summary: Solana is a blockchain network that utilizes a Delegated-Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. 
content: Solana is a blockchain network that utilizes a Delegated-Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. It is designed to support decentralized apps, marketplaces, and enterprise applications and aims to provide scalability while maintaining decentralization. It was founded in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko. History Solana was founded in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko, among other engineers which include Greg Fitzgerald, Solana’s CTO, as well as Eric Williams, they conceptualized a new way of dealing with the throughput problems that were present in both the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains. They envisioned a trustless and distributed protocol that allows for greater scalability, and this led to Solana's creation in late 2017. The company launched its alpha testnet in the summer of 2018 and was successfully able to raise a $20m initial investment, led by Multicoin Capital in 2019. The founder and CEO at Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko, previously led the development of operating systems at Qualcomm, distributed systems at Mesosphere, Inc., and compression at Dropbox. Solana's core team mainly includes engineers from Qualcomm who are well experienced in managing big projects such as Firefox OS and the BREW Operating System. Solana became live on Mainnet Beta in March 2020 after raising $1.76 million in a CoinList public token sale. On the project's beta network, simple transactional features and smart contract capability were accessible. There were no staking rewards, either, as Solana was still formulating its continuous release schedule. The beta version was updated to a more production-ready version in Q1 2021 and as of Q4 2022 is yet to fully complete its move to the mainnet version. Outages Solana has a history of outages, with five occurring in 2022. The disruptions are due ​​to a high level of network usage combined with a limited number of validators to manage the workload, as well as issues with bugs in its blockchain system. The network experiences strain when there is an unusual influx of transactions, which often occurs as a result of targeted attacks on Solana (such as DDoS) or the use of bots during non-fungible token minting events. First Outage: December 4, 2020 The network experienced a six-hour disruption due to the Mainnet Beta cluster's inability to generate new blocks. This caused the network's ability to process new transactions to come to a standstill. The problem was quickly rectified the following day by Solana's over 200 validators, who rebooted the network. Second Outage: September 14, 2021 The network was hit with a 17-hour outage as a result of a DDoS attack, which is a cyber-attack where excessive traffic is flooded to the network, causing it to stop functioning. In this case, during an initial DEX offering on Raydium, the Grape Protocol flooded the network with 400,000 transactions per second, causing the longest outage in the network's history. The protocol's validators decided to restart the network in order to address the problem in the most efficient manner. Third Outage: December 2021 Blockasset, a Solana-based NFT project, detected another DDoS attack, but the network appeared to have remained operational and did not experience any significant downtime. However, the network doesn’t officially recognize this incident. Fourth Outage: January 2022 Network instability and degraded performance arose, but contradictory reports were declared, as Wu Blockchain, a web3 news outlet, reported a 4-hour network disruption, while Solana Status insisted that the platform was fully operational. Anatoly Yakovenko denied that this event was caused by a DDoS attack, and instead the company called this as a ‘performance degradation’. Fifth Outage: March 2022 This particular network issue did not receive a lot of attention, but it was recorded in the protocol's incident records. According to the data, the platform experienced degraded performance on March 10 and 21. It also noted that on March 28, some of its remote procedure call (RPC) nodes were down. Although not as severe as previous incidents, it was partly caused by a malfunctioning update that led to some RPC nodes forking off. Sixth Outage: April 30, 2022 On April 30, 2022, Solana's Mainnet Beta cluster froze due to a flood of transactions, clocking at 6 million tps and causing a seven-hour outage. It was later determined that the cause was bots programmed to win an NFT mint at Metaplex's Candy Machine and not a DDoS attack. The network was restarted to resume normal operation. The downtime occurred a couple of days after the Okay Bears NFT collection launch, which was heavily hyped and had a large number of bots. Seventh Outage: June 2022 The network was down for four and a half hours because of a bug that generated different outputs, resulting in a major consensus failure. Eight Outage: September 30, 2022 This outage lasted for six hours, and it was caused due to a misconfigured node, thus freezing the operations on the network. FTX Bankruptcy After the collapse of FTX, where Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was the CEO, the value of SOL dropped 30%, as SOL was Alameda’s second-largest holding. Fears that FTX and Alameda Research would unload SOL tokens to raise liquidity arose. Solana Labs raised $314.2 million in the summer of 2021 with heavy investment from Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund founded by SBF. SBF also built a decentralized exchange called Serum on the Solana blockchain and invested a significant amount of money in SOL tokens through his companies. Nonetheless, even after the incident, the network has been steadily gaining users and developers. According to Austin Federa, head of strategy and communications at the Solana Foundation, developers are joining the protocol through a variety of projects. “You're not really seeing any projects migrate off of Solana that need the performance and power of the network. There's a lot of stuff that you can only build on Solana, and those developers are continuing to build here.” Overview Solana is a high-throughput blockchain. It is a web-scale blockchain, providing a solution that is capable of hosting applications with a computational bandwidth akin to the modern internet. Solana is the only blockchain in existence with the capability to power decentralized versions of Nasdaq, Facebook, Twitter, and all other existing blockchains – with more available area to spare. It is currently supporting 50,0000 to 65,0000 transactions per second and 400ms block times, without complex solutions like sharding or layer-two. As the world's first web-scale blockchain, Solana will unlock a whole new class of performant applications that facilitate larger-scale blockchain adoption. Utilizing an innovation called Proof of History, Solana is able to outperform any other existing layer 1 and provide fees at $0.00001 per transaction. The Cofounder and Managing Partner of Multicoin Capital Kyle Samani said: “Solana is the closest thing to the ‘world computer’ Blockchain developers conceptualized in the early days of crypto.” Core to Solana's scaling solution is a decentralized clock titled Proof-of-History (PoH), which was built to solve the problem of time in distributed networks, where there is not a single, trusted, source of time. Proof of History The central innovation that makes Solana possible is Proof of History, PoH, which creates a record that proves that an event has occurred at a specific moment in time. Whereas other networks require participants to communicate in a bid to agree that time has passed, each Solana Node maintains its clock by encoding the passage of time in a consecutive series of events. Proof of Stake Anyone can participate in Solana’s proof-of-stake and become a Validator. However, like any blockchain, running a full node requires hardware. Therefore, the network allows for “Delegators” who can delegate a Validator to participate in block production and receive interest from his block rewards. The PoS operates on a rotating leader schedule, where the Validator is determined according to their share of the entire staking pool. So the more Delegators stake for a particular Validator, the more blocks they will produce. Validators and Delegators receive their rewards from a combination of transaction fees and inflation. Features Solana sets itself apart with: Scalability: Solana network can handle over 50,000 transactions per second. It has a block-producing time of 400 milliseconds ideally Turbine block propagation: This protocol supports the Solana network, making the handling of thousands of nodes possible and still achieving performance and scalability Cheaper Transaction fees: Estimated Transaction cost on the network is 10 USD for 1 million transactions Innovations supporting Scalability Proof of History (PoH) - A clock before consensus Tower BFT - A Proof of History-optimized version of PBFT(Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) Turbine - A block propagation protocol Gulf Stream - Mempool-less transaction forwarding protocol Sealevel - Parallel smart contracts run-time Pipelining - A Transaction Processing Unit for validation optimization Cloudbreak - Horizontally-Scaled Accounts Database Archivers - Distributed ledger store Wormhole On October 8, 2020, Solana announced that it is ready to launch Wormhole, a decentralized bridge, which means Ethereum liquidity will not have to go through FTX to get to Solana anymore. This product allowed users to transfer the value of their digital assets between different blockchains, such as turning ERC-20 tokens into Sola