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.
Wireless cellular networks are similar to blockchain-based networks in that they have long focused on network communication optimization. Because no single radio tower has enough bandwidth to give each cell phone its own radio frequency to broadcast on its own scale, telecommunications companies need “multiple access technologies” to cram multiple phone calls on the same frequency. is needed.
Today’s blockchain-based networks have clock issues. When a new block is created, their clocks “tick”. This happens once every fifteen seconds in Ethereum, and there is only so much data that can fit in one block. For a blockchain-based network, the TDMA equivalent would be a clock with a sub-second granularity at which all valid nodes agree so that transactions can be processed more quickly.
Proof of History (PoH), a source of time in a globally available, permissionless network that operates before consensus, is Solana’s main innovation. POH is not an anti-civil mechanism or consensus protocol. On the other hand, POH is a solution to the clock problem.
Leaders spin and the network as a whole progresses regardless of network conditions, thanks to the evidence of history. This means that the network never shuts down. Without any validators communicating with each other, the network may decide to rotate the validators. This is a subtle but important change. There is no other blockchain that has such a mechanism. Every other chain validator must communicate in order to arrive at a decision. Leader rotation decisions in Solana 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 runs Tower Consensus on top of Proof of History, a PBFT-like consensus algorithm that takes advantage of a synchronized clock. Unlike PBFT, tower consensus values ​​livability over consistency. Similar to PBFT, nodes rapidly increase their timeouts to reach an agreement, but because the ledger is also a trustworthy source of time, nodes can observe and check the timeouts of all other validators in the network.
Turbine
Because the Solana consensus layer is not dependent on peer-to-peer messaging, it can optimize how blocks are sent through the network regardless of consensus. Solana’s blockchain-propagating technology, Turbine, is heavily influenced by BitTorrent. When a block is streamed, it is split into smaller packets with eraser codes and then dispersed among a large number of random peers. The second layer of the network can cover 40,000 validators with a fan of 200. As a result, validators can propagate blocks that have a log 200(n) effect on the last one. For all practical purposes, if each connection takes 100 milliseconds, then replication will take 400 milliseconds and lastly 500 milliseconds for a 40,000 node network.
Gulf Stream
Mempool management is a new type of problem in a high-performance network that other chains don’t have to deal with. Gulf Streamworks by bringing transaction caching and forwarding to the network’s edge. Clients and validators forward transactions to the expected leader ahead of time because every validator knows the order of upcoming leaders in the Solana architecture. Validators can now execute transactions ahead of schedule, reducing confirmation times, switching leaders faster, and relieving validators of memory pressure from the unconfirmed transaction pool.
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
A blockchain network with 1 gigabit per second would generate 4 petabytes of data per year for bookkeeping. The primary centralization vector would quickly become data storage, defeating the purpose of blockchain implementation in the process.
On Solana, data storage is delegated from validators to archivers, a network of nodes. Archivists do not participate in consensus meetings. The history of the state is fragmented and erased in many ways. A small part of the state is stored by archivists. The archives will be asked to prove that they are storing data by the network on a regular basis. Solana uses Proof of Replication (PoRep), which is heavily influenced by Filecoin.
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.
