Solana (SOL)

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Solana is a scalable smart contract blockchain that utilizes proof of history to verify the ordering and passage of time between events.

Basics

History

  • Lied (27-5-2020) about it's supply being twice as small as actually was the case. A response, in which the team admits to not having been open about the situation can be read here (28-4-2021). Another recap on its shady beginnings can be read here.
  • From Messari (15-10-2020):

"Solana, the company, is the open-source project building the Solana protocol. The company was founded in 2017 by former members of Qualcomm's engineering team."

"IP/internet around the world is really flaky and a huge PIA to deal with. Once we got off test cloud deployments all hell broke loose and we had to rebuild the network stack."

  • From Daily Coin (19-5-2024):

"From the beginning, Yakovenko and the founding team envisioned using their novel Proof-of-History consensus mechanism to weave all the world’s blockchain transactions into one silky smooth network. To that end, the protocol was originally named Loom after the device popularly used to weave intricate tapestries.

However, the Solana co-founders weren’t the only team in the crypto space with this vision. Around the same time they were prototyping the Solana blockchain and PoH consensus mechanism, an Ethereum-based project was launched using the Loom name.

To avoid confusion and separate themselves from the project, the founders opted instead to name their network after Solana Beach, the small town where they’d surfed and relaxed while designing what would become crypto’s most performant blockchain."

Audits & Exploits

"Due to repeated downtime, Solana has the second worst final technical risk score of the 15 chains that we have reviewed so far. Only Ronin has a lower score at this point.

Firstly, Solana's base score is low. Despite a public software repository and some good documentation, their infrastructure relating to nodes is subpar. There is only one node implementation (we will address this later), the updates are handled in a haphazard manner and there is no process for an archive node. It is still unclear where the chain stores its history - there have been no documented updates on the Solar bridge after archivers were abandoned. Aside from the founder’s reddit comment from 1 year ago that states the chain "is archived to arweave" and that validators store 2 days of history, there have been no documented updates.

While Solana Beach / SolScan have made significant strides in UX, their utility as a block explorer still does not match Etherscan's. Frequent 404 errors and failed searches plagued our researchers when trying to view components of older transactions. This raises questions about the nature of Solana as a blockchain if it is not easily verifiable.

In addition, while Solana as a chain has been audited (years ago)  the node software has not been audited. Kudelski’s 2019 Audit focuses on architecture and not node software. The 3 years of subsequent iterations are thus unaudited. This is alarming given the lack of formal process relating to upgrading any part of Solana - the production version of the chain is at the whim of whichever core contributor sees the push request.

Credit where it's due, Solana has made significant strides in validation decentralisation. Thanks to an impressive program that incentivises many validators on other continents, Solana scores well on this point. Nonetheless, it is unclear what role these validators play.

Upon downtime, a selection of 25 validators restarted the chain (coordinated via google docs). What is a blockchain? We would like to thank @Solana for sharing that google doc explaining their chain restart process. This is nice transparency. Is it the future of finance? This is the 8th time that this has occurred (or 9th, it is unclear). How a chain of such significance can be controlled by 25 groups is incomprehensible and unsafe. The potential for chain manipulation is high. Given that two of these chain failures occurred in less than 6 months, an already unimpressive score is docked twice by half. This leaves their score at 25% of its original value. There was some discussion amongst validators about censoring specific transactions that caused the downtime, which would have incurred a further penalty, but fortunately this was not necessary.

They have an impressive bug bounty though, as @austin_federa correctly identifies. Maybe @solana would consider offering full time contracts for security researchers instead of the bounty system they currently operate."

  • "Audited (13-10-2020) by a Fortune 500-preferred security firm. Iron-clad immutability for global scale."

Bugs/Exploits

  • Had a critical security vulnerability which got patched by 70% of the stake through internal coordination by the Foundation with validators (9-8-2024).
  • Went down, in 2-2024 Vaneck revealed that there is speculation around the cause of the latest Solana outage, which stopped its blockchain by five hours. Sigel explained that the bug that created this service interruption was related to the Berkley Packet Filter (BPF) and that it might have been manually triggered.
  • A Solana focused Messari analyst wrote a defense for Solana and its outages, claiming that each outage was due to software bugs and each had been fixed (22-3-2023). Main fixes were a fee market and PoS for tx ordering.
  • Solana went down for a day (25-2-2023) with the root cause is inadequate update management. "A coordinated restart is underway to address an issue during the upgrade from 1.13 to 1.14 that caused block finalization to slow significantly. This means that economic activity on the network stopped while the network attempts to recover."
  • From Bitcoin.com (1-10-2022):

"Solana’s network had an outage again after validators failed to process blocks due to a misconfigured node within the system. The network restart did not take effect until six hours later on October 1."

"Thousands of Solana users collectively lost about $4.5 million worth of SOL and other tokens from Tuesday night into early Wednesday, and now there’s a likely explanation for why: it’s being blamed on a private key exploit tied to mobile software wallet Slope."

  • From Blockthreat (17-6-2022):

"Solana patched an rBPF bug that could have caused a network split after it was responsibly disclosed by the BlockSec team."

  • Had another outage (2-6-2022). Solana halted due to a possible chain split caused by a DoS in durable nonces.
  • Solana’s blockchain clock got adrift of real-world time by about 30 minutes due to longer than ideal slot times on the network, the project reported via its status page on Thursday (27-5-2022).
  • From Blockthreat (19-5-2022):

"Solana patched a vulnerability in its implementation of the `sdiv` instruction which could lead to monetary losses after it was responsibly disclosed by the BlockSec Team."

  • From Blockthreat (3-5-2022):

"On April 30, 2022 Solana Network went down for 7 hours after getting flooded with bot transactions related to NFT mints."

  • From Blockthreat (28-4-2022):

"Solana fixed a rounding error that could drain up to 700M in its implementation of stable swap after it was responsibly disclosed by OtterSec."

