Historical Summary of Solana
Solana is known as a fast, scalable, and permissionless blockchain network, with a record of success stories and effectively navigating challenges on its historical journey
Let’s take a journey through memory lane, as we deep dive into the founding vision, milestones, triumphs, technological innovations, community growth, and pivotal moments that have shaped the growth and development of Solana to this fast and scalable blockchain network we know.
We will be exploring Solana’s journey from its inception year, 2018, to its current state.
Founding vision
Solana is designed to run as a scalable, high-efficiency blockchain built for mass adoption. This vision ensued from the inability of Bitcoin and Ethereum to handle and process many transactions per second that can handle the world’s population.
Solana founders envisioned a blockchain protocol capable of high throughput and low latency, thereby enabling fast transactions at very low cost.
The problems Solana aims to solve
Solana aims to:
1) Increase transaction throughput:
Blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum can only process a limited number of transactions per second (tps). This is because of their limitation to efficiently maximize their available node bandwidths, and the compulsory communication and consensus between nodes before transactions can be confirmed and added to a block.
Consequently, Ethereum has to rely on several Layer 2 scaling solutions to increase its throughput.
Solana is designed to maximize the efficiency of the blockchain by utilizing all bandwidth available to its hardware resources(nodes) ensuring throughput and fast finality.
Solana, through its Proof of History (POH) mechanism, enables nodes to run and confirm transactions concurrently, without interference, and independently of each other. This ability allows for processing thousands of transactions per second and achieving fast finality,
Solana can handle an average of 65,000 transactions per second.
2)Reduce gas fees:
One disadvantage of low throughput is network congestion, which causes transactions to be prioritized based on how high the gas limit is set. Solana’s high throughput makes gas fees cheaper, allowing equal priority to be given to all transactions
The Evolution of Solana
From humble beginnings to widespread recognition, Solana has evolved greatly. In this section, we will highlight milestones, triumphs, technological innovations, community growth, and pivotal moments that have shaped the network's growth and development from 2018 to 2024.
2018
Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko, created a method called Proof of History (POH) for node-producing blocks to easily validate the timestamp on a transaction using its clock. This means that nodes do not have to achieve consensus before a transaction is added to a block, this eliminates low latency and increases the number of transactions confirmed at any given time.
In 2018, Anatoly, alongside Greg Fitzgerald, Stephen Akridge, and three others, began building the network and named it Solana.
2019
In 2019, Solana doubled down on development and release of its network infrastructures.
The release of Trestles v0.16.0 implemented the Proof of Replication Methodology for replicator nodes, and improved support for Solana smart contract language, Rust.
In June, the Solana Foundation, a non-profit, was created to coordinate the activities of the protocol.
Solana announced Tour De SOL, an event for the validators community, to test their skills and performance required to participate and secure the network.
The most defining moment for Solana in 2019, was its $20M seed raised in a funding round led by Multicoin Capital in July. “Solana is one of the most compelling layer 1 platforms we’ve evaluated to date,” said Multicoin Managing Partner, Kyle Samani.
“We’re very proud to lead this round, and we encourage developers everywhere to take a serious look at Solana.” He added.
This fund was intended to be used for engineering and project management work.
Several testrun were executed on subsequent released Solana versions — Waimea v0.17.0, Mavericks v0.18.0, Jaws v.0.19.0, Cloud Nine v0.20.0 — to monitor performance, third-party validator uptime, and TPS. This went on for a few months while they waited for an almost finalized version of Solana.
In November, Sultans v0.21.1 was released with major features and improvements, hitting over 100k in max Transactions per second(tps)
In December, Soft Launch Program 1(SLP1) was launched. A late-stage test to test Solana features in a genesis dry run. The SLP1 “very closely mirrored what is expected for the official Solana mainnet Genesis release, and is a significant indication that the Solana Network is nearing feature completion”_Austin Virts
With everything in place, Solana was set for mainnet launch.
2020
TECHNOLOGY INNOVATIONS
In Q1, Solana was launched on Mainnet
Thereafter, the network technology gradually improved through bug fixes, cross-program communication, account operation, and the launch of the SPL token standard. These upgrades were effected between Solana v1.1 to v1.4 releases.
Later in the year, Solana announced the SPL Feature Proposal program, through which community votes on network features were determined based on validators’ stakes.
Triumph and Pivotal moments
- This led to exponential growth for Solana, as over 100 projects across Defi, Dapps, Wallets, and Exchanges, infrastructures launched on Solana’s mainnet beta. Some notable examples include USDT, USDC, Chainlink, and Serum.
- SOL token became available for trading options on Binance and Bithumb Global exchange
- With its remarkable technological innovations, the network inevitably attracted leading Web3 organizations, establishing solid partnerships with Infrastructure providers and Organizations like Chainlink, Circle, Arweave, and others.
Community Growth
Less than a year after its mainnet launch, Solana quickly grew its community to over 600k members across Continents and social platforms, thanks to the numerous projects launched and partnerships established.
Key Milestones
At the end of 2020, Solana recorded a total of:
- 8.3billion total transactions
- 4.9million unique SOL wallets
- 360 network Validators
- 54 million blocks
- 100+ Projects Integrations
2020 was the best year yet for Solana🥳
2021
Challenges
Solana faced several network failures and performance-related issues in 2021. The most prominent being the Denial of service attack in September which lasted for 17 hours, was caused by depletion of the network resources due to a high increase in transactions amounting to 400,000 tps. This led to the restart of the network by the validators community to restore functionality.
Technological Innovations
- The year began with the move to make the network censorship-resistant, more decentralized, and secure, through staking rewards launched on the Mainnet.
- Several Mainnet Upgrades from V.1.5 to v.1.8 to improve the network stability and fix memory issues.
Triumphs and Pivotal Moments
- Solana Labs raised over $316 million (the actual figure being $314,159,265.359) in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, and Polychain Capital.
- Alexhis Ohanian, the founder of Seven Seven Six, pledged $100 million to support decentralized social media projects on Solana.
- The Solana crypto-friendly Phantom wallet was launched, and in November of 2021, registered 1 million users.
- The on-chain order book AMM, Raydium, and the crypto marketplace, Orca, pitched their tents on Solana.
- NFT platforms such as Fractal, owned by Twitch co-founder Justin, Metaplex, and Neopets NFT collections all announced their launch on Solana.
- Browsers were not left out, with Brave and Opera announcing their support and integration of the Solana blockchain into their browsers
- The NBA star Micheal Jordan launched the Heir community on Solana to connect athletes with their fans.
Community Growth
- Solana x Serum DeFi, Solana season, and IGNITION hackathons resulted in increased developer participation, with 3,000, 13,000, and 6,000 developers joining the respective events. This spurred the launch of many new projects, including the cross-trading platform–Mango market, and the decentralized protocol for lending and borrowing — Solend on Solana mainnet.
Key Milestones
Solana rounded up the year celebrating these milestones.
- 45,500,750,478 Billion transactions
- 5,145 total projects
- 1,328 global validators
- 1 million total NFTs minted
- $11.4 billion Total Value Locked (TVL)
- $1.6 billion TVL in stake pools
2021 was a hit!
2022–2023
If 2021 was good, then 2022–2023 was even better🥳
This era came with amazing innovations, exciting partnerships, and mainstream adoption.
Challenges
- Solana’s promise of a highly efficient and scalable blockchain came at a cost. Once again, the network faced challenges when its limits were tested during a contest over NFT ownership in April. Bots sent over 6 million transactions per second (tps) to Solana, overwhelming the network. This flood of transactions caused validators to run out of memory which in turn stopped the production of new blocks. The validator operators then performed a mainnet restart and upgrade to restore services.
- The SOL token price dropped after news of the FTX crash. FTX held approximately $1 billion worth of $SOL, with 57 million locked over a vesting period till 2025. Its collapse stirred panic and led to a sharp decline in the value of $SOL.”
Technological Innovations
The goal was clear–to make the network more stable, resilient, faster and decentralized.
- The adoption of a second Solana Validator, Jump Firedancer, aims to improve Solana’s throughput and efficiency, enabling the processing of hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, and achieving Nakamoto coefficient metrics.
- In the spirit of technological innovation, Solana launched Saga, its mobile phone: a 50MP, 12GB RAM Android 13 phone.
Anadoly, holding the Solana phone
On Saga, you can interact and transact between Dapps, and access your web3 wallet. The idea is to enhance communication with the blockchain on mobile phones, reducing the use of desktops. It was sold out in December 2023.
- The launch of SolanaPay to enhance seamless payment, maintain merchant-to-customer relationships, and retain customer base through personalized offers and rewards.
- Solana introduced state compression — a method for storing data at a cheaper cost. Transaction fees are cheap on Solana, but with state compression, minting an NFT got even cheaper🤑 compared to other Blockchain networks.
Triumphs and Pivotal Moments
- Solana DEX volume hits №1 for the first time in history, surpassing Ethereum and other competitors over 24 hours.
- Traditional companies such as Stripe, Shopify, Leger, Visa, and Mastercard announced the integration of Solana into their systems to enhance seamless peer-to-peer crypto transactions for their users.
- Cloud infrastructure providers, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services extended support for Solana by deploying block-producing validator nodes in the cloud and indexing blockchain data for easier research.
- Helium, known as “ThePeopleNetwork”, is a decentralized wireless network for IOT devices, and other DePins like GenesysGO, Render, and Teleport migrated to Solana.
COMMUNITY GROWTH
Solana communities blew up massively through organized hackathons, annual Breakpoints conferences, and the Hacker House World Tour which registered huge numbers of attendees. In addition to tutorials and development tool guides, all these introduced and onboarded thousands of web3 developers and enthusiasts to the Solana Ecosystem.
Key Milestones
- 3300 active developers
- 450K daily unique fee payers
- 40.7M average daily user transactions
- $333M Total NFT sales
- $100M Total cNFT minted
- Top non-EVM chain for new developers
Present Day Solana
Solana is building an energy-efficient, carbon-neutral, climate-focused blockchain, by tracking its carbon footprints data and implementing control measures to reduce its carbon prints to 0.
This secure and fast blockchain network currently with 11.5M + accounts, 3,400 validators, and less than $0.0025 transaction fees, is experiencing wide adoption with an increasing number of both traditional and web3-based companies migrating to it.
The network can boast of solid developer and non-technical communities across all social platforms, with 2.4 million X followers, 85k Telegram members, and 44k discord members.
Potential Future Trajectory
There is so much we can create in web3, more use cases to unlock, more people to onboard, if only we could worry less about high gas fees and scalability.
There’s no doubt that in the coming months, more startups and established businesses will realize how low transaction fees and throughput could impact their services and increase customer acquisition and retention.
Ultimately, they will all move to Solana, the network that has promised and proved to offer high throughput and fast transactions with low fees.
References
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e09EW-QVDOg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnJkQwmZXfA&list=PPSV
https://solana.com/docs/intro/history
https://medium.com/solana-labs/year-in-review-2020-c3731d1cc8a
https://solana.com/news/happy-solstice-2021-celebrating-solanas-sunny-year
https://solana.com/news/solana-solstice-2022
https://solana.com/news/archivers---solana-s-solution-to-petabytes-of-blockchain-data-storage
https://twitter.com/solanastatus?lang=en
https://messari.io/report/state-of-solana-q4-2023
https://solana.com/news/solana-solstice-2023-community-review
