About
Solana is a high-performance, open-source Layer 1 blockchain designed to provide scalable, fast, and low-cost decentralized applications (dApps). Founded by Anatoly Yakovenko in 2017 and officially launched in 2020, Solana was built to address the "Blockchain Trilemma"—achieving decentralization, security, and scalability simultaneously without the need for complex "sharding" solutions.
The core innovation of the network is Proof of History (PoH), a cryptographic clock that allows nodes to agree on the time and order of events without having to communicate with each other constantly. This drastically reduces network overhead and enables Solana to process thousands of transactions per second (TPS) with sub-second finality. Transactions on Solana typically cost a fraction of a penny, making it a leading ecosystem for high-frequency trading, Decentralized Finance (DeFi), and the mass-market adoption of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). Despite facing challenges such as network stability in its early years, Solana has emerged as one of the primary competitors to Ethereum, sustained by a robust developer community and a focus on "internet-level" hardware performance.
