What's Solana?

Background

Solana is a leading blockchain network designed for widespread adoption. It’s a single globally unified state machine that is fast, open, and decentralized. Mainnet offers high throughput, low fees, and a rich ecosystem of dapps that target use cases in DeFi, NFTs, payments, DePIN, and gaming.

Solana has introduced several groundbreaking innovations that’ve redefined the the capabilities of distributed networks. Key developments include Turbine, a block propagation protocol that enhances node communication; Gulfstream, which eliminates the need for mempools by forwarding transaction information to validators ahead of time; and Proof of History, a consensus mechanism that enables greater scalability by encoding the passage of time into the blockchain.

However, one of Solana's most notable contributions is the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), which has been the recipient of significant attention and interest recently.