# Solana – ICO Review

Disclaimer: the purpose of the article is to provide the information, not to make anyone invest. Think wisely and check all the details should you consider investing, this will save you and your kids from being hungry in the future. Beware of the scam! I'm a cryptointhusiast impressed by the blochain beauty and the number of solution it is going to provide to us with in the future. Some of them will be published here.
The key problem of decentralized cryptocurrencies is scalability. Back in times of Ethereum or Bitcoin release, they were used by only cryptoenthusiasts willing to try something new out. Throughput back then was more than enough back in time, but not anymore since hype level attracted millions of people.
Developers make desperate attempts to apply fixes to the existing cryptosystems to make them work faster. The main concern however is that it can result in centralization or the security problem. Instead of fixing what is already broken, Solana developers have decided to create brand new superfast solution. They indeed have the insight into the current problem cryptomarked is experiencing that enables them to foreseen some of the things Satoshi Nakamoto has overlooked back to 2008. Let have a look at what exactly they have to offer to the community.

How is it going to work?

To start with, let us just mention that developers claim to achieve 710k transactions per second. I can almost feel the tension from Visa that is 11 times slower. Looks impressive, how they are going to make this happen?
Firstly, they will use two types of consensus. The first is Proof of Stake, which is not something new to us, whereas the second one is quite peculiar. The name of the new consensus algorithm is Proof of History. They are going to use precise inner system time source to give each transaction a time signature and write it down to blockchain. One of the nodes becomes a Leader, elected to line up the transactions according to the time signature. This should help the Verifying nodes to process them faster and to increase the throughput drastically.
Perhaps, you don’t understand what is Proof of Stake for then? Well, it will be used to vote for the leader, to confirm the sequence of transactions created by the leader and… to punish the rule breakers. The system will generate invalid blocks now and then to find out the nodes confirming them to give them a penalty for that. This is the way their security system works.
Secondly, they will use new data transmission algorithm named Avalanche. To make the things short, the more nodes are available, the less the processing time of each transaction is. This means that the throughput should increase as the number of users is going up. Should the number of nodes reach 10 000 and more, the processing time of each transaction will be less than 500 millisecond. At least according to the theoretical layout in their White Paper.
Thirdly, they are going to use the hardware progress to increase the scalability.As the number of cores in GPU and CPU is growing, the PC should be able to process more and more smart contracts and transactions. Every two years the throughput will be doubled by only that.
To give the developers ability to migrate from another blockchains, Solana will support all of programming languages, supported by LLVM. Is Vitalik Buterin concerned now to launch sharding faster?
International team members presumably know each other for a while since most of them have been working at Qualcomm for several years. There are some other well-known industry giants that the team members worked for, such as Dropbox, Intel and Google.

Throughput tests

We shall probably not hear from them any time soon, but we do. This has happened for two reasons: they have uploaded working prototype to GitHub already and executed some throughput tests. The very first test they made with only one node gave the result of 35k per second. In several months’ time they have conducted multimode test to achieve 400k per second in peak (250k average, still impressive though). The public testnet should be launched somewhere in July-September, we shall see if we can bring Solana down!
There is quite a hype around the project, the number of their Telegram followers increased to 32k for only two months. Token sale should happen in the beginning of 2018, meaning those interested have some time to sell their properties.