Solana Introduces Proof-of-History and Offers Faster Transaction Speed than Ethereum

3 min readSep 15, 2021

Solana is still in its infancy and isn’t well known in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. However, many early adopters of this blockchain platform are excited at the possibilities of this newcomer. Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko, worked on wireless protocols at Qualcom for over 12-years.

This gave him enough experience to compete with ethereum .However, most crypto investors find it confusing to choose between ethereum and Sonana due to similar features that the two share. Many people have been asking Solana vs Ethereum:

Here are some facts about these two open source crypto platforms.

Faster consensus

Anatoly Yakovenko had a brilliant idea several years back and revolved around creating a historical record to speed up “consensus” in a blockchain –consensus is how decisions are made on blockchains and are peer-to-peer systems.

At the moment consensus is reached on the majority of blockchains when ‘proof-of-work’ (solving a mathematical puzzle) occurs. This can be a lengthy process and can take up to an hour in the case of BTC and one minute in the case of ETH. The miners who perform these actions are rewarded in the form of cryptocurrencies.

This process requires a lot of energy and for this reason, these two cryptocurrencies (BTC & ETH) aren’t very scalable at the moment. This is one of the reasons ‘Elon Musk’, Tesla’s CEO stated that they would no longer accept BTC payments for their electric automobiles because of their over-reliance on fossil fuels.

Proof of Stake

However, many blockchain developers are moving away from the ‘proof-of-work’ concept and realizing the potential of transitioning to a ‘proof-of-stake’ system.

The proof of stake system works as follows: Validators don’t have to use huge amounts of computational power anymore, as they are now randomly selected and don’t have to compete with one another anymore.

Validators don’t have to mine blocks anymore, rather their job is to create blocks when picked and validate proposed blocks when they are not picked. Furthermore, this validation process is known as ‘attesting’ and validators are rewarded for attesting and proposing new blocks.

This can be done without the need for sophisticated computers and gives an opportunity for more people to become validators. Since more people are participating as validators on the blockchain network consensus can be reached faster.

Proof of History

The Solana blockchain has developed a synchronized clock that allocates a timestamp for every transaction and disables the ability of miners and robots to determine in what order a transaction gets recorded on the blockchain network.

Furthermore, this blockchain platform can forward transactions to validators before the previous batch of transactions has been finalized. This can rapidly increase the confirmation speed and increase the number of transactions performed on the blockchain.

This makes Solana an interesting prospect for blockchain developers and future token projects. The blockchain industry is always in need of more scalable blockchains than Ethereum, however, the Solana blockchain still has to prove its long-term worth.

Final Thoughts

If the popularity of Solana is anything to go by, then the open source platform is poised to rival other established cryptocurrencies.

What makes Solana unique compared to other cryptocurrencies are better features that are aimed at supporting fast transactions. In that case, Solana is likely to be the next big thing in the crypto ecosystem.