Solana took the Crypto ecosystem by storm as it has crept up the ranking on the coin market and it has gone to become top 10 cryptocurrency in the Market Cap.
So What is Solana?
Solana is an open source Blockchain which is aimed at using speed to solve scalability issues in the Blockchain, and this is made possible by the proof of history model.
Anatole Yankovenko named it after his favourite beach , he published the first whitepaper in 2017, and in the whitepaper he explained how the time stamp technique which he referred to as the proof of history will solve scalability issues, in his documentation, he claimed that cryptocurrency such bitcoin and Ethereum are faced with a huge limitation of scalability which is based on the fact that the amount of transaction per second is low, and Solana has gone to prove that it can be better as the block time of solana is 400millisecond while Ethereum as a block time of 10 seconds and bitcoin has a block time of 10 Minutes. Solana processes transaction faster than Visa as Visa processes 23666 transaction per second while Solana does about 50000 transaction per second, solana was mentioned that it can process 700000 transaction per second and if this happens that is ten times the amount of transaction that can be processed by visa per second.
The SOL token.
The native token of the Solana network is called SOL or SOL token, the sol token is a to a current circulating supply of 26 million and the sol token maximum supply is at 489 million tokens, Investors who prefers to hold the sol token makes good profit from it, also the sol can be staked for reward as SOL is up for sale and also can be bought on different popular exchanges, the current market cap of SOL is currently at over 45 billion dollars, there are over 52 solana exchanges and the have a daily volume of 3.2 billion dollars, Sol can be exchanged for with other 10 cryptocurrencies and can be bought with any of the three major cryptocurrencies, Dollars, pounds, euros and stable coins for protection against hack and theft it is advisable to store the sol token in a Crypto wallet.
Becoming a Validator on Solana.
Who is a Validator you might ask, a Validator is one who helps verify transaction on a blockchain and they are rewarded with tokens. The barrier for becoming a solana validator doesn't exist unlike that of Ethereum where in order to become a Validator the intending validator must have to stake 32eth which is around $100000 this is such a huge barrier for any one that's not financially capable but for Solana the barrier is the type of computer needed by the validator must have the following specs 128gb RAM, 256gb motherboard, 12 cores/ 24 threads CPU, but it is important to note that Solana has over 1000 validators who are owned by the development and this sort of put a question mark on the decentralisation fundamentals of solana.