Working of Solana Blockchain

Posted by Shrikant Sharma on May 9th, 2022

Solana enables the development of user-friendly applications. It can scale up to 100,000 transactions per second. Solana uses the Proof-of-History method and allows the users to create historical records provided a transaction occurs in a specific time period.

The algorithm is a high frequency verifiable delay function that requires a series of steps. In Solana blockchain development the transactions that are evaluated are given a unique hash and an account. The account works like a time-stamp and gives information about when a transaction occurred.

The nodes on the Solana network keep track of the ordering of events by using a cryptographic clock. The transactions are grouped together in blocks. Solana lets the transactions come as an input to the leader on the blockchain.

The leader node executes the transaction on the current state of the blockchain. They then publish the transactions with signatures and the final stage of the transaction is passed to the verifiers.

Verifiers execute the published transaction on the copies of their state before publishing their signatures of state if the transaction is confirmed. Published confirmations on the Solana network act as votes for the consensus algorithm.

How does the Solana network function?

Solana uses a set of computers working together to verify the output of the programs submitted by the users, called ‘Clusters’. Clusters keep the record of events which cannot be changed as they are generated by the programs deployed on Solana.

Solana is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain and aims to configure a network of decentralised nodes. This is done in a way that it matches the performance of a single node. In Solan development the global consensus algorithm Proof-of-History is used to achieve the consensus.

The Proof-of-History algorithm uses a recursive delay function to hash the incoming transactions and this makes Solana extremely fast. It agrees on time and this is achieved by asking the participants to timestamp their blocks and agree on the organisation of blocks without taking approval from the other validators.

Author Bio

The Shrikant Sharma is a blogger and likes to blog about the different computer technologies used for application development. Currently, the author has discussed Solana development.