SOL Founder Reflects on Solana’s Original Vision: Details

As a crypto investor with experience in the blockchain space, I find Anatoly Yakovenko’s recent comments about Solana’s core purpose intriguing. While Solana has gained popularity for its high throughput capabilities, it’s refreshing to hear that the founder didn’t initially design it solely for maximum throughput.


Anatoly Yakovenko, one of Solana Labs’ co-founders, recently shared on Twitter his unique take on Solana’s founding vision, which contrasts with the widely held perspective focusing primarily on throughput.

The creator of Solana, known as “toly” on platform X, has shared that the primary intention behind Solana’s design was not solely focused on achieving maximum throughput. Instead, its fundamental goal is to synchronize state across the globe at speeds approaching the physical limits.

As a crypto investor, I’d rephrase that statement as follows: “Solana is not engineered for the highest possible transaction volume. Instead, it focuses on quickly disseminating the latest state information to as many nodes worldwide as the laws of physics permit.”

— toly 🇺🇸| bip-420 (@aeyakovenko) May 17, 2024

Solana is a high-performance, open-source blockchain designed to process global data in real time. Its primary focus is on minimizing latency and maximizing throughput, although it makes some compromises on verifiability. Key features enabling these capabilities include its innovative proof of history (PoH) timestamp mechanism, the Turbine block propagation protocol, and parallel transaction processing.

In response to the latest findings from CoinGecko’s report, the founder of SOL expressed his remarks. Notably, Solana emerged as the swiftest among larger blockchains, registering a new record for daily average transactions per second (TPS) at an astounding 1,504 on April 6, 2023 – a period marked by meme coin frenzy.

Solana outperforms Ethereum by a factor of 46 in terms of transactions per second (TPS), and it surpasses Polygon by more than fivefold, making it the frontrunner among Ethereum’s scaling alternatives.

As a researcher studying the Blockchain landscape, I’ve come across Solana, which has gained recognition for its impressive throughput capabilities. However, it’s important to note that the founder of SOL did not prioritize this feature above all else in the project’s inception. Instead, they aimed to develop a system that could efficiently achieve global state synchronization – a goal that sets Solana apart from other blockchains.

Based on data from CoinGecko, Solana, which boasts the quickest blockchain among its competitors, has attained just 1.6% of its theoretically possible transaction speed of 65,000 transactions per second (TPS). Simultaneously, the surge in transaction volume led to network congestion. It remains uncertain how swiftly Solana can realize higher real-world TPS through its forthcoming improvements.

The native cryptocurrency of the Solana blockchain, referred to as SOL, currently holds the fifth-largest market capitalization, valued at approximately $74.74 billion. At present, one SOL token is being traded for around $166.54.

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2024-05-17 18:17