Solana: From a Garage Startup to One of the Largest Blockchains
I researched an interview with $SOL CEO Daniel Albert
The info I found was shocking...
Here is the past and the future of Solana Foundation🧵👇
➮ Before we dive in..
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1/➮ Why did Daniel join Solana?
He has been following the cryptocurrency industry since 2017
He joined Solana full-time in 2019
All the co-founders of Solana and most of the early developers, we all came from Qualcomm
2/➮ Qualcomm is a large technology company; they manufacture chips for mobile phones and mobile networks
Daniel didn't join SOL immediately when he was invited because of his work in Antarctica
But later in 2019, he eventually agreed and entered SOL with 10-12 other people
3/➮ What was Solana in 2019?
They had a small office in San Francisco, but they worked in Greg's basement during that 1st summer of 2019
There, they 1st understood the real hardware requirements for validators and assembled the first ones
And the SVM was still a prototype
4/➮ TX processing and the super-fast consensus that SOL is famous for were already functioning
Firstly they just play with stuff in Greg's house
Then they took it to a data center, installed them in a rack, and this was the 1st physical installation of SOL validators
5/➮ About parallel execution of TXs
This is the main reason for the high TPS
SOL's consensus mechanism is very different from many EVM-compatible networks
The parallel execution engine allows Sol's environment, which actually processes your tx, to scale with the hardware
6/➮ When performing tasks in parallel, it simply applies more cores and achieves greater parallelism over time
As long as people use the internet, and Intel, AMD, and Nvidia fight, chips will get faster, and data transfer speeds will increase
Solana will always get faster
7/➮ What is a Firedancer?
Firedancer is probably the most exciting project happening in the Solana network at the blockchain level today
Currently, there are 2 main validators in the SOL network, and it's a completely new client
This client looks at the lowest level of hardware
8/➮ There is no other project that takes hardware optimization as seriously
The number of bottlenecks they have eliminated provides a huge performance advantage for this new validator
Firedancer might be launched on the mainnet in 2024
9/➮ Token extension
Token extensions are a set of smart contracts, there was one token program on Solana, SPL
It was difficult to get more advanced functionality for your token
But with token extensions, many features and behavior logic are provided with a single smart contract
10/➮ Will this model replace the standard SPL?
This is an extension of the standard. SPL is not going anywhere
It is expected that people will continue to use it for a long time
These things can coexist on the network
11/➮ How meme coins affect the Solana ecosystem?
Overall, meme tokens are a healthy phenomenon
Firstly, they are fun. Solana is simple, fast, and cheap
Secondly, meme tokens create fertile ground for experiments, just like NFTs did
12/➮ Restaking boom
Daniel is neutral about restaking in Solana
There are several ways the concept can be useful
But some people might fall into a certain mindset trap because Ethereum and Solana have different architectures
13/➮ Conclusion
- Solana will always get faster
- Firedancer will be smth great and unique
- There will not be any restaking boom effect on SOL like it was with ETH
- The token extension will make the token's advanced functionality creation easier
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