What is Solana?

It is an open source project which aims to make a fast, high-performance, permission-less blockchain.

Why Solana?

It is possible for a centralised database to handle 710,000 transactions per second on a standard network if the transaction size is not more than 176 byes. A centralised database can also replicate itself and maintain itself highly without significantly compromising that transaction rate using the distributed system technique known as Optimistic Concurrency Control. Solana aims to achieve these theoretical limitations in its blockchain network.

Optimistic Concurrency Control

It is a method of generating correct results of concurrent operations which are applied to systems which record transactions.

How does it achieve

It is by a new mechanism called as proof of history. In normal blockchain transactions, nodes have to interact with each other to verify a transaction. Through proof of history, there is a standardised clock in every block of the network. In other networks, there is no standardised clock

The lack of a trusted source of time (i.e., a standardized clock) meant that when a message timestamp was used to accept or reject a message, there was no guarantee that every other participant in the network would make the exact same choice. Proof of History gets past this hurdle, with every node in the network able to rely on the recorded passage of time in the ledger on the trustless basis that is key to blockchain functioning