Solana is a high-performance cryptocurrency blockchain that supports smart contracts and decentralized applications.It uses a special PoS consensus mechanism,called Proof-of-History, with time-stamped transactions to maximize efficiency.This allows Solana to process close to 50,000 transactions per second (compared to 7 TPS for Bitcoin and 16 TPS for Ethereum).
Unlike other similar projects such as Polkadot and Ethereum 2.0 , Solana is a single blockchain (layer 1) and does not delegate operations to other attached chains (layer 2).How does Solana work?Solana is the highest performing blockchain in the world.
Achieving this requires the implementation of several optimizations and new technologies:Proof-of-History (PoH): a mechanism that improves the speed of consensusTower BFT: an optimized version of PBFT's PoHTurbine - a block propagation protocol based on BitTorrent technology (albeit with many technical differences)Gulf Stream: transaction forwarding protocol without MempoolSealevel - Parallel Smart Contract RuntimePipelining: a transaction processing unit for validation optimizationCloudbreak: horizontally scaled account databaseReplicators - Distributed Ledger WarehouseProof-of-History (PoH)The Proof-of-History (PoH) mechanism improves the efficiency of the PoS consensus mechanism.A new block in Solana is generated every 400 ms (compared to about 15 seconds for Ethereum and 10 minutes for Bitcoin) and, as you can guess, it is very important to establish the chronological order of each block.This produces a kind of "clock tick" in which each clock tick is 400 ms (instead of one second like a normal clock).Solana uses a PoS not DPoS consensus mechanism , as discussed many times.
It's an easy mistake to make because there are multiple roles on the Solana blockchain (leaders, validators, archivers, etc.).
The leaders rotate every four blocks (1.6 seconds).
As long as a node occupies the Leader position, it basically puts all the transactions it can into the four blocks it is producing and shows these blocks containing the transactions to the relevant node groups, called Solana Clusters.