Inside the Solana Docs – Why Solana and What is $SOL?

The Solana document repository (powered by GitBook) is extremely thorough and should be your first port of call when learning about the Solana Blockchain. This post covers what is actually in the documentation and highlights the good stuff ! 🙂

Why Solana Blockchain?

You can find absolute nugget information like this,

It is possible for a centralized database to process 710,000 transactions per second on a standard gigabit network if the transactions are, on average, no more than 176 bytes…

… The key ingredient? Finding a way to share time when nodes cannot trust one-another. Once nodes can trust time, suddenly ~40 years of distributed systems research becomes applicable to blockchain!

The theoretical limit @ 1Gbit bandwidth network – Solana Docs

The Solana blockchain is open-source, scalable, secure and decentralised. It uses a more granular and concise SHA 256 hash chain, called Proof of History, to coordinate consensus amongst the nodes.

When network speeds scale up to 40 gigabit, which is actually quite common in datacentres, the Solana blockchain could hit 28.4 million transactions per second (TPS).

A Solana Cluster is a group of independently owned computers working together to verify the output of untrusted user-submitted programs. They track who did what meaningful work, others may track who owns what assets and the events are all recorded in the Solana ledger.

What is SOL?

You can also call it $SOL if you are on Twitter! It is the native token of the Solana Blockchain and is passed to nodes within a Solana Cluster, in return for running an on-chain program and validating the output. for these micro-transactions, SOL is also able to be broken down into further units of 0.000000001 and they are called Lamports. (That’s a dot with 8 zeros)

What happens if I you own SOL? You become one of the SOL brothers and sisters, and have SOL Mates for life! It’s true, just ask the Solana subreddit.

Need some SOL food?

Check out the recent Solana SOL exchange listings post to convert fiat currency (dollars) into $SOL.

Stay tuned, our next Inside Solana Docs post is all about the Solana Wallet !