Why Solana isn’t the Ethereum killer, but you should find out anyway.
Solana is the world’s first scalable internet blockchain. The platform’s permissionless blockchain can generate a throughput of 50,000 TPS thanks to its unique architecture.
It uses eight core functions (PoH, Tower BFT, Gulf Stream, Turbine, Sealevel, Pipelining, Cloudbreak, Archivers) that enable it to achieve unprecedented transaction speeds.
Solana uses a PoS consensus mechanism supported by the BFT Tower consensus.
The BFT Tower allows the network to achieve consensus using a universal time source called Proof of History.
Proof-of-History is a decentralized clock that helps protect the blockchain and is one of Solana’s eight key innovations. The BFT Tower uses the permissionless clock to speed up transactions. Sealevel’s transaction parallelization system enables simultaneous execution of smart contracts using available GPUs and SSDs.
The special feature of Gulf Stream is the memory pooling system, often called mempool. It allows transactions to be sent to validators before previous transactions have been completed. This maximizes the speed of transactions.
In summary, Solana’s procedures work as follows:
– Translation entry into the general ledger.
– The general ledger sorts and classifies messages so that they can be efficiently processed by other nodes.
– The same ledger executes the current state transactions and stores them in RAM.
– The general ledger publishes the transactions and the final state signature to the verifiers (the replication nodes).
– The verifiers execute the same transactions in the state copy and publish their state signature when they receive an acknowledgement.
– The published acknowledgements will be the votes for the consensus mechanism.