Solana (SOL): cryptocurrency overview, strengths, forecast and development prospects

The two most famous cryptocurrencies – bitcoin and Ethereum – constantly have competitors. One of them is the Solana cryptocurrency, the value of which rose sharply in 2021 and reached $ 74 per coin. The increase was more than 3000%. Let’s consider the main features of the Solana project.

The dynamics of the cryptocurrency exchange rate has been recorded for all time:

History of the Solana project

Solana is not only a kind of cryptocurrency, but also a platform for developing decentralized applications and smart contracts. The white paper of the project was published in 2017 . Its author is Anatoly Yakovenko, the head of Solana Labs, who previously worked on the development of operating systems for mobile devices, and also performed data compression work in Dropbox.

Yakovenko recruited programmer Greg Fitzgerald and physicist Eric Williams, a specialist in the field of Big Data in medicine, to work on the project. The name Solana comes from the name of the small American city of Solana Beach, where Anatoly Yakovenko lives.

In June 2020, the Solana Foundation was founded to promote the development of the Solana economic system. The company has received more than 160 million SOL coins for research, as well as educational and educational activities. This year, the total cost of investments in the project amounted to more than $ 20 million.

Solana has formed a partnership with the Chainlink project Sergey Nazarov.

Although the Solana coin is considered a competitor to Ethereum, the project team is now actively working on creating a mutual transfer system between Solana and Ethereum.

Strengths of the Solana cryptocurrency

Solan’s advantages include high throughput of the blockchain network (from 50,000 transactions per second and above) and low fees. For comparison: the throughput of Visa and Master Card payment systems does not exceed 65 thousand transactions per second.

Such a high speed in the Solan network is due to the use of the PoH algorithm (Proof of History, proof of history) together with the PoS algorithm (Proof of State, proof of share). As part of the PoH algorithm, the same time is set on all nodes of the network. Thanks to this, the nodes are synchronized.

The principle of operation of the Solana blockchain

A distinctive feature of the Solan ecosystem is that it does not use EVM (Ethereum virtual machine for the development of decentralized applications). In EVM, applications are written in the Solidity programming language. The low-level Application Machine (LVM) of the Solan project uses the Rust language. Now the project programmers are developing a compiler for translating smart contracts in Rust to Solidity.

Another difference of the project is the refusal to use sharding. Sharding consists in the fact that each node (node) in the blockchain network processes a subset of transactions. This allows you to speed up the execution of operations. Solana, unlike other blockchain networks, scales without sharding. Also, the project does not have branches (parachains) on independent blockchains.

How to get cryptocurrency SOL

You can buy Solan on cryptocurrency exchanges, for example, Binance. Some platforms provide an opportunity to pay for tokens from the accounts of Russian and Ukrainian bank cards.

Classic staking SOL does not support. But you can delegate coins to validators for a fee.

You can store Solan coins in third-party crypto wallets, Ledger hardware wallets, or on the accounts of cryptocurrency exchanges.

History of changes in the price of the Solana cryptocurrency

For the first time, the SOL coin appeared on cryptocurrency exchanges in April 2020. Its initial cost was 1 US dollar. After the start of cooperation between the Solana and Tether projects, the cost of Solana increased to $ 4. But then it quickly fell to $1.8.

At the beginning of 2021, the Solana began to grow actively, and in May it reached the value of 55 dollars. Experts believe that by the end of 2021, the value of the coin will be more than $ 70. According to the forecasts available for the Solana cryptocurrency, the final value of the coin in a few years will lie in the range of 110-300 dollars.

Solana cryptocurrency: development prospects

Now the project is working in testing mode, which some experts tend to consider as a disadvantage. There may be technical problems in the network associated with the spread of cryptocurrencies. There was a case of a network freeze for 6 hours.

Solana is a platform for the development of open source decentralized applications. Now it is used by more than 250 projects.

The developers promise to increase the transaction processing speed to 700 thousand per second. This is very important. For example, Ethereum has a similar value of only 30 thousand.

In May 2021, the SOL token was ranked 18th in the cryptocurrency ranking. The capitalization of the project has reached a value of $ 8 billion.

Among Russian experts, the Solana crypto coin is considered undervalued. According to forecasts, its cost may grow to $300 by 2025.