Solana

Solana is a high-performance blockchain platform that boasts of speeds up to 65,000 transactions per second. With its layers of scaling technologies like Sealevel, which efficiently packages transactions into blocks, Rapid Fire, which allows for low latency finality, Turbine for load distribution and Gravity for on-chain governance, Solana is built to scale from day 1.

Solana is a smart contract platform and allows to execute distributed code and issue tokens and NFTs, similar to other smart contract platforms like Ethereum or Cardano.

Solana uses a new consensus algorithm called Proof-of History (PoH), which differs from Proof Of Stake and Proof of Work mechanisms. While Bitcoin processes around 7 transactions per second and Ethereum (before its planned scalability upgrades) only 15 – 20 TPS, Solana claims to be able to achieve up to 65000 TPS.

One of the most appealing aspects of Solana lies in its promise of low fees. Despite the scalability potential when compared to Bitcoin, the cost for executing transactions remains extremely low, compared to other platforms such as Ethereum where miners set gas prices according to network congestion levels.