"Solana patched an account impersonation vulnerability in its Anchor framework after it was responsibly disclosed by Armani Ferrante."

"The [Wormhole] attack - the second largest in DeFi after the $600m Polynetwork hack - caps a month of bad news for Solana as the network struggled to maintain uptime during recent volatility, quickly implementing a fee market, reneging on earlier pronouncements. Jump announced plans to make sure the weETH holders on Solana are made whole."

"Minutes after samczsun pointed out that there was a problem, the Wormhole team stated that the network was simply “down for maintenance” whilst investigating a “potential exploit” The exploit was later addressed directly, with a bold promise to restore the funds .Less than 24 hours later, and the backing has just been restored.

The Wormhole was manipulated into crediting 120k ETH as having been deposited on Ethereum, allowing for the hacker to mint the equivalent in wrapped whETH (Wormhole ETH) on Solana. 93,750 ETH was bridged back to Ethereum over the course of 3 transactions where it still remains in the hacker’s wallet. The remaining ~36k whETH were liquidated on Solana into USDC and SOL."

  • From Blockthreat (8-12-2021):

"Solana patched a critical vulnerability in Solana Program Library (SPL) lending contract after it was responsibly disclosed by Neodyme."

"At 12:11 UTC, the validator community noticed the transaction spike and network slowdown. The community took steps to help the network recover, but were unsuccessful. These transactions flooded a system known as the forwarder queue, causing the memory used by this queue to grow without limits. The transactions that were encoded into blocks were resource-heavy to process. The combination of the unbounded growth of the forwarder queues and resource-heavy blocks caused block producers to automatically propose a number of forks. The validator processes started to run out of memory and crash, and upon restart the validators were unable to process all the proposed forks in time to catch back up with the rest of the network.

Once the situation was diagnosed, the community proposed a hard fork of the network from the last confirmed slot, which requires at least 80% of active stake to come to consensus. Over the next 14 hours, engineers from across the globe worked together to write code to mitigate the issue, and coordinate an upgrade-and-restart of the network among 1000+ validators. The validator network restored full functionality at 05:30 UTC, under 18 hours after the network stalled."

"Solana hit a roadblock on Tuesday when the network shut down due to overwhelming transaction volumes. Solana was ultimately offline for nearly 18 hours before validators were able to successfully restart the decentralized network. It’s unclear whether “full functionality” has been restored at this time. Solscan shows transactions processed less than a minute ago, as of this writing, but has displayed longer lag times over the past hour.

“Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 [[[transactions per second]]],” the statement reads. “These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and the lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking. This forking led to excessive memory consumption, causing some nodes to go offline.”"

"On September 14, the protocol suffered an error and at the time of writing, the chain stopped for a total of four hours so far, as the outage is still ongoing. “With transactions being filtered out, and failing commits, and validators need to upgrade and deploy… Will take about 24-48 hrs to fix,” the Twitter account called ‘bruce.codes’ explained."

"A error in Solana's mainnet beta prevented block confirmations. The Solana team quickly asked its validators to restart the network. The blockchain was offline for approximately six hours. Before the reboot was executed, the Solana team waited for validators representing 80% of all staked SOL tokens to reach an agreement on the state of the network."

Governance

  • As of 7-2021, there are no clear governance plans, besides SOL being used for it in the future.

Treasury

Token

Launch

  • Had a private sale on 30-7-2019 which collected $20M in funding.

Token allocation

  1. "Seed sale 16.23%
  2. Founding sale 12.92%
  3. Validator sale 5.18%
  4. Strategic sale 1.88%
  5. CoinList auction sale 1.64%
  6. Team tokens comprise 12.79% of the total token supply.
  7. Foundation tokens comprise 10.46% of the total token supply.
  8. Community tokens comprise 38.89% of the total token supply.

Utility

  • From Binance Research (23-5-2020):
  1. "Staking: Solana is in the process of enabling inflation rewards for staking the SOL token in exchange for powering and supporting the network.
  2. Transaction fees: users can use the SOL token to pay for simple token transactions and smart-contract executions on the network.
  3. Governance: the SOL token will be used in governance voting in the future."

Solana uses a delegated-Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm that incentivizes token holders to validate transactions. As part of Solana's security design, all fees will be paid in SOL and will be burnt, reducing total supply. This deflationary mechanism to SOL supply incentivizes more token holders to stake, which results in increased network security."

"Sol tokens are used to pay Solana node-clusters as a fee for processing and validating on-chain programs or transactions."

Token Details

  • From Messari (15-10-2020):

"Fractional sols are called lamports in honor of Turing Award winner Leslie Lamport. A lamport is equal to approximately 0.0000000000582 sol."

  • Lied about it's token cap. From an angry blog (27-5-2020):

“Around the last week of April 2020, News broke around the community that a third party managed to find a unlocked Solana Wallet containing 13m tokens. About 5m more than the circulating supply of 8,258,354 tokens Solana has advertised before its launch on Binance April 10th, 2020. Once Solana was exposed, the team went into full damage control mode. On April 28th 2020, Yakovenko finally issued a medium post admitting that the circulating supply was actually more than double than what they originally stated. Yakovenko went on to explain that there was a previously hidden 11,365,067 tokens, which was a loan to their contracted Market Maker. The official circulating supply count was a staggering ◎19,715,661, a number figure that they flat out avoided using until recently. They made sure to carefully word it by separating the two line items without giving the grand total.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the fix is in! On Saturday May, 23rd 2020, Solana announced on a Medium post that they only retrieved ◎3,365,067 $SOL tokens out of the ◎11,365,067 they loaned out to their Market Maker. In order to make up for the other 8m tokens they committed to burn, they released 8m tokens into circulation with out any previous announcement to the community, totally reneging on their April 28th, 2020 Medium Post. The original commitment was to remove ◎11,365,067 tokens FROM THE MARKET AND THAT THERE WAS NO PLANS TO INTRODUCE MORE TOKENS TO THE MARKET AND ANY PLANS WOULD BE PUBLICLY BEFORE HAND. Not only did they outright lie to everyone twice, they waited to a Saturday of a holiday weekend to dump the news. A strategy that PR Firms use to bury unflattering news while most people are not paying attention.

The new circulating supply total is now ◎16,350,594, not ◎8,258,354 that every $SOL holder was expecting for since late April. The Solana team ran a month long con on its community. The excuses you hear now is “It’s the best we could do.” or that “The Total Circulating Supply is in accordance to the Binance article”. They are bullshitting so badly, that their team can’t even stay on the same page when questioned about the circulating supply scam.”

  • A response, in which the team admits to not having been open about the situation can be read here (28-4-2021).

Inflation

  • The inflation rate is set to continue decreasing by 15% every epoch year until it settles at 1.5%. Has gotten down to 5.8 as of Q3.

SPL tokens

  • Has its own equivalent of ERC20 tokens. This program defines a common implementation for Fungible and Non Fungible tokens.

Stablecoin 

Coin Distribution

"Statistics show that there’s a current supply of 314,967,774 SOL in circulation. The top ten addresses hold 10.11% of the SOL supply today, while the largest holder owns 1.58% of the SOL in circulation. The top 20 SOL wallets possess 15.77%, the top 50 hold 26.82%, and the top 100 solana (SOL) wallets hold 34.64% of all the SOL in existence. The number of wallets that hold a fraction of SOL or more today is 8,383,421 holders."

"48% of the total token supply went to VCs and insiders."

"Solana staking is seemingly well distributed — The top 20 validators account for 130M SOL, but after that, the validator share is fairly evenly distributed among the remaining 546 addresses."

Tech

  • Whitepaper can be found here (as of 15-10-2020).
  • Code can be viewed here. "According to Electric Capital's 2022 Developer report, more than 2,000 developers were building on Solana in 2022 — second in developer activity only to the Ethereum ecosystem and up 83% from 2021. The entire Solana ecosystem has seen a 16x growth in full-time developers since 2018."
  • Consensus mechanism: DPoS
  • Algorithm: Proof-of-History
  • Virtual Machine: Sealevel
  • Solana currently has two clients: the original Solana Labs client and an MEV-optimized fork by Jito Labs (11-1-2024). Currently, 48% of stake is running the Jito client, up 51% QoQ and 534% YoY (as of 7-2024, it has ~80%). There are two upcoming clients being written from scratch: Firedancer and Sig. Light client TinyDancer is also in active development. A forked validator client called Agave is being built by execs & engineers from Solana Labs under the company Anza (30-1-2024).

Development languages

  • Solana will be built with a LLVM front end, which means that any language supported by LLVM will be available to developers. The full suite of supported languages will be rolled out progressively, starting with C and C++. However, Rust will be the flagship language for Solana smart contract development.
  • Move is also possible (13-10-2020). Is starting to be worked on, but probably a year out (4-9-2022).
  • Solanalabs announced (19-7-2023) Solang, a compiler enabling developers to write smart contracts on Solana in Solidity.
  • Sig is a Solana validator implementation written in Zig, a low-level programming language by Syndica (20-7-2023).

Transaction Details

  • Capacity (TPS):  Its testnet consisted of a network of 200 physically distinct nodes which support a sustained throughput of more than 50,000 TPS. “Solana is measured to have approximately 60,000 transactions per second, with 400ms block times.” According to realtps it has 343 (31-10-2022).
  • Solana founders have stated that throughput could reach several hundred thousand TPS in the future with hardware and software improvements. During a performance demo (6-6-2023), validators running Jump's Firedancer were able to process more than 1 million transactions per second (TPS).
  • From Rekt (13-9-2021):

"The network claims to have a potential capacity of 50,000 TPS, though at present the Solana Beach dashboard shows much lower numbers. With an average block time at 0.56s over a one hour period, and approximately 2,000 transactions per second, the throughput is currently much higher than that of the Ethereum network, which has around 30 TPS.

However, on Solana, the majority of these transactions come from the validation network itself, as the design requires that all validation communications have to pass through mainnet."

 How it works

  • Helius has written a Solana Excecutive Overview, which can be read here (7-2024).
  • According to its website, Solana is built on top of 8 building blocks, which they call 'innovations':
  1. "Proof of History (PoH); a clock before consensus
  2. Tower BFT; a PoH-optimized verson of PBFT
  3. Turbine; a block propagation protocol
  4. Gulf Stream; mempool-less transaction forwarding protocol
  5. Sealevel; world's first parallel smart contracts run-time
  6. Pipeline; transaction processing unit for validation
  7. Cloudbreak; horizontally-scaled accounts database
  8. Archivers; distributed ledger storage"

"The protocol’s architecture combines Proof-of-History (PoH) and a customized Avalanche communication design to scale transaction throughput and time to finality (i.e., settlement time). At a high level, PoH enables network nodes to trust the submission time and order of transactions without needing to correspond with other nodes, and Avalanche is a method of organizing data flow through a network of validators. This transaction communication system works independently of Solana’s Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism but is designed to help consensus participants (validators) process the ledger more efficiently."

  • Solana uses Proof of Stake (PoS) as its consensus mechanism. PoH allows Solana nodes to process the ledger optimistically, i.e. in terms of the CAP theorem Solana is an availability preferring system, and by leveraging validator vote lockouts that increase exponentially in time, Solana’s economic finality grows probabilistically with ledger depth.
  • Is openly against scaling through sharding: "We don’t believe in compromising security. Solana takes existing blockchain architecture and algorithms and improves on them instead of overlaying additional complexities such as sharding. We believe in it so much that we named our podcast #nosharding." 

