Ratings Solana

Real Team: ✅
GitHub: ✅
Smart Contract: -
Working Product: -
+2 yr Vesting for team: -
Have a company: ✅
Transparent: -

TBD
Token economy and terms not yet published.
New Blockchain written in Rust with PoS for consensus.
Public beta in September 2018. Mainnet Q4 2018.

Sound good...

I like this one! Tech looks sound. Github +++ I look forward to seeing where this one goes. Good luck guys!


Ratings are that of opinion and not to be financial advice of any kind and in no way should be considered endorsement of any project. Please, do your own due diligence on anything you invest in!

The goals of this project are to create a very high throughput blockchain that "scales with Moore's Law" ie. as CPUs get faster so will the blockchain. Baseline predictions for throughput with a single node system are well in excess of 500k tps, actually more like 700k. This is similar to the TPS of a modern commodities exchange like NASDAQ. It is unclear to me how this is affected as more nodes are added to the system and distributed across networks with higher latency, or what the upper bounds are on decentralizing by massively increasing the number of verifiers and validators. The performance is given by having a single "leader" that uses a VDF - verifiable delay function - that is relatively slow to compute but much faster to verify which can be done in parallel across multiple GPU cores. The leader interleaves transaction data with the output of the VDF which verifiably orders the transactions. On top of a pool of verifiers, any one of which can become the leader, there is also a PoS based set of validator nodes which can lose their stake by slashing if they do their job incorrectly by consensus. The validators provide finality to transactions within a few hundred milliseconds.

Solana will also provide contracts written using extended Berkeley Packet Filter bytecode which is used the Linux kernel to filter network packets. eBPF has a JIT and can be targeted by LLVM so theoretically contracts should be writable in any language LLVM supports including Rust.

The team building Solana is headed up by two former engineers from Qualcomm who did hardcore low-level stuff like operating system development and have a very pragmatic approach to building the software which is mostly written in Rust and NVIDIA's parallel processing language CUDA. They have a lot of code online in Github which you can download and run standalone or join their public Testnet. They have a dashboard monitoring the performance which you can check out now.

This is definitely a very interesting project to watch and even if it only has niche appeal it may gain support for applications that need very high throughput such as exchanges (commodities and advertising).

The team has a very impressive background with seasoned veterans in building performance code, languages, data science, and ops. However they don't have anyone who claims a background in cryptography and security but I don't doubt they can hire an appropriately high calibre person. But if you read the whitepaper and their technical blog posts you will not get the impression that they are lacking knowledge of blockchain technology.

Overall I'm very impressed with what I've seen so far. However if you're rushing to throw money at Solana I should warn you that according to the whitepaper investment in Solana will likely only be open to accredited investors. So you'll need assets of over $1M or income greater than $200K/yr for two years to demonstrate that. There is a sign up form on their website if you're still interested. If you have some substantial well connected hardware to throw at the project you can also express interest in being a "miner" i.e. verifier or validator.

- Solana's team brings together engineers with years of experience in the field of engineering, has made Qualcomm, Intel and other well-known technology companies. Obviously with such an experienced background we have hope for the development team to know what they want to do and what to do to create the product as desired.
- Solana's Github has updated the source code and has full instructions on how to run the testnet, the Single Node and the Multinode.
- Track the current roadmap Solana is still sticking to the plan set out. If Solana keeps up with the current progress, the moment they start selling tokens (Q1, 2019) is when they have a complete blockchain platform in hand. This is a huge plus.