Solana (blockchain platform)

Solana is a blockchain platform which uses a proof-of-stake mechanism to provide smart contract functionality. Its native cryptocurrency is SOL.

Solana
Denominations
CodeSOL
Development
White paperSolana: A new architecture for a high performance blockchain
Code repositoryhttps://github.com/solana-labs/solana
Developer(s)Solana Labs & Solana Foundation
LicenseApache 2.0[1]
Ledger
Block explorerhttps://explorer.solana.com/
Website
WebsiteOfficial website

Solana was launched in 2020 by Solana Labs, which was founded by Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal in 2018. The blockchain has experienced several major outages, was subjected to a hack, and a class action lawsuit was filed against the platform.

Solana's total market cap was US$55 billion in January 2022. However, by the end of 2022, this had fallen to around $3 billion following the bankruptcy of FTX. Following the general rise of the cryptocurrency market in 2023, its market cap rose to $7 billion.

Characteristics

According to the company's white paper, Solana runs on a proof of stake model.[2] The New York Times and Financial Times described the coin as an alternative to Ethereum.[3][4]

History

Solana was first opened to the public in March 2020,[2] with its first block being created on 16 March 2020.[5] The Solana blockchain was designed to support smart contracts and decentralized apps in particular.[2][6] Large numbers of simultaneous transactions have contributed to several outages of the Solana blockchain.[6]

In June 2021, Solana Labs sold $314 million worth of its native cryptocurrency, SOL, to a group of funds led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital.[7]

On 1 July 2022, a class action lawsuit was filed against Solana. The lawsuit accused Solana of selling unregistered securities tokens in the form of Solana from 24 March 2020, onward and that Solana deliberately misled investors concerning the total circulating supply of SOL tokens. According to the lawsuit, Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder of Solana Labs, lent a market maker more than 11.3 million tokens in April 2020 and failed to disclose this information to the public. The lawsuit claimed that Solana stated it would reduce the supply by this amount, but it only burned 3.3 million tokens.[8]

On 3 August, 2022, 9,231 Solana wallets were hacked[9] and four Solana wallet addresses stole approximately $8 million from victims.[10] The Solana Foundation stated that the hack was caused by digital wallet software from Slope Finance.[10]

In April 2023, Solana Mobile, a subsidiary of Solana Labs,[11] began selling the Solana Saga, an Android smartphone with several Solana-based decentralized apps preinstalled.[12]

In June 2023, the SEC sued Coinbase, alleging that Solana and twelve other currencies offered by the platform failed the Howey Test and qualified as securities. The suit accuses Coinbase of illegally evading requirements for disclosure by offering these tokens. The SEC had previously issued a Wells notice to Coinbase in March.[13][14]

In September 2023, Visa announced that along with payment processors Worldpay, Inc. and Nuvei, it had added support for the Solana blockchain to send payments to merchants using the stablecoin USD Coin (USDC), rather than fiat currency via bank wire.[15]

Market value

The value of Solana tokens has fluctuated greatly since the system's inception. The market capitalization of the Solana blockchain surpassed $63 billion in September 2021,[16] and reached $74 billion in early November 2021, having risen by nearly 12,000% that year to a price of $259.96.[2] The blockchain's popularity at this time was due in part to interest in NFTs.[6]

In November 2022, the price of Solana dropped by 40 percent in one day following the bankruptcy of FTX, due to sell off from Alameda Research. Solana was Alameda's second-largest holding at the time[17][18] and FTX held $982 million in Solana tokens.[19] By the end of 2022, Solana had lost more than $50 billion in value since the beginning of the year.[6] Since the start of 2023 until 15 March, coinciding with a rise in the cryptocurrency market, Solana's value had risen by 100 percent to a market capitalization of around $7 billion.[20] On 11 June 2023, Solana dropped nearly 30% in one day after the SEC announced that it would make the case in court that Solana is a financial security, causing big exchanges to liquidate their holdings, including Robinhood which delisted SOL and other tokens named by the SEC in its lawsuit.[21][22]

Outages

The Solana blockchain had experienced several notable outages in service.

On 14 September, 2021, the Solana blockchain went offline after a surge of transactions caused the network to fork, and different validators had different views of the state of the network. The network was brought back online the next day on 15 September, 2021.[23] The outage lasted a total of about 17 hours.[16]

The Solana blockchain again went offline on 1 May, with the outage lasting roughly seven hours due to it being taken offline by bots.[24] The blockchain went offline again on 31 May, 2022, due to a bug in how the blockchain processes offline transactions. This outage lasted about four and a half hours.[25][26][27]

On 1 October, 2022, the Solana network went down for 6 hours due to a consensus bug in the validator client allowing a misconfigured node to publish multiple valid but different blocks.[28]

Solana's outages have frequently resulted in the value of the network's native SOL token falling.[6][29]