"A high-throughput blockchain that relies on a concept called optimistic concurrency control, which assumes that transactions generally don’t conflict with each other. The project describes several other key features of its technology on Medium."

Proof of History

"In short: communication overhead. Since Proof of History (PoH) provides a trustless sense of time and ordering of messages, network nodes can trust the relative message times that they receive in the PoH broadcast without having to communicate with all the other nodes in the network. For many distributed networks, the time to finality (the guarantee that past transactions on a digital ledger are legitimate and will not change) scales as the square or even the cube of the number of nodes in the system due to the necessity to confer with other network participants on message ordering.

Because of our Proof of History implementation and our Avalanche communication design, Solana blockchain’s time to finality scales with the logarithm of the number of nodes. This translates into a high throughput network that can support tens of thousands of nodes, while retaining sub-second confirmation times."

Avalanche:

"Avalanche is a method of organising the network data flow. The generator (leader) is at the top of the pyramid, with validators at each level below it. And for every additional level below the generator, the number of validators doubles.

This enables Solana to scale their finality times logarithmically or log(n), where ‘n’ is the number of nodes. Typically, finality times on traditional gossip protocols scale at n squared, which means the finality times suffer exponentially as nodes increase on the network. However with Avalanche, the opposite occurs on Solana, thus supporting greater decentralization of nodes, while maintaining sub-second finality times."

Proof of Replication (PoRep):

"Proof of Replication (PoRep) is a proof of storage protocol. And in our blockchain, it’s used for increasing availability, making it unnecessary for all nodes in the entire network to store the full ledger. It achieves this by ensuring that each bit of data has been replicated to it’s own uniquely dedicated physical storage node(s).

In practical terms, it essentially allows the network to prove that a node you don’t trust is using its resources to store a segment of the ledger. This generates a torrent like network, where no single node is holding the full ledger, but a copy is always available on demand."

On ASIC's while using Proof-of-History

"Isn’t every CPU different, and some much faster then others? How do you actually trust that “time” as it’s generated by our SHA256 loop is accurate?

This topic deserves its own article, but long story short is that we don’t much care if some CPUs are faster then others, and if an ASIC can be faster then the CPUs available to the network. The most important thing is that there is a finite bound on how much faster an ASIC can get.

We are using SHA256, and thanks to Bitcoin there has been significant research in making this cryptographic hash function fast. This function is impossible to speed up by using a larger die area, like a Look Up Table, or unrolling it without impact to clock speed. Both Intel and AMD are releasing consumer chips that can do a full round of SHA256 in 1.75 cycles.

Because of this, we have pretty good certainty that a custom ASIC will not be 100x faster, let alone 1000x, and most likely will be within 30% of what is available to the network. We can construct protocols that exploit this bound and only allow an attacker a very limited, easily detected and short lived opportunity for a denial of service attack."

Fees

Upgrades

"Solana has successfully implemented its 1.16 upgrade, introducing several new features, including improved runtime support for zero-knowledge proofs and enhancements for validators. However, the highlight of this upgrade is the “confidential transfers,” a feature that allows fully encrypted transactions for SPL tokens, bolstering user privacy."

  • Is working on 3 upgrades, QUIC, Fee markets and Stake-weighted QoS (22-8-2022).

Staking

  • 71.5% of the SOL supply eligible to be staked is staked (11-1-2024). Note that tokens held by Solana Labs or the Foundation are not all counted as circulating despite not being locked. Staked SOL fell 19 million QoQ (5%), largely driven by the FTX Estate unstaking around 20 million SOL.
  • From its website (15-10-2020):

"Solana’s networks are permissionless and therefore anyone can begin running a validator node at any time. Registration and KYC are only required to receive compensation from the Solana Foundation until a time when inflation and network rewards might be enabled. Please note that U.S. entities and individuals are not eligible to receive compensation at this time."

"Validator Yield Throttling — Yield throttling is the programmatic reduction of staking rewards (validator-level yield) for all stake above a threshold stake amount which is determined by a target amount of censorship resistance on the network."

Validator Stats

  • Validator numbers have gone down from a high of 2020 in Q4 2023 down to 1373 validators as of Q3 2024.
  • From a commissioned Messari report (11-1-2024):

"71.5% of the SOL supply eligible to be staked is staked. Note that tokens held by Solana Labs or the Foundation are not all counted as circulating despite not being locked. Staked SOL fell 19 million QoQ (5%), largely driven by the FTX Estate unstaking around 20 million SOL. Solana network’s 2,020 total validators are hosted in 34 countries, up 21% YoY. "

"Staking on the network was stable through Q2, while the average number of validators decreased by 21.1% QoQ."

  • From a commissioned Messari report (23-4-2023):

"Total stake and average engaged stake (total stake divided by total supply) remained stable. At the same time, the average number of validators grew 18.9% QoQ."

"It managed to do this while maintaining decentralisation, with 1972 validators and a strong Nakamoto Coefficient compared to other PoS chains. That said, it seems many of these validators would be unprofitable if not for Solana foundation subsidies, so it remains to be seen what this looks like once the subsidies end."

  • 77% of SOL is staked (2-10-2021).
  • From Our Network (15-5-2021): "There are now over 600 validator nodes in the network."
  • According to Our Network (2-4-2021), Solana has 566 validators now (5-4-2021); "Total stake on Solana has reached 300M SOL. At the current price of $19.10 this equals ~$5.7B staked. 56M of stake is set at a 100% commission and 18M at zero. The vast majority of stake is concentrated at a 5-10% commission for the validator."
  • Says it has 179 validators (15-10-2020). Update (2-1-2021): over 350.
  • Chorus One have been (21-2-2020) building a high availability validator for Solana StrongGate with funding from the Solana team.

Scaling

"Light Protocol and Helius Labs announced the launch of ZK compression on Solana. ZK compression allows Solana’s state to scale by storing transaction data on Solana’s ledger (inactive state) and only posting proofs to its active state. This is particularly important because Solana charges rent on the amount of data posted onchain and ZK compression is expected to improve cost efficiency by 160 to 5,000 times. ZK compression may be thought of as a mix of a Layer-2 and a stateless client for Solana."

  • From Nitro's Twitter (15-9-2022):

"Nitro is building an L2 for Solana that combines Solana’s powerful execution environment and developer community with the thriving Cosmos and IBC ecosystem. Nitro will serve as the gateway between #Solana and #Cosmos. Nitro will feature SVM compatibility that enables developers to easily launch their Solana dApps on Nitro and access the broader Cosmos and IBC ecosystem. Apps built on Nitro can leverage the SVM for high performance while gaining the interoperability that is native to IBC."

Different Implementations

  • Firedancer would be the network's third (6-2023) alongside the Solana Labs client and Jito-Solana client.
  • Jump Crypto announced (17-8-2022) it will build a new, open-source validator client for Solana, independent from the one built by Solana Labs. This ambitious plan is called Firedancer and is set to take up to 24 months to complete. The new validator will be built using the C++ programming language and will be overseen by Kevin Bowers, Jump Trading’s Chief Science Officer. This is in contrast to the original Solana client that’s written in Rust.

Interoperability

  • From Block Bytes (2-3-2023):

"Customizable rollup provider Eclipse is launching a Polygon/Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) scaling solution, allowing applications to be compatible with Polygon. The SVM will be powered by Eclipse and can run smart contracts and tooling compatible with Solana.

Through the launch, decentralized applications (dApps) built for the Solana blockchain can migrate or become multichain through the Polygon SVM, which can open the doors for both communities using and building on different blockchains."

"Solana has launched Wormhole, a bridge platform that connects to Ethereum and adds support for ETH and ERC-20 tokens."

  • Wormhole, which connects Terra, Ethereum, BSC and Solana has gone live (10-8-2021):

"Wormhole’s 19 validators check if an asset is locked up on Chain A so that a copy of it can move freely on Chain B."

Other Details 

Oracle Method

"Together with Chainlink, Solana intends to develop a high frequency Oracle that can be used for trading binary options. One that is capable of price updates every 400ms with Solana’s architecture, with developers building DeFi assets and marketplaces using this platform."

  • Chainlink price oracles went live ( 26-8-2021). Data streams went live, with GMX as launch partner (29-10-2024).
  • The state of Solana's oracles as of 9-2021 can be read here.
  • Pyth is used as an oracle system on Solana, it created some issues when it released bad pricing data, effecting several Solana programs (22-9-2021).

Privacy Method

"Solana has successfully implemented its 1.16 upgrade, introducing several new features, including improved runtime support for zero-knowledge proofs and enhancements for validators. However, the highlight of this upgrade is the “confidential transfers,” a feature that allows fully encrypted transactions for SPL tokens, bolstering user privacy. While transactions remain private, wallet addresses are still publicly visible on the blockchain."

"Solana’s networks are permissionless and therefore anyone can begin running a validator node at any time. Registration and KYC are only required to receive compensation from the Solana Foundation until a time when inflation and network rewards might be enabled. Please note that U.S. entities and individuals are not eligible to receive compensation at this time."

Their Other Projects

Blinks

"Dialect introduced the Blinks extension and the Actions stack on Solana. Blinks uses a browser extension to unfurl links into actionable cards across the Internet. To minimize risk for the users, Blinks will initially only work on X (formerly Twitter) and from only a few top Solana applications like Jupiter, Tensor, Sanctum, and Realms. It has massive long-term potential to improve ease of use and reduce friction during onboarding."

Saga

"Solana Labs has announced an Android-based software kit for developing mobile Web3 apps. The firm will also release its own smartphone called Saga, which will be released in 2023."

Stores

  • A Solana-themed store is set to open its doors in New York City. Called Solana Spaces, the new store is located in Hudson Yards and is being launched in collaboration with the Solana Foundation (28-7-2022).

Roadmap

  • Can be found [Insert link here].
  • A roadmap can be read (16-10-2020) on Binance Research, which claims all milestones were on time. However, Solana already announced it would have a mainnet ready before the end of 2018 and then the end of 2019, so it has had delays.
  • Wants to get into cloud storage and web services in the future.

Revenue

  • From Onchain Times (16-7-2024):

"Solana today ranks fourth in revenue-generation at $135M in annualized revenues YTD. This is derived as the share of transaction fees that users pay to validators for using the network. If we account for token issuance (costs) however, Solana is seemingly unprofitable, having paid out $311M in token incentives for just the last 30 days."

  • Revenue shot up to 13.7M in Q4 2024, as did SOL price. When looking at actual SOL revenue it went up from 185.4K to 221.4K, still nice but 19.4% instead of the 239.6% in $ terms, indicating SOL stakers can be happy, but revenue is coming from speculation mostly, not a huge boost in activity. Update: revenue in Q1 2024 went up to $98.8M!
  • According to a commissioned Messari report, Solana has had between $3.4M-4.8 in revenue in the last year per quarter (18-10-2023).
  • The revenue directed to the protocol (in SOL) has increased ~42% compared to the previous year due to priority fees (21-9-2023).
  • During the first 2 quarters of 2023 the average daily fees were around 4000 SOL (~$80k) with spikes during airdrops and such. 50% of fees get burned.

Usage

  • Pyth's oracle tx as % of total Solana tx has fallen from 50% (subsidized) to 6% after Pyth moved to a pull-model.
  • From a commissioned Messari report 23-4-2023):

"Marinade Finance, Lido, Jito, and JPool grew TVL by 100% or more during the quarter and finished in the top 20 by TVL. These LSDs finished Q1 with ~$205 million in TVL collectively, nearly matching Solana’s entire non-LSD DeFi ecosystem of ~$300 million. A healthy distribution of TVL across applications consistently exists on Solana, with Orca and Raydium hosting only 24% of the total non-LSD TVL on Solana."

"While TVL has steadily contracted from $7b at January 2022 to $1b at November 2022 (85% decline) and daily active addresses fell from a peak of ~4m in May 2022 to ~500k in November 2022 (~88% decline), Solana has seen much gentler declines in NFT activity, from both a daily active user and a daily volume perspective over 2H 2022. Solana NFT marketplaces saw ~5.4m SOL volume at its peak in May 2022, which declined to ~4m SOL in Sept and ~3m SOL in Oct 2022,(~25% and ~45% decline vs. May volumes). Daily Active Users have declined from 1.4m in May 2022 to 1.2m in Sept and 1.1m in Oct, (~12% and ~20% decline vs. May volume)."

  • Most of Solana's TVL turned out to be double counted and part of a big scheme. From Coindesk (5-8-2022):

"Coding as 11 purportedly independent developers, Ian, a 20-something computer wiz from Texas, created a vast web of interlocking DeFi protocols that projected billions of dollars of double-counted value onto the Saber ecosystem. That temporarily inflated the total value locked (TVL) on Solana, as the network was racing toward its zenith last November.

“I devised a scheme to maximize Solana’s TVL: I would build protocols that stack on top of each other, such that a dollar could be counted several times,” Ian wrote in a never-published blog post reviewed by CoinDesk. The blog post was prepared on March 26, three days after Cashio, one of Ian’s secretly built protocols, lost $52 million in a hack.

Ian’s ploy worked for a while. By his count, Saber and Sunny comprised $7.5 billion of Solana’s $10.5 billion TVL at their peak. (Billions of those dollars were double-counted between his two protocols.) In public, Ian and his brother Dylan called their anonymous personas “friends,” or “friends of friends.” Their “Ship Capital” coder club was laying the “blueprints for my ideal DeFi ecosystem,” Ian wrote in the unpublished blog. The Macalinaos in May published “Saber Public Goods” to propagate the “Saber team’s” prolific code across Solana. Eight of Ian’s 11 secret projects appear there. Their disclosure is mum on the anons and their master. Sunny and Cashio, whose tokens imploded, don’t show up, either."

  • From Our Network (26-2-2022):

"Solana’s unique daily active signers (a good proxy for users) have increased by ~300% since the last update in late September. Unique signers peaked at 299k in late January, but tapered off a bit to 232k after the network’s most recent bout with degraded performance. The Solana NFT market exploded into relevance in the second half of 2021, and carried that momentum into 2022 with a market cap just shy of $1b and 7-day volume of $46m. Since Metaplex protocol went live on Solana, cumulative unique NFT owners grew from 28k to almost 2.5m today."

  • From Our Network (2-10-2021):

"A series of new Solana DeFi protocols have risen to prominence over the last few months, with TVL market leaders Saber ($2.83B), Sunny Aggregator ($2.36B), Raydium ($1.37B), and Orca ($711M) lifting the ecosystem’s collective TVL to $8.12B."

"TVL on Solana hit $1.6B earlier this week, on the back of massive growth (+700%) since the beginning of April. Leading the charge was Raydium, which peaked at above $1B in TVL — and newer dapps are showing even more rapid growth trajectories. Solfarm, a yield aggregator, hit $100MM in TVL within days of launch."

  • From their 2020 year end review (2-1-2021):

"Over 100 project integrations spanning DeFi, Blockchain Gaming, and Web3 verticals, 8.3 billion transactions on-chain and counting, 4.9 million unique SOL wallets, 600,000+ global advocates and community members."

Projects that use or built on it

  • Solana is becoming a hub for DePIN applications, hosting Helium, Hivemapper, Render, Teleport, and GenesysGo, among others (11-1-2024).
  • As of 15-10-2020 it had 14 projects building on it, according to its own website.
  • Around 80 projects (14-4-2021) build on Solana (some are multi-chain). You can check the Solasystem here (3-5-2012).
  • Akash; "Akash is integrating (15-10-2020) their serverless supercloud infrastructure into Solana to allow users to easily deploy powerful and low cost servers to run nodes or to scale their application."
  • Anchor; "Anchor is a savings protocol that aims (15-10-2020) to produce a simple and convenient savings product with broad appeal to everyday users."
  • Arweave; "Arweave and Solana partnered (15-10-2020) to provide a decentralised permanent data storage solution of ledger data, ensuring the data can be always retrieved as required."
    • On 22-9-2024, Filecoin announced it had started Old Faithful, with which Solana's ledger was being stored on Filecoin.
  • Audio; From CoinDesk (29-10-2020):

"Audius announced Thursday it will migrate its content management system over to Solana’s high-speed blockchain from an Ethereum sidechain operated by the POA Network that runs on a set of trusted validators. Staking and governance functionality will remain on Ethereum. Audius expects the migration to happen in three phases, wrapping up in the second quarter of 2021." Audius is being backed by the Multicoin, which also backs Solana and FTX.

  • BadgerDAO; planning to deploy (17-3-2021)
  • Big Data Protocol (BDP); (3-2021) had Alameda whale farming a couple of days before dumping again and then getting a bug.
  • Bonfida; a DEX (15-12-2020).
  • Civic; "Civic has partnered (15-10-2020) with Solana to integrate their decentralised identity solution. The solution is targeted at providing low-cost, scalable identity management in emerging economies that lack the infrastructure."
  • Chainlink, is developing an oracle on top of Solana (15-10-2020).
  • Cope; From TheTie (25-5-2021): "Cope is a project created by legendary dev Cyrii, and it enables traders to rank their performance and view other traders’ performance in an index based on their Cope score. Cope won the Community Choice Prize in the Solana x Serum DeFi Hackathon, voted by the community."
  • dFuse; "dFuse is implementing (15-10-2020) their API solution into Solana to allow developers to build and maintain performant applications with ease on top of the protocol."
  • DODO; has plans to launch on Solana (16-6-2021).
  • Hummingbot; "Hummingbot is working together (15-10-2020) with Solana to integrate their Liquidity Mining solution so that miners/traders can earn fees by providing liquidity to Solana across various exchanges."
  • Hxro
  • FTX. From Crypto Briefing (27-7-2020):

"FTX is building a DEX, Serum, on the Solana blockchain with the help of partners like Kyber Network and Multicoin Capital. Serum is cross-chain comptaible, giving it access to liquidity on DeFi dApps on Ethereum. The DEX will run on a central limit orderbook, but will still operate in a trustless manner."

  • Kin moved to Solana from it's own fork of Stellar (22-5-2020). "The Solana Foundation would actually pay the Kin Foundation for making this move, however, awarding it with up to 1% of the supply of SOL (roughly $6 million at today’s prices), with 0.1% unlocking for each new 1 million active users that join over a 24-month period. "
  • LunaDEX; officially launched on Solana (18-12-2020).
  • Magic; "Magic is integrating (15-10-2020) their SDK into Solana to provide easy-to-use alternatives to web3 wallets (i.e. MetaMask) for end-users and developers."
  • Magic Eden; NFT marketplace
  • Mango Markets; decentralized trading platform that enables cross-margin trading.
  • The Media Network (2-1-2021).
  • Orca; DEX
  • Oxygen, a DeFi prime brokerage protocol built on Serum got announced (18-12-2020).
  • Predix (2-1-2021).
  • Pocket; "Pocket will be integrating (15-10-2020) with Solana to help enable primitives for a new, censorship-resistant web3 stack by providing 100% redundant infrastructure for users."
  • Raydium; DEX
  • Realms is the leading platform on Solana for creating DAOs and allowing them to manage members, governance, and treasuries. Realms created 140 DAOs through Q1 2023.
  • Saber; stableswap and wrapped assets exchange on Solana, turned out to be a huge double counting scheme contribution to most of Solana's "TVL" (8-2022).
  • SenSwap (2-1-2021).
  • Serum Swap AMM
  • Solanaroll (2-1-2021).
  • Solend: From Our Network (26-2-2022):

"Solend is an algorithmic, decentralized protocol for lending and borrowing on Solana, with over $1b in deposits. Solend's TVL has been relatively steady since the new year, despite large drawdowns in crypto prices. Currently it sits at $600m. When charted against SOL, however, Solend's TVL is at an ATH."

"The Torus Network is supported by a collective of validator nodes run by Binance, Ethersacne, ENS, Tendermint, and other ecosystem stakeholders. The solution they offer is blockchain agnostic since they believe an improved developer experience/user experience should be accessible for everyone.

The collaboration with Solana will focus on bringing the web OAuth user onboarding experience to all developers looking to build Solana applications, giving them access to seamless key management, where they have full control over their login user onboarding wallet system to suit their users’ needs."

Competition

  • Other L1 protocols and mainly Eth-killers.

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Scalable as one of its core tenants. Touting L1 scaling.
  • From Binance Research (23-5-2020):

"Inexpensive execution: transactions costs on the network are estimated to cost 10 USD for 1 million transactions."

"Solana attracted a strong ecosystem of projects and $1.5B TVL, placing it first amongst non-EVM compatible chains by TVL. The developer experience, which was initially perceived to be difficult, has meaningfully improved after the introduction of SeaLevel framework Anchor. Solana has also managed to grow a meaningful and differentiated developer ecosystem, which we believe is arguably top 3 in the space alongside Ethereum and Cosmos. This has also resulted in a differentiated culture, reflected in developers with more traditional/financial backgrounds and a thriving NFT ecosystem."

Cons

  • Goes down often, in 2024 Vaneck revealed that there is speculation around the cause of the latest Solana outage, which stopped its blockchain by five hours. Sigel explained that the bug that created this service interruption was related to the Berkley Packet Filter (BPF) and that it might have been manually triggered.
  • Another recap on its shady beginnings can be read here.
  • Due to most of Solana's remaining TVL being intertwined with Serum, it took a big hit (70% of TVL was gone) when Serum's founding company FTX/Alameda went down in November, 2022. Not only Serum related projects, but also wrapped tokens within Solana got hit hard, since solETH and solBTC were issued by FTX.
  • Most of Solana's TVL turned out to be double counted and part of a big scheme. From Coindesk (5-8-2022):

"Coding as 11 purportedly independent developers, Ian, a 20-something computer wiz from Texas, created a vast web of interlocking DeFi protocols that projected billions of dollars of double-counted value onto the Saber ecosystem. That temporarily inflated the total value locked (TVL) on Solana, as the network was racing toward its zenith last November.

“I devised a scheme to maximize Solana’s TVL: I would build protocols that stack on top of each other, such that a dollar could be counted several times,” Ian wrote in a never-published blog post reviewed by CoinDesk. The blog post was prepared on March 26, three days after Cashio, one of Ian’s secretly built protocols, lost $52 million in a hack.

Ian’s ploy worked for a while. By his count, Saber and Sunny comprised $7.5 billion of Solana’s $10.5 billion TVL at their peak. (Billions of those dollars were double-counted between his two protocols.) In public, Ian and his brother Dylan called their anonymous personas “friends,” or “friends of friends.” Their “Ship Capital” coder club was laying the “blueprints for my ideal DeFi ecosystem,” Ian wrote in the unpublished blog. The Macalinaos in May published “Saber Public Goods” to propagate the “Saber team’s” prolific code across Solana. Eight of Ian’s 11 secret projects appear there. Their disclosure is mum on the anons and their master. Sunny and Cashio, whose tokens imploded, don’t show up, either."

  • Scored 25% on DeFi Safety (6-2022), which was almost the lowest score among chains. For more info, check the Audits section at the top of this page.
  • Had 9 chain halts (6-2022) through 2021/2022. For more info, check the Bugs/Exploits section at the top of this page.
  • Lied (27-5-2020) about it's supply being twice as small as actually was the case. Which is ironic, since it has 'transparency' reports.

Team, Funding, partners

Team

  • "comprised of pioneering technologists from Qualcomm, Intel, Netscape, and Google"
  • According to their website (15-10-2020) some of the team members also come from Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Dropbox, General Catalyst, Omada and Cern.
  • Anatoly Yakovenko; CEO "Anatoly is the creator of Solana. He led development of operating systems at Qualcomm, distributed systems at Mesosphere, and compression at Dropbox. He holds 2 patents for high performance Operating Systems protocols, was a core kernel developer for BREW which powered every CDMA flip phone (100m+ devices), and led development of tech that made Project Tango (VR/AR) possible on Qualcomm phones."
  • Greg Fitzgerald; CTO, "Greg is the principal architect of Solana. Formerly of Qualcomm's Office of the Chief Scientist, Greg has explored the full landscape of embedded systems. He created a bidirectional RPC bridge between C and Lua for the BREW operating system, helped launch the ARM backend for the LLVM compiler toolchain, and published a variety of open source projects including a streaming LLVM optimizer in Haskell, license analysis tooling in Python, and a reactive web framework in TypeScript. If you have time to burn, ask him "Why Rust?" We dare you."
  • Raj Gokal; COO "Raj leads operations, product, and finance. He has spent 10 years in product management and finance. He was a venture investor at General Catalyst, started the consumer medical device company Sano which attracted over $20m in investment, and led product management at Omada Health as it grew tenfold."
  • Eric Williams; Chief Scientist, "Eric heads data science and token economics. He studied particle physics at Berkeley and received his PhD from Columbia while Higgs hunting at CERN. He completed a postdoc in Medical Physics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and later led data science at Omada Health."
  • Andrew Hyde; Community
  • Chorus One have been (21-2-2020) building a high availability validator for Solana StrongGate with funding from the Solana team.
  • Hsin-Ju Chuang; former head of growth
  • Tamar Menteshashvili
  • Anza; a collective of Solana-focused developers (7-4-2024).

Funding

  • Orca; Solana Capital was part of the $18M Series A (22-9-2021).
  • According to the balance sheet of Alameda they had bought $1.65M of 'restricted purchase tokens'. According to another source, these tokens were $160M worth before the crash (10-12-2022).
  • From Decrypt (15-11-2022):

"In a blog post, the Solana Foundation said that it had approximately $1 million worth of cash or equivalent assets on FTX as of November 6, before the site stopped processing customer withdrawals. Those assets are now stuck on the platform, pending the results of FTX’s bankruptcy proceedings. The Foundation said that it amounts to less than 1% of its funds. Furthermore, the Solana Foundation holds approximately 3.24 million shares of FTX Trading LTD common stock, along with about 3.43 million FTT tokens and 134.54 million SRM tokens from decentralized exchange (DEX), Project Serum.

Solana Labs, the company that represents the founders of and core contributors to the Solana network, also sold over 7.56 million SOL (about $106 million worth) to Alameda Research. All of those tokens will unlock for trading in 2025."

  • Regarding the FTX blow up, the founder tweeted (9-11-2022):

"Solana Labs, a US corp, didn’t have any assets on ftx.com, so we still have tons of runway, and luckily still a small team. Runway is in $, ~30 months at current burn. Learned our lessons in 2018. Had a small amount [on FTX US] that was withdrawn without any issues."

"As of writing, Solana has used approximately 11.79MM USD (46.12%) of token sale funds, according to the allocations below:

  1. 3.00% Partnerships.
  2. 3.00% Marketing.
  3. 35.00% Team.
  4. 35.00% Development.
  5. 12.00% Professional Services & Legal.
  6. 3.00% Taxes.
  7. 6.00% Office Rent.
  8. 3.00% Others.

Community tokens are held by the Swiss Foundation, which is run by an independent board. This token pool is used for bounties, incentives programs, marketing, and grants. Tokens held by the Foundation are held in Coinbase Custody, on hardware wallets, and in cold storage. The team stores all of its funds in an USD bank account."

"Exchanges OKEx and MXC will be investing $40M to help catalyze the development of a DeFi ecosystem on Solana."

"Five strategic investment funds totaling $100 million have launched in a bid to accelerate the growth and development of key projects in Solana’s blockchain ecosystem. The funds are each bringing $20 million in investment to boost growth and development for Solana in the Chinese region. Three funds from crypto exchange Huobi; Gate.io’s investment arm, Gate Labs; and crypto investment firm NGC Ventures have each contributed $20 million."

"Solana Labs has raised $314 million in a token sale from Andresseen Horowitz and Polychain Capital led the private token sale with participation from CMS Holdings, Coinfund, ParaFi and Alameda Research. Blockchange Ventures, CoinShares, Collab Currency, Memetic Capital, Sino Global Capital and Jump Trading also joined the round."

"Since March, ecosystem funds have deployed over $3,900,000 in 33 projects building on Solana"

"Solana Ventures, Forte, and Griffin Gaming Partners have established a $150 million investment fund for games being built on Solana. Last month, Solana Ventures teamed with FTX and Lightspeed on a separate $100 million Web3 gaming co-investment fund."

  • From Bloomberg (8-6-2022):

"Solana Ventures and the Solana Foundation said Tuesday that they’ve launched a $100 million investment and grant fund to support crypto projects in South Korea."

Partners

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