SUN SOL/USDthe native currency of the decentralized blockchain platform solarium, has participated in the recent cryptocurrency rally and the token is currently trading at its highest level since late December 2021. The cryptocurrency celebrates its fourth anniversary on Saturday and, to mark the special occasion, here is an introduction to the platform.
The origin: In November 2017, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko published a white paper describing history testing, a technique for maintaining time between computers that don't trust each other. Armed with the distributed systems experience he acquired during his tenure at Qualcomm, mesosphere and mailbox, He worked to simplify synchronization that could make the network “incredibly fast” limited only by network bandