is still extremely undervalued in my estimation.
SOL Price Forecast 2021
SOL has a cap of $80 before the end of 2021. How did I take advantage of this price? It's simple.
First, I believe that Solana (SOL) should not have a market cap below $25 billion because it is a functional and perhaps superior smart contract chain.
If Cardano without smart contract capability (yet) can achieve a market cap of $46 billion, and XRP, which no one uses, is worth over $37 billion, there is no reason why Solana should end the year with its current $10 billion + market cap capitalization.
Second, the chain quickly attracts both users and developers building on it. And at the current level of development, a 3x to 5x price share by the end of 2021 is absolutely feasible.
Management is yet to be activated and will be in 2021. Several projects are launched on Solana. What could go wrong with a 5x price move from here?
SOL price forecast 2022-2025
My most conservative price prediction for SOL coin between 2022 and 2025 is $ 205.
This assumes that the mark cap is $100 billion and that the entire supply will be in circulation in that period.
The bull that will follow the 2024 Bitcoin halving will be a major catalyst for this growth, regardless of what happens between now and then.
Even with the current bearish sentiment, SOL coin is relatively stable. While other major coins and tokens, including BTC, have declined by more than 50% since the market began to crash in mid-May, SOL has only dropped by 36%.
This relative stability is due to the increasing demand for the coin as its ecosystem grows with new projects and users.
Conclusion
"Basically, the speed of light is how fast we can make this network go," ~ Yakovenko.
Solana is fast, secure, fully decentralized and offers almost zero transaction fees.
Although there is a slower influx of new projects building on Solana, this is because Solana is not an Ethereum-compatible chain, where any dick-and-harry developer can simply fork any existing Ethereum or BSC project code and to start your own in less than 24 hours.
Projects built on Solana are built from scratch as it takes longer to launch and the rate of fraud, carpet pulling is significantly lower as most fraudsters don't have time to build from scratch.
Therefore, while Solana appears to be growing slower than BSC, Polygon, and the like when they actually launched, it is moving extremely fast, especially when you compare it to Cardano, which is doing the same.
Solana has all the strengths of both Ethereum and BSC combined with none of their weaknesses. As such, I consider it a superior chain to existing competitors, suitable for all types of DeFi traders and investors.
What do you think of Solana? Do you think $80 by the end of 2021 and $205 per SOL coin between 2022 and 2025 is realistic? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.