Yakovenko says doing so allows for greater security and “censorship resistance.”Īccording to a new explainer of Solana in the outlet Decrypt, Solana has innovated other ways, too, including by forwarding transactions to validators even before the previous batch of transactions is finalized, which reportedly helps to “maximize confirmation speed and boost the number of transactions that can be handled both concurrently and in parallel.” The reason, he says, is that even with proof of stake, miners - and bots - have advance access to transaction information that allows them to exploit users, or front run transactions, because they can control transaction ordering.Įnter Yakovenko’s big idea, which he calls “proof of history,” wherein the Solana blockchain has developed a kind of synchronized clock that, in essence, assigns a timestamp for each transaction and disables the ability for miners and bots to decide the order of which transactions get recorded onto the blockchain. Still, he argues that not even proof of stake is good enough. We talked with him yesterday, and he’s certainly not rooting against Ethereum, saying it would be “devastating for the entire industry” if Ethereum weren’t able to pull off its transition to proof of stake given its mindshare and its roughly $500 billion market cap. Yakovenko is enthusiastic about the shift. Meanwhile, because more validators can participate in a network, consensus can be reached faster. Like miners, “validators” take on the role to earn more cryptocurrency, but they need far less sophisticated equipment, which opens up the opportunity to more people. Indeed, crypto watchers and developers are excited about Ethereum and other currencies that are transitioning to a new system called “proof of stake,” wherein people who agree to lock up a certain amount of their cryptocurrency are invited to activate so-called validator software that enables them to store data, process transactions, and add new blocks to the blockchain. (Bitcoin’s heavy reliance on fossil fuel is the reason Elon Musk cited earlier this week to explain why Tesla is no longer accepting Bitcoin as payment for the company’s electric cars.)Įlon Musk, Technoking of Tesla, orders a halt to bitcoin car paymentsīut there is another way. Right now, consensus is reached on various blockchains when members solve a mathematical puzzle, a mechanism that’s called “proof of work.” These miners are rewarded for their efforts with cryptocurrency, but the process takes an hour in Bitcoin’s case and a minute in the case of Ethereum, and it’s insanely energy intensive, which is why neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum has proved very scalable. His big idea centered on creating an historical record to speed along “consensus,” which is how decisions are made on blockchains, which are themselves peer-to-peer systems. But insiders think the blockchain platform is interesting for a wide variety of reasons, beginning with its amiable founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, who spent more than a dozen years as an engineer working on wireless protocols at Qualcomm and who says he had a lightbulb moment at a San Francisco cafe several years ago following two coffees and a beer. Solana isn’t widely known yet outside of the crypto community.
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