Solana
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Solana (https://solana.com/) is one of the world's fastest blockchains, capable of reaching 710 000 tx/s, which is done by the coding of the data passage times.
1. Economic model:
- Currency: ETH;
- Total supply of tokens: TBA;
- Total supply of tokens available for purchase: TBA;
- ICO hard cap: TBA;
- Terms of sale: TBA.
- Token price: TBA;
- Token allocation: Creators 18%, Reserve 8.5%, Community/ops 8.5%, Selling 25%, Mining 40%.
2. Lock-up periods: TBA.
3. Token release: TBA.
4. Activity in social networks (data captured on 10.09.2018):
Telegram EN (https://t.me/solanaio) – 31927 users in the group;
Twitter (https://twitter.com/solanalabs) – 6100 subscribers, 76 tweets.
Additionally, there is a Medium page: https://medium.com/solana-labs.
5. Investors & Partners:
Currently, there is no information about investors or partners available.
6. Roadmap:
7. The token will be based on its own network. Its purpose will be in ensuring network's security via PoS consensus.
8. Limitations for contributors: TBA.
9. WhiteList/KYC – ТВА.
10. Blockchain: YES.
11. Patents: NO.
12. MVP: the testnet has already been launched, the mainnet's launch is planned for the end of 2018.
Similar projects:
We consider that Solana looks like Thunder Token, Radix DLT, Zilliqa (as a technically strong project of high-speed blockchain).
GitHub (https://github.com/solana-labs):
There are 7 public repos in the project's GitHub page with 65000 lines of code. The major programming languages are JavaScript, Shell, Rust, TeX. The GitHub is being very well managed. The significant amount of work is being done.
The Whitepaper (https://solana.com/solana-whitepaper.pdf):
Solana is a high-performance data transferring system, which is adapted to work on GPU.
Features:
- PoH consensus (Proof of History), which is a sequence of calculations that acts as a cryptographic proof for verifying order and passage of time between events. It uses a cryptographically protected function that is written so that it's not possible to predict the outcome using only its arguments until the function is fully resolved. The function is successively launched on a single core, taking the previous output as an input. The output and the number of consequential calls are periodically saved. Following this, the value can be calculated once again and verified by external computers in a parallel manner, every segment of the sequence on a single core is being checked. Data can be timestamped into this sequence by appending the data (or a hash of some data) into the state of the function. The recording of the state, index, and data as it was appended into the sequences provides a timestamp that can guarantee that the data was created sometime before the next hash was generated in the sequence. This design also supports horizontal scaling as multiple generators can synchronize amongst each other by mixing their state into each other's sequences. Solana creates a secure distributed cryptographic protocol for the safe ordering of events, which solves major of the existing scalability issues experienced by other blockchain protocols. The solution excludes a transaction's dependency on the consensus. Moreover, it is a high-performance blockchain, which does not rely on sharding, side-chains or multi-chains;
- Algorithm for storing data in a distributed ledger - PoR (Proof of Replication), used by FileCoin. It is used to increase utility and make it unnecessary for all of the nodes in the network to store the whole layer of the data. This is achieved by ensuring that every bit of data was replicated to its own dedicated physical storage node. As a result, the network is able to prove that this trusted node uses its own recourses for storing the layer's segment. So, the natural flow, where none of the nodes hold full information layer, but a copy is always available on demand, is generated;
- PoS (Proof of Stake) consensus algorithm;
- Solana – permissionless network;
- Max performance on currently available hardware is estimated at 710000 TPS;
- Smart-contracts support. There will be availability of building smart-contracts using almost any language. Solana will be utilising Berkeley Packet Filter, which enables any languages, supported by LLVM. In addition to that, the smart-contracts mechanism will work on GPU.
- The network's layout:
The Whitepaper is of a very high-quality level with a detailed outline of all the technical aspects for the blockchain's functionality.
The team:
Anatoly Yakovenko – СЕО
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anatoly-yakovenko/ - 1216 followers
Anatoly got his Bachelor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2003.
He founded Alescere, a start-up focused on VOIP (Lead development of SIP and RTP protocol stacks and server components for a VoIP system for small businesses) in 2001.
From December 2003 to July 2016 Anatoly acted as Senior Staff Engineer Manager at Qualcomm (33 612 employees. The company's page states: 'Our inventions sparked the smartphone revolution and connected billions of people. We pioneered 3G and 4G, and today, we’re building the foundation for 5G.'). After that, he spent some time as a Software Engineer at Mesosphere and Dropbox.
Since October 2017, he is a Co-Founder of Solana.
Anatoly has 4 patents.
According to the website, 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
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregoryrfitzgerald/ - 688 followers
Along with CEO, he got his Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2003.
In addition to that, he worked with Anatoly in Qualcomm (33 612 employees. The company's page states: 'Our inventions sparked the smartphone revolution and connected billions of people. We pioneered 3G and 4G, and today, we’re building the foundation for 5G.') for 13 years, starting as Staff Software Engineer and then as Senior Staff Software Engineer.
Prior to that, Greg was working at Anatoly's venture Alescere as Systems Software Engineer.
Since March 2018 he is a Co-Founder and CTO of Solana.
According to the website, 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 an 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.
Raj Gokal – СОО
According to the website, 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.
He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton School in 2010.
Raj has solid experience in 10 companies. The description on the website has been confirmed.
Since December 2017, Raj works at Solana.
Eric Williams – Co-Founder & Chief Scientist
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sciencethedata/ - 500+ contacts
According to the website, 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 was a Vice President of Data Science & Analytics at beforementioned Omada Health.
Eric has 4 mentioned honors & awards.
Hsin-Ju Chuang – Head of Growth
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hsinjuchuang/ - 2579 followers
According to the website, Hsin-Ju heads growth and community. She was formerly the Head of Growth at Stellar. She advises several blockchain companies, and started her career building the customer base at MindTouch, an enterprise software company.
She graduated from the University of California, San Diego with major in Cognitive Science.
Stephen Akridge – 1st Principal Engineer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenakridge/ - 162 contacts
Stephen studied Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and graduated in 2006.
After that he acted as a Component Design Engineer at Intel, followed by 9 years as Staff Engineer at Qualcomm (33 612 employees. The company's page states: 'Our inventions sparked the smartphone revolution and connected billions of people. We pioneered 3G and 4G, and today, we’re building the foundation for 5G.')
According to the website, Stephen spends all his time in the codebase. He has 10 years of critical GPU optimization expertise at Qualcomm and Intel. He led the GPU backend that constantly beat Nvidia.
Mickael Vines – 2nd Principal Engineer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mivines/ - 314 contacts
He studied Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Waterloo and spend the majority of his time after graduation in 2001 within Qualcomm.
According to the website, Michael spent 14 years at Qualcomm, rapidly rising from Engineer to Senior Director. He was founder and VP of Engineering of AI startup Silk Labs. He uses foot pedals when coding. Michael holds 3 patents.
Rob Walker – 3rd Principal Engineer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-walker-365188/ - 283 contacts
He got his Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
The LinkedIn page supports the description on the website.
According to the website, Rob has a storied career, innovating in software from the 1990's at Netscape, through a 17 year career at Qualcomm leading teams spanning BREW, Component Services, DASH, and Snapdragon.
Jeffrey Levy – Operations (finance)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jfflvy/ - 968 followers
According to the website, Jeff handles operations and finance. He was previously VP of Operations at Aclima, after founding and selling CareAtHand. Previously, he had ops roles at Twitter and Google.
He has 3 honors and awards, along with 1 patent. In addition to that, he is publishing articles.
Rankaj Gard – 1 Senior Staff Engineer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pagarg/ - 204 contacts
He studied Computer Engineering at the National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra.
According to the website, Pankaj joins us after 10 years at Qualcomm, where he worked in the Innovation Center. Previously he led design and development of the LTE modem chipset for mobile devices at Motorola.
Jack May - 2nd Senior Staff Engineer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackmay/ - 384 contacts
He studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Jack is a part of the Solana team since August 2018.
According to the website, Jack joined the team after 17 years at Qualcomm where he's had his hands in many areas, starting with BREW kernel and CDMA development, to developing for and leading teams in Qualcomm's Advanced Tech Department.
Tyera Eulberg - Senior Engineer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyera-eulberg-275b225a/ - 215 followers
She got her Master's degree at the University of Colorado Boulder.
According to the website, Tyera has spent close to 10 years as a developer, most recently at PS Audio International, where she wrote software from the physical to application layer for audio products.
The team is very proficient and has vast experience in TOP hardware companies, IT enterprises, and players in mobile telecom.
Advisory board:
At the moment the project does not have any advisors mentioned.
Summary:
Solana is a very high-level project: great quality of the Whitepaper, terrific GitHub page, which is being actively worked on, the team consists of qualified professionals. The Roadmap is tight: the testnet is already live, and the mainnet launch is planned for the end of the current year. All of the above creates a positive impression about the project.
The drawbacks that worth mentioning are the absence of final tonenomics, no information about investors & partners, and empty advisory board.