Solana

Solana was founded in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko. Solana is a highly scalable blockchain which supports cryptocurrencies, smart contracts and decentralized applications. It uses proof of stake as its consensus mechanism. Solana had 5 funding rounds in which they managed to raise over $25 million.

Solana is built to maintain high throughput and high transactions per second (TPS) without relying on parallel chains or multiple blockchains (sidechains) like its counterparts which include Polkadot, Ziliqa, Lisk, and even Ethereum 2.0. This vision comes directly from their founder Anatoly who has worked with telecommunication technologies most of his time.

Solana uses Proof of History (PoH) which is an additional and proprietary component in their PoS mechanism. Solana uses ‘Verifiable Delay Function’ to prove transactions happened on their blockchain. Every transaction is embedded with a timestamp to maintain the correct sequence of transactions. Solana uses decentralized clock as a reference for the timestamps with SHA256 hash function.

There is no minimum requirement to stake Solana. Rewards of a node is directly proportional to the number of SOL tokens staked on the network. The fees received on Solana’s network are burned which keeps the token deflationary. The token has its maximum supply fixed at 500 million.