The Solana Foundation is an open-source project designed to facilitate the creation of decentralised apps (DApps).
Mission
The project was begun in 2017 and launched in March 2020. The blockchain is built to make decentralised finance accessible on a larger scale, serving both small-time traders and enterprise customers.
It has developed a proof-of-history (PoH) consensus – which eliminates the problems related to the truthfulness of timestamps in distributed networks by relying on proof of a sequence of events for validation – combined with the underlying proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus of the blockchain.
Use-cases
Through this hybrid protocol, the blockchain has incredibly short validation and therefore processing times.
Also able to execute smart contracts, it can process 50,000 transactions per second.
Founders
Anatoly Yakovenko is a former senior staff engineer manager at Qualcomm and software engineer at Dropbox.
Yakovenko partnered with former Qualcomm colleague Greg Fitzgerald to found Solana Labs, and several other Qualcomm employees joined them to take the project to launch.
Economics
A total of 489 million SOL tokens will be released into circulation. Around half of these were split between an initial seed sale, a founding sale, team members and the Solana Foundation. The remaining tokens are for public and private sales.