Solana Blockchain - Crypto Academy / S4W4 - Homework post for @pelon53

Hola amigos. Welcome once again to the week 4, season 4 of Crypto Academy. Here I will be undertaking the homework post of our dear professor @pelon53 on Solana Blockchain.

_{Edited from Pixabay image}

Question 1. Explain in detail the PoH of Solana.

Since the advent of Blockchain, we have seen many updates and many variations of Blockchains being produced. Here, we will look extensively at the Solana framework of Proof of History (PoH) but before then, we will consider a brief overview of the Solana Blockchain itself.

Solana Blockchain at a glance

Solana is a 4th-generation web-scale Blockchain that is created to leverage on open infrastructure, and thereby providing increased speed and high scalability. The new technique that was introduced by Solana has made it stand out as one of the fastest Blockchains on the planet with an unparalleled enterprise-based scalability.

According to official report from Solana, the Solana Blockchain has over 200 physical nodes that provides support for a whopping 50,000 transactions and more in just one second. Now one may ask how the Solana Blockchain achieves this amazing feat. The answer lies in the protocol of "Proof of History" (PoH).

Overview of Solana's PoH

PoH is a protocol that functions in a series of continuum in which the output hash function (SHA-256) of the current transaction becomes the input of the subsequent function. In this way there is an interconnection between the preceding hash function and the subsequent hash function, hence the name "history". PoH of Solana is designed in a way to maximise throughput, efficiency and most importantly, output speed.

The need of PoH in the Solana framework is to include the necessary data that will consequently optimise the interaction sequence of the transactions being made in the network using the interconnection of various nodes. This sequence is automated and runs from the last output hash to the next input hash.

_{Image from gitbook}

In the above image, notice how the second transaction's hash function is a subset of the first one. Subsequently, the third input will also be a subset of the output hash function of the second one. This series continues as long as transactions are being made and processed.

Question 2. Explain at least 2 cases of use of Solana.

Quite a number of projects have been built on the blockchain of Solana but here, I will review these two:

• Raydium
• Phantom Wallet

Raydium

Raydium is arguably among the commonest use-cases of Solana. Raydium is an Automated Market Maker (AMM) and a DeFi which is built to serve as an order book in Solana Blockchain. What distinguishes Raydium from similar other platforms that provide liquidity is that, in the case of Raydium, it goes to a central-limit order. What this means is that the liquidity providers and users will be able to have access to the whole ecosystem of serum because of the central-limit order.

The users that provide liquidity in Raydium also earn rewards from the transaction fees being paid on transactions, while some selected pools are rewarded with $RAY token as a reward for staking and farming. More so, the interface of Raydium is so user-friendly that you do not need to be a genius to work your way around it.

_Raydium

The Raydium platform has other key features like. The exchange: where tokens can easily be swapped for another one for a minimal fee. The Yield Farm: where you can farm yield through fees. Then it also has Pool: where users can provide liquidity for tokens.

Raydium has a native token which is the $RAY and at the time of writing this post, it is valued at $9.47 in CoinMarketCap, with a maximum supply of 555m tokens.

Phantom Wallet

Phantom Wallet is Solana-based digital wallet that is designed to support DeFi and NFT tokens which has risen to become the most widely-used Solana wallet. Phantom Wallet works basically as a web extention which will make your browser adapted for the web3.

_{Phantom Wallet}

There are some unique features that have distinguished and made it preferred by users. Here are the features:

• Non-custodial: You absolutely own your funds and Phantom does not have access to any of them, because it is decentralized.

• Token Swap: Phantom Wallet has an in-built DEX exchange that can enable users to safely swap their tokens in the app.

• Hardware support: Phantom Wallet also has support for the inclusion of hardware wallet like ledger.

• SOL staking: Users can directly stake their SOL in Phantom Wallet to farm rewards.

Question 3. Detail and explain the SOLA token.

_{Image from Solatoken}

SOLA token is the platform token of the DiFi platform of https://solatoken.net as shown in the image above. This platform was principally created as a Solana Market Maker which has included other features too. When you hold the SOLA token, you are given the power to participate in the governance activities in the https://solatoken.net platform and you can also participate in the decision making process.

As at the time of writing this post, SOLA token has a circulating supply of 27,153,077, which is valued at $0.056 per token on Coingecko and it is traded on the popular Raydium.

_Coingecko

Here's an overview of SOLA token according to Coingecko:

• Price: $0.056
• circulating supply: 27,153,077
• Total Supply: 27,153,077
• Market Cap: $1,496,910
• Market Rank: 1844

Question 4. When did Solana Blockchain see its operations interrupted? Why? Explain

A few weeks back, precisely on September 14 2021, the Solana Blockchain experienced a blackout which lasted for an upwards of 17hours and caused a major concern in the crypto space, particularly from the investors, as over $11billion was stagnated in those number of hours according to CNBC news. Now, one may ask what caused it?

The major cause of this interruption was due to the exhaustion of resources when the Solana network transactions got to a total of 400,000 TPS (Transactions per second). When that happened, an excessive number of transactions flooded the processing queue and because there was no network priorities as to how these excessive kinds of transactions will follow, the system initiated a self-fork and stalled the entire network. This was evident in the Official Tweet of Solana.

_{From Solana official tweet}

Consequently, the self-initiated fork caused by the excessive transactions used up a large chunk of the memory space. This also caused some of the nodes of Solana network to go offline and it resulted in total interruption of the Solana Blockchain network.

At the moment, Solana Blockchain is optimized to undertake a transaction of about 65,000 in a second, and that is why it had difficulty handing that outrageous transactions.

What then hiked the transaction to 400,000 TPS? Grape Protocol had a lunch of their project and conducted an Initial Deposit Offering (IDO) on Raydium. This led to automated bots generating transactions in quick succession. These transactions then overtook the entire network and led to an attack known as "DoS - Denial of Service".

However, the network validators (which are the node operators) of Solana network reached a consensus to restart the entire network in order to reset the network. The Solana Blockchain was restarted. The restart took the form of an entire change of protocol (a hard fork) to allow a diversion from the last confirmed hash. The restart protocol took about 2 hours to be fully initiated and the nodes that went offline was resuscitated and services resumed in the Blockchain.

Question 5. Check the last block generated in Solana and make an approximate calculation of How many blocks per second have been generated in Solana, taking into account from the initial block to the current one? Justify your answer and show screenshots.

There are many Solana explorers but for the purpose of this post, I will be using the Solana beach - https://solanabeach.io.

_{Screenshot from Solana Beach}

Now we will review the last block and then calculate how many transactions were generated by the block.

_{Screenshot from Solana Beach}

The last block was validated by "Papsan" and has a transaction number of 157.

_{Screenshot from Solana Beach}

From the screenshot above, the last block is 98919833 with the number of transactions of 157 at 67.52% success rate. Now, we have to further examine this block in Solscan to know more details and the timestamp.

_Solscan

The timestamp recorded is 11:40:10 AM +UTC, September 29, 2021. The block hash is Fz9mqG7LishF6FgpuuN382eB1FE1cbtA9QSQX2oqoc86 and the block leader is syrs1ewkLaWrJ3VoXhFtZHZZSRNTRb6qQhkEhmXKbcC.

Now let us look at the initial block (which is the genesis block) and extrapolate it to the current one to know the number of transactions per second that have been generated. The genesis block is "1", so we will input it in the Solscan.

_{Genesis block in solscan}

Notice how the transaction here are 4, and there is no timestamp. The block hash is AcknnkY4ok5BZuk69WijDETKVRUPZoMtniZHMe4ZaK1e.

According to Solana, the Solana Blockchain has the capacity of generating 2 blocks in 1 second. Which also means 1 block for 0.5 seconds in approximation.

The current block is 98919833 (that is judging from the time this post if made). Then at the rate of 1block/0.5sec, let us calculate how may seconds it will take to generate the number of blocks.

98919833 x 0.5 = 49,459,916.5 seconds

Now let us convert it to years:

49,459,916.5 ÷ 60 = 824,331.94 mins
824,331.94 ÷ 60 = 13,738.86 hrs
13,738.86 ÷ 24 = 572.45 days
13,738.86 ÷ 365 = 1.5683561644 years

So it took 1.5 years at the rate of 1block/0.5sec to arrive at this current block.

Now, calculating the rate of 1block/0.5sec:

2blocks/sec
120blocks/min
172,800blocks/day (24hrs)
63,072,000blocks/year (365 days)
94,608,000blocks in 1.5 years (1yr and 6month)

From this figure, you will observe that is close to the current block of 98919833.

Conclusion

Solana is a widely used 4th-generation web-scale Blockchain that is created to leverage on open infrastructure, and thereby providing increased speed and high scalability. From the creation of Solana Blockchain, it has seen amazing projects being built on it and it has also seen upgrades. We have considered the various use-cases of Solana and their features. One thing I believe is that more updates will be witnessed in the Solana Blockchain.

Thanks all for reading, and special appreciation to @pelon53.

Thanks for reading