Solana (CRYPTO:SOL)

A DECENTRALIZED PAYMENT SOLUTION

Since the beginning of the year, some very interesting projects are emerging on the Solana blockchain. Indeed, after the deployment of the king of blockchain wallet, Phantom, on iOS (thus opening to users the access to smart contracts), as well as the announcement of the future release on Android, Solana Labs has just recently launched Solana Pay, a framework allowing the deployment of a decentralized payment solution on the ultra-fast blockchain.

2 requirements: having something to sell and having a supported wallet (there will be more and more additions over time). Of course Phantom is supported, but also the FTX wallet. So we have a DeFi payment solution, allowing to trade while taking advantage of Solana's ridiculously low transaction rates (1 transaction being less than 0.001$), this through SOL or other stablecoins such as USDT or USDC. Far from wanting to compete with the whales of the centralized electronic payment market, such as Mastercard or Visa, Solana Pay intends above all to change the world of payments and to deeply democratize it (and there is no doubt that other payment solutions will follow, notably on other blockchains).

The idea is extremely noble, but let's not forget that the blockchain has had some problems of congestion lately (3 in the space of a few months). Nevertheless, according to the creator of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko, a lot of work is being done to optimize the blockchain. There is no doubt that these kinds of applications will greatly influence the adoption of blockchain and will push more and more players into decentralized finance.

The crypto SOL, was trading today at $96, down 9% since yesterday.

SOLANA CONTINUES ITS DEMOCRATIZATION

Like Metamask, Phantom is a crypto wallet allowing access to Solana's tokens and nft and allowing interaction with blockchain applications.

On January 31, 2022, Phantom announced the raising of $109 million (for a current capitalization of $1.2 billion). With the goal of achieving the primary objective of the wallet, namely the propagation of the application on other blockchains to make it a multichain wallet. The same day Phantom also launched its iOS application, allowing all users of the ecosystem to benefit from the optimized wallet, as well as all its applications (smart contract, staking of SOL, seen tokens and NFTs, etc ...) Phantom's CEO Brandon Millman also plans to continue expanding its market with the launch of the Android application in the near future.

With more than 2 million active users, managing 112 million stacked SOLs and with the planned integration of the Ethereum blockchain by 2022, Phantom intends to strengthen its position as a giant, and soon become the reference in multichain wallets. The SOL cryptocurrency, on the other hand, seems to have reacted well to the news, after a good breath leading to a 30% rise to $105, following its drastic plunge to the $80 support.

THE FASTEST BLOCKCHAIN IN THE WORLD

"It is possible for a centralized database to process 710,000 transactions per second on a standard gigabit network if the transactions do not exceed, on average, 176 bytes. A centralized database can also replicate itself and maintain high availability without significantly compromising this transaction rate by using the distributed system technique known as optimistic concurrency control" [H.T.Kung, J.T.Robinson (1981)].

40 years later, Anatoly Yakovenko, applying these principles to decentralization, gave birth to the fastest blockchain in the world: Solana.

Able to manage (for the moment), about 65,000 transactions per second, about 4333 times faster than Ethereum, Solana occupies the first place of the podium of the fastest blockchains in the world. Couple this with extremely low transaction fees, due to the consensus used, the Proof Of History (we won't go into details, but compare this to the Proof Of Stake, in which validators stake their crypto-currencies to validate transactions), and you get a super-powerful blockchain, and 1st choice for speed and user experience lovers.

Many DeFi projects have made it their first choice blockchain for the development of their applications: about $14 billion invested in Solana. Currently, the SOL crypto-currency is trading at $230, with an increase of 17,000% since 1 year, and a theoretical limit of 710,000 tps foreseen by its creator for the next few years (Solana processing transactions faster as the hardware evolves).

Currently 5th in the market caps ranking, there is no doubt that Solana will be more and more talked about in the future.