See also

References
  1. "solana/LICENSE". Solana Labs. 17 March 2023. Archived from the original on 18 March 2023. Retrieved 18 March 2023.
  2. Locke, Taylor (5 November 2021). "Solana is up 12,000% this year—what to know before buying the Ethereum competitor". CNBC. Retrieved 29 March 2023.
  3. Yaffe-Bellany, David (2022-02-07). "They Made Millions on Luna, Solana and Polygon: Crypto's Boom Beyond Bitcoin". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-04-07.
  4. "Ethereum co-founder hits out at economics of fast-growing Solana blockchain". Financial Times. 2022-03-15. Retrieved 2023-04-07.
  5. "Explorer | Solana". explorer.solana.com. Archived from the original on 2021-08-16. Retrieved 2022-05-07.
  6. Goswami, Rohan (30 December 2022). "Solana's slide accelerates — $50 billion in value wiped from the cryptocurrency in 2022". CNBC. Archived from the original on 2022-12-30. Retrieved 30 March 2023.
  7. Osipovich, Alexander (9 June 2021). "Crypto Startup Solana Raises $314 Million to Develop Faster Blockchain". Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on 2022-11-21. Retrieved 2022-11-21.
  8. Miller, Rosemarie. "New Lawsuit Alleging That Solana Is A Security Could Have Big Implications For The Crypto Investment Landscape". Forbes. Archived from the original on 2022-07-07. Retrieved 2022-07-08.
  9. "Hacking attack drains £5m from 8,000 wallets linked to Solana crypto network". the Guardian. 2022-08-03. Archived from the original on 2022-09-28. Retrieved 2022-09-28.
  10. "Crypto Takes a Fresh Hit as Thousands of Solana Wallets Hacked". Bloomberg.com. 3 August 2022. Archived from the original on 26 August 2022. Retrieved 19 March 2023.
  11. Weiss, Ben; Quiroz-Gutierrez, Marco (8 May 2023). "The Solana Saga is here. Should you spend $1,000 on the newest crypto smartphone?". Fortune Crypto. Fortune.
  12. Melinek, Jacquelyn (13 April 2023). "Ring ring, Solana's web3-focused Saga phone is calling". TechCrunch. Retrieved 3 May 2023.
  13. Godoy, Jody (7 June 2023). "What makes a crypto asset a security in the U.S.?". Reuters. Retrieved 12 June 2023.
  14. Lawler, Richard (6 June 2023). "Coinbase is being sued by the SEC". The Verge. Retrieved 12 June 2023.
  15. Weiss, Ben (5 September 2023). "Visa to send stablecoin USDC over Solana to help pay merchants in crypto". Fortune Crypto. Fortune.
  16. Wells, Charlie; Kharif, Olga (18 September 2021). "What the Solana Blackout Reveals About the Fragility of Crypto". Bloomberg. Retrieved 29 March 2023.
  17. Locke, Taylor (9 November 2022). "How will the Binance-FTX drama affect Solana? Here's what we know so far". Fortune. Archived from the original on 2022-11-10. Retrieved 2022-11-10.
  18. Shen, Muyao; Shukla, Sidhartha (9 November 2022). "'Ethereum Killer' Solana Falls Prey to Binance-FTX Deal Turmoil". Bloomberg.com. Archived from the original on 10 November 2022. Retrieved 24 February 2023.
  19. Yang, Yueqi (13 November 2022). "FTX's Balance Sheet, Hack Paint Dim Picture for User Recovery". Bloomberg. Archived from the original on 24 March 2023. Retrieved 6 December 2022.
  20. Kharpal, Arjun (15 March 2023). "Bitcoin is already up 50% this year — beating stocks and gold". CNBC. Retrieved 28 March 2023.
  21. Roberts, Jeff John (11 June 2023). "Solano, Cardano, and Polygon plunge nearly 30% as big firms dump holdings after SEC allegations". Fortune. Retrieved 17 June 2023 – via Yahoo! News.
  22. Weiss, Ben (9 June 2023). "Robinhood to delist tokens for Solana, Cardano, and Polygon after SEC suits name them as securities". Fortune. Retrieved 18 June 2023 – via Yahoo! News.
  23. Shumba, Camomile (15 September 2021). "Solana says it is back up and running after a surge in transactions caused the network to crash the day before". Business Insider. Archived from the original on 13 November 2021. Retrieved 2 December 2021 – via Yahoo News.
  24. Manjoo, Farhad (2022-05-05). "Opinion | What Is Happening to the People Falling for Crypto and NFTs". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 2022-10-05. Retrieved 2022-10-05.
  25. Sigalos, MacKenzie (1 June 2022). "Solana suffered its second outage in a month, sending price plunging". CNBC.com. Archived from the original on 18 July 2022. Retrieved 2 June 2022.
  26. Evans, Brian (1 June 2022). "Solana tumbles as its blockchain network suffers 2nd outage in a month". Business Insider. Archived from the original on 6 June 2022. Retrieved 2 June 2022 – via finance.yahoo.com.
  27. "Solana suffered a four-hour blackout due to a bug in how the blockchain processes offline transactions". Archived from the original on 2022-10-05. Retrieved 2022-10-05.
  28. Locke, Taylor (1 October 2022). "Solana back online after another outage. Here's what happened". Fortune. Archived from the original on 2 October 2022. Retrieved 2 October 2022.
  29. Chipolina, Scott (2022-10-07). "FT Cryptofinance: Solana loses its lustre". Financial Times. Retrieved 2023-04-07.
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