The Solana Blockchain Network
With more than one blockchain to develop with, Solana has been a great choice for people who prefer fast and cheap transactions. That is why focussing on developing decentralized applications in Rust has been a priority lately. This post is dedicated to understanding some basics and key terms needed to move forward your research of new blockchains.
The Solana Network
- Transaction Fees
The network Cluster sets transaction fees based on recent processing history
- Transaction Speed & Finality
Solana can manage up to 65,000 transactions per second and block times at 400ms
- Languages supported
Solana applications are built on Rust, but also support C and C++
- EVM compatibility
Solana is not EVM compatible but it offers a bidirectional token bridge between Solana and Ethereum so projects can move tokenized assets across blockchains
- Role of the SOL token
The token is used to pay for the transaction fees in the network and to reward participant in the Proof of Stake consensus
Core Concepts
- Proof of History
nLocktime-based
- Optimistic Concurrency Control
710,000 to millions transactions per second
- Solana Cluster
Set of computers working together or against to verify user transmitted program
- Solana Ledger
Record of events preserved for life and reproducible outputs
Rust Programming Terms
crate
Collection of source code which can be distributed and compiled together
borsh
Binary Object Representation Serializer for Hashing
derive
Generates all the necessary boilerplate code to wrap around data structures
pub
Declares data structures publicly accessible, meaning other programs and functions can use it