Solana (SOL)

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Speaking to Cointelegraph at Solana’s annual Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam, the co-founder recounts a late-night brainwave of a “hyper-optimized, fast as possible” smart contract blockchain protocol.

“The use case that I was going after was for central limit order books, like how to run something that’s like the Nasdaq, but on a public permissionless blockchain,” Yakovenko explains.

Solana’s roots are intrinsically linked to Yakovenko’s journey as a computer engineer. Having spent the majority of his career at Qualcomm in San Diego alongside co-founder Raj Gokal, Yakovenko’s idea for the platform carries plenty of inspiration from that period of his life.
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The impetus for the idea stemmed from a concept known as time division multiple access. As Yakovenko explains, the technology is tied to how cellular towers alternate transmissions based on time intervals.

His idea was to build a system based on technology that Stanford University researchers had been working on called a verifiable delay function. Yakovenko jokes that he thought he discovered something truly novel, which prompted him to begin working on a smart contract layer platform:

“The intuition that I had was that once you have a way to track time in a decentralized way on a public permissionless blockchain, you could use similar optimizations that Qualcomm did for cellular networks.”

Inspired by the advent of smart contract functionality pioneered by Ethereum, Yakovenko and his partners set out to develop a breakout application and use cases powered by smart contract functionality:

“We wanted to build a hyper-optimized, smart contract platform that could give the benefits of trust-minimized computing but without the performance headaches or costs associated with alternatives.”

Two years of work went into the engineering of Solana before its eventual launch in March 2020 ...

More:

Solana’s genesis story: Anatoly Yakovenko’s vision for a high-performance blockchain

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko explains the genesis story of the smart contract blockchain, which aims to build a hyper-optimized, fast-as-possible protocol.

cointelegraph.com

 

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More reporting on Solana (SOL):

... as the layer 2 economy continues to grow on Ethereum, which is helping to scale the largest smart contract blockchain but also fragmenting the user experience, more and more influential Ethereum boosters and developers are saying there is a chance "monolithic" chains like Solana will dominate.
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... This year Solana saw the launch of the blockchain-forward Saga phone, announced by Yakovenko, a former operating systems developer at Qualcomm, and got a taste of Firedancer, the upcoming secondary chain client built by trading powerhouse Jump Crypto. Low cost payments in particular is one area where Solana shows promise.
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Anatoly Yakovenko and Solana Bounce Back

With a rocketing token and tech improvements on the horizon, the Solana community – rallied by industry champion Anatoly Yakovenko – defied the odds of defeat.

www.coindesk.com

 

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Apparently this project rolled out in June, but I was not aware of it:

Solana Mobile, a subsidiary of Solana Labs, introduced Saga, a flagship Android mobile phone with unique functionality and features tightly integrated with the Solana blockchain making it easy and secure to transact in web3 and manage digital assets, such as tokens and NFTs.
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Saga was introduced at an event in New York today, which also included the introduction of the Solana Mobile Stack, a framework for Android allowing developers to create rich mobile experiences for wallets and apps on Solana and create a “Secure Element” for private key management ...

Solana Mobile debuts Saga, a flagship Android phone for web3

Flagship Android phone from Solana Mobile showcases innovations needed to bring web3 to billions of mobile users

solana.com

It sounds like they built an Android cell phone that integrates a Solana (SOL) hard wallet into it. It's like combining a Ledger Nano X with a cell phone except the Ledger is limited to just supporting Solana. It's just another example of some of the development efforts ongoing with Solana.

It looks like it might not have reached a critical mass of buyers to sustain development:

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Solana's Saga Phone has an uncertain future because of disappointing sales and changing market dynamics, Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko said during a recent appearance on Laura Shin's Unchained podcast.

“We have to decide if there’s a place for a smart wallet, a much cheaper version that an iPhone user could use as a secondary device. We haven’t seen a ton of signal whether that’s a compelling enough thing to sell 50,000 units,” he said, saying that this was the magic number to determine the success of the phone.
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Future of Solana's Hyped Saga Phone Is 'Under Internal Discussion' as Sales Figures Fail to Wow

Yakovenko emphasizes the importance of reaching a user base of 25-50K to sustain the Solana phone's development in an interview with Laura Shin.

www.coindesk.com

It's a cool idea, but if I were shelling out big bucks for this thing, I wouldn't want it locked in to a single crypto platform. It's a bit clunky to connect the Ledger Nano X to a cell phone and then run dApps that connect to the Ledger, but it works, it's definitely secure and it works with any crypto platform supported by Ledger (all but the newest or most obscure). Maybe some genius will figure out how to build a "universal mobile stack" that would allow for a seamlessly integrated crypto phone and hard wallet for all crypto platforms.

 

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So about Solana's Saga phone mentioned above in post #18....

The once-struggling Solana phone is turning into a sellout. And the memecoin BONK is almost certainly the reason why.

Arbitrage traders appear to be chasing a 30 million BONK token airdrop that's available to every owner of the Saga phone. At current prices that much BONK is worth nearly $700 for a phone that costs $599.

"Saga sales have >10x'd in the past 48 hours, and are now on track to sell out before the new year," Solana co-founder Raj Gokal tweeted midday Thursday. The surge is so pronounced that Gokal's counterpart, Anatoly Yakovenko, tweeted they needed to raise the price.

The euphoria around BONK – Solana's dog-themed equivalent to Dogecoin – has led to a turnaround story for Saga ...

More:

Sales of Solana Phone Surge as Traders Chase BONK Arbitrage

BONK Phone, Who Dis?

www.coindesk.com

I guess there are peeps buying multiple phones if you are essentially getting (a promise to be) paid to buy one right now. Crazy! IMO, it's a high risk play. The day the airdrop happens, BONK could easily drop in value and that 30 million BONK could be worth $7 instead of $700 (for example).

 

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Sounds pretty cool. I have not investigated it yet to fully understand it yet:

 

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Regarding that earlier post about token extensions on Solana:



Anyone can easily create their own layer 2 crypto token on the Solana network. I need to investigate further to fully understand how it works (ie. if it's dependent upon FluxBeam once created or not). Even so, that's pretty wild.

 

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Lighthouse Protocol, a smart contract designed to make Solana’s Web3 environment more user-friendly, expects to reach mass adoption later this year. The initiative, which seeks to tackle the wallet-draining problem in the Solana blockchain, uses assertions (instructions that seek to verify the correctness of assumptions made in a transaction) to simulate the changes derived from a transaction.

For example, if a transaction signed seeks to send 0.1 SOL, but Lighthouse predicts that its final purpose is to drain the whole contents of a wallet, the execution of this movement will fail, protecting the user from being drained. Lighthouse will provide a self-contained and open-source solution for implementing these assertions, free to be used in every wallet to prevent these attacks.

According to Slorg, project lead of Solincinerator, Lighthouse seeks to avoid different techniques used by attacking groups to collaborate to the mass adoption of Solana, allowing less tech-savvy users to test decentralized finance without being easy prey for attackers.

Slorg stated that the objective of Lighthouse’s implementation goes beyond curbing these incidents, and its use is only possible on Solana. ...

Lighthouse Protocol Aims to End Wallet Draining Attacks on Solana – Altcoins Bitcoin News

Lighthouse Protocol, a transaction assertion smart contract, aims to end the problems derived from using unknown smart contracts in Solana.

news.bitcoin.com

I have not dug into the technical details, and I barely understand what they are describing here, but it sounds pretty cool. I'm picturing an open source anti-fraud system that works sort of like anti-spam email filters.

 

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Apparently a developer that built a trading interface for Solana designed their system such that MEV exploits (like the ones discussed in the Ethereum thread) were possible:

The developer of popular alternative Solana client Jito on Friday abruptly nixed its mempool functionality, a key part of its tech stack that had nonetheless enabled a spate of costly front-running attacks on crypto traders.

Jito said in a tweet Friday that its mempool would go offline within hours. Mempools are the place where transactions sit before they’re added to the blockchain. Solana's core architecture doesn’t have a mempool but Jito’s Block Engine, which is designed to bring "maximum extractable value" (MEV) to the chain, did.

The decision ends a six-week battle between Jito's stewards and savvy traders who were exploiting the mempool by front-running other people's trades. For much of its existence Jito's terms of service had banned "front running" in its mempool, but traders kept executing these so-called "sandwich attacks" anyway.

A sandwich attack occurs when arbitrage bots trade against people whose transactions are sitting in the mempool but haven't yet settled. It's niche part of MEV on Ethereum, where perpetrators mostly target large orders. But Solana's low fees made sandwich attacking all too easy, and many retail users were paying the price.
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https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/03/08/solana-client-developer-jito-announces-end-of-mempool-function/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=rss&utm_campaign=headlines

Note that this isn't an issue with Solana itself. This was a 3rd party trading application that was flawed and presumably only hurt folks using that same platform.

 

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More developments on the Solana blockchain:

ABOUT STAR ATLAS
Star Atlas is a next-gen gaming metaverse emerging from the confluence of state-of-the-art blockchain, real-time graphics, multiplayer video games, and decentralized financial technologies.

Using Unreal Engine 5's Nanite, real-time graphics technology allows for cinematic quality video game visuals. In addition, blockchain technology using the Solana protocol establishes a largely serverless and secured gameplay experience. Non-fungible tokens obtained and traded within Star Atlas create an economy that replicates tangible world assets and ownership. To learn more, visit StarAtlas.com, join a faction at Play.StarAtlas.com, send your spaceships on a deep space mission by enrolling them in a Faction Fleet, harvesting resources with Faction Claims and download the Showroom on your PC.

Star Atlas DAO Lays Foundation for Sustainable Governance in Gaming | Star Atlas

A grand strategy game of space exploration, territorial conquest, political domination, and more.

staratlas.com

 

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Just as of recently Solana which is known to many through its great speed and scalable blockchain technology recently came across something unusual. The Solana network faced a lot of network congestion. What this led to has been concerning for the company. This network congestion caused 75% of on-chain transactions to fail

This issue has caused a lot of discussions and also got some users migrating to Ethereum instead. The reason for this migration seems to be for more reliable transaction experiences. Austin Federa, the Head of Strategy at the Solana Foundation, provided insights into the root causes of these challenges and the measures being taken to resolve them.
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... The issue according to Austin Federa is called ‘’tech debt’’. This shows a really difficult decision for Solana. The issue is that they can either add new features or improve the existing network.
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More:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/com...ive-into-the-causes-and-solutions/ar-BB1lrxot

Growing pains for the network are currently hurting Solana's market value. Solana likely will pop a bit if they get the issue sorted and I would expect that they will at some point.

 

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Solana devs still working on solutions:

Solana Developers Deploy Fixes to Mainnet to Address Network Congestion – Altcoins Bitcoin News

Solana developers have successfully pushed a series of fixes that seek to address the issue of network congestion.

news.bitcoin.com

Sounds like they fixed some issues and are still working on others.