In November of 2017, Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana’s founder, published a paper describing a technique for keeping time between computers that do not trust one another. Proof of History can be described succinctly as a globally available source of Time that works before consensus. One of Solana’s most significant innovations is “Proof of History”. Leader Nodes remain so for a duration of time called an “Epoch”. Of course, a leader Node could potentially be malicious, so Leader Nodes are rotated to minimize the influence of a potentially malicious leader. At any given time, only one Leader Node is expected to produce ledger entries. A Solana cluster is capable of subsecond confirmation for up to 150 nodes with plans to scale up to hundreds of thousands of nodes. The best way to visualize Solana’s architecture is as a set of Node Clusters. A Node Cluster is a group of Validators that work together to verify the output of untrusted, user-submitted programs and maintain the integrity of the ledger.

These programs running concurrently can use as many cores as are available to the Validator.

In addition to this speed and responsiveness which are unheard of in blockchain systems, the Solana architecture supports the safe, concurrent execution of tens of thousands of programs (programs are to Solana what Smart Contracts are to Ethereum) written in C or Rust. Solana is so fast that it defeats the need for second layers or Shards. This project, designed, built and maintained by the Solana Foundation, features blazing fast speeds: 400ms blocktimes and sub-second finality! The documentation describes a novel proof-of-stake (POS) architecture with a theoretical upper bound of 710 thousand Transactions per Second (TPS) on a standard Gigabit network and 28.4 million Transactions per Second on a 40 gigabit network – these figures put a fair amount of blockchains to shame and leaves them red-faced.

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