How to Buy Solana: a Little Rusty, but Clearly Delightful
Named after a sunny beach in California, Solana truly is a great illustration of an old sailor motto: the name makes a ship
“Investors who bought SOL at the beginning of 2021, when it was valued at $1.5 USD, made an annual return of 11,367% after the token ended the year with a $172 price tag.”
Smart Valor
“Life’s a beach.”
Solana
Its surprisingly well-built architecture already gained it $315 800 000 in funding, and it’s been doing great in pretty much every respect so far
It managed to become the fastest blockchain around with 3 000 confirmed TPS and potentially going up to 65 000, it’s releasing its own phone, and the fan base is still there even after a few pretty devastating hits that would probably wipe out 99% of other projects if they just experienced the first few. Solana became successful, took a really bad beating, walked it off, and it’s still one of the most impressive blockchains around.
One of the best parts of my day lately, we’re knee deep in dApp testing 📱@solanamobile @Android @AndroidDev pic.twitter.com/vvk7yBmG4I
— TIEXO 📱 🎒 🚀 (@tiexohq) February 27, 2023
But this story isn’t just about one brave little blockchain that could (so all others can envy it).
It’s about picking up where Satoshi left off.
Read more about Who is Satoshi Nakamoto
What is Solana?
Solana is essentially the next step in what Satoshi’s blockchain was supposed to be. That by no means posits that Solana is aiming to replace Bitcoin. It’s just that Bitcoin was built for security, and, as the crypto industry progressed, it quickly turned out that you can only pick one out of three pillars of distributed systems (security, speed, scalability).
These systems (Bitcoin, Ethereum, and so on) may be fast, but not so scalable, or scalable, but not secure, and so on. Bitcoin turned out to be extremely difficult to break (actually impossible), but it gave crypto a bad name in the sense that transactions were slow. It’ll take probably half an hour on average or an hour and a half as a worst case scenario for a Bitcoin transaction to confirm these days.
The minimum time for a Bitcoin transaction is 2 minutes, according to the recorded timestamps, and the maximum is 6:02 hours. Official data notes that the confirmation time with a 99.98% probability is somewhere between 7 minutes and 3:44 hours. Here Is Why Bitcoin Transactions Take So Long — OriginStamp
Solana’s transactions take between 5 and 20 seconds, which is much better, but it also solves Bitcoin’s second fundamental problem: it takes money to move it.
While with Bitcoin a normal transaction is estimated to come to around a dollar or two, with Solana it’s more like $0.00025 per transaction. That was really helpful in the times of the rising popularity of NFTs where people were charged an arm and a leg on Ethereum to get things done, and many switched to Solana, which actually made everything possible. So that’s just two of Solana’s achievements, and already they’re important to the industry.
What’s Proof Of History?
Like every breakthrough new project, Solana comes with cool new tricks. The Solana project's proof-of-history method can be broken down into two key components: timestamps and proofs. Timestamps allow for efficient synchronization of the network; proofs ensure the validity of transactions in blocks, by creating a unique identifier for each block which cannot be spoofed or duplicated.
The PoH method provides the assurance that all transactions are correctly recorded and processed without double counting or errors in data transmission. Proof of history requires only one full node to be present during verification; therefore it can process up to thousands of transactions per second. This approach also avoids wasting energy on solving cryptographic puzzles and mining rewards.
Read more about Proof of Work VS. Proof of Stake
The proof-of-history method is a way to use a decentralized consensus algorithm that solves the problem of verifying transactions in an immutable, reliable and scalable manner. The Solana blockchain implements this method as part of its core architecture. The proof-of-history algorithm takes advantage of timeouts to guarantee correctness by using them as proofs for honest actors who would otherwise be subject to adversaries with much more computational power.
Most interesting Solana-based projects
You’ve guaranteed to have heard of STEPN, but what about Civic, Raydium, and Orca?
STEPN
STEPN is a new project that allows users to connect a crypto wallet to a form of a MiBand/Aplle Watch that tracks user movement so that jogging is recorded in an app that pays crypto for every bounce. Although STEPN is a leap (sorry) compared to its predecessors in terms of the amount of money to be earned, there are still many restrictions and a rather high entry barrier, which made STEPN quite popular as a concept, but not enough to take over the world. Works on Solana tokens.
#STEPNxHypeSaints - Week 1 🌟
— STEPN | Public Beta Phase V (@Stepnofficial) February 27, 2023
The first week of our event has come to an end. The co-branded PFP and merch winners have been emailed ✨
Show us your beautiful co-branded Sneakers under this tweet 👇🏼 and let's get minting for week 2 👟 #STEPN #HypeSaints pic.twitter.com/cndmL8mMwe
Orca
Orca is a Solana-based DEX. Take that with a pinch of salt, because all exhcnages are a mix of centralized and decentralized architecture and none are exactly one or the other, but this exchange is already doing quite well, with its own DAO, $400 000 000’s worth of deals already completed, and integration with recognized and time-tested services like Stripe. Simplicity is indeed the key to our hearts, at least in the crypto world.
Raydium
Raydium is an automated market-maker that was designed as another layer on top of Solana. The two key things about it that will very likely be useful to someone who knows where the wind is blowing are 1) complete lack of any type of KYC and 2) a truly admirable capacity for providing liquidity, so much so that it was non-jokigly labeled a “liquidity mammoth” by Coin Bureau. Think that will come in handy sometime soon?
Pros
- Very fast
- Very wealthy
- Brilliant team
- Impressive uptime
Cons
- Equally impressive downtime
- Just a few security breaches (haters gonna hate).
Saga, Solana own smartphone
Solana is known for quite a few records and ground-breaking discoveries, like its new Saga phone with its $10 000 000 encouragement fund for developers who want to design apps for it (which for most of them is a reward in itself).
What’s more important, it’s actually the <double-sided> Solana blockchain-based phone that will likely enable users to massively enter the Web3 market with all the potential that it promises. With open-source code, neural networks that can design apps themselves, and no-code programming, the future in Web3 promises staggering new horizons. And frankly, it wouldn’t be surprising if it was Solana that created the first bridge to Web3’s mass adoption.
And that’s just the beginning!
Security issues
Don’t let a little bad luck spoil the experience for you! Bitcoin has seen worse. Just like every project that’s uber-successful now.
The number of security breaches Solana had so far is indeed alarming, but bear in mind that there are colossal sums of money in crypto now, and cybercriminals are after them like never before, and even titans of the industry like Binance managed to fall on the hacker sword.
What’s important is that Solana is still going strong, the transaction numbers are higher than ever, and the community support is stark, tender, and not going anywhere.
Where and how to buy Solana?
Coinbase is probably the best place for security (though clearly not for privacy), and Crypto.com is the most formidable resource out there, all things considered, although if particular factors (like quickly setting up and getting out are important) try eToro or Kraken.
Learn more about the ways to buy crypto
Final thoughts
Solana is a new blockchain network that has the potential to make all other blockchains obsolete. It is faster than any existing blockchain system, while being lightning years more energy efficient at the same time.
The project is led by some of the most successful minds in technology and cryptography, and clearly it has exactly the same potential to be successful as Bitcoin. And it’s demonstrating very impressive evidence to support that faith.
