Why is Solana cheap and fast?
Solana has a block time of 400 milliseconds which means they are very fast especially when you compare that to Ethereum’s block time of 10 secs or bitcoin’s 10 mins and Solana boast they can handle up to 710,000 transaction per second which is like 30 times the amount visa currently handles so Solana network is fast and also cheap.
What makes them cheap and fast?
- There consensus mechanism which is a fancy way of saying how everyone agrees what the blockchain will be.
Solana don’t use proof of work and proof of stake rather it uses a new system called proof of history (uses cryptographic time stamp to sequentially order each transaction that occurs on Solana, to provide verifiable ordering without requiring all nodes to agree simultaneously) which is technically not a consensus mechanism.
Proof of history is basically proof of stake but it adds in the special variable of time which is a way of integrating time in the block chain data. It uses timestamp (also contained in the block, primary function is to determine the exact moment in which that particular block is mined and validated by the block chain network) to place a specific date and time in the block and they do it to allow very fast sequencing of validators they know their order to submit block without having to communicate back and forth which is a problem that other blockchain has, the nodes ( fancy word for computers) have to chat back and forth until they agree on a time and they have to do this before submitting a block and this take a lot of time.
In proof of history they don’t have to wait for everyone to approve a block.
- Implementation of Sealevel; technically it’s a fun term to describe that validators can actually run smart contract code in a parallel way.
Example…
You have to do your dishes, laundry and sweep the floor, as humans it’s a serial task because we can only do that one after the other. In Solana the word parallel means you can do them all at the same time, it’s like making two more copies of yourself and doing the dishes laundry and sweeping the floor all at the same time, that’s what Solana can do and they are not bottlenecked by software or ideas.
It removes software as a performance bottleneck, allowing transaction throughput to scale proportionally with network bandwidth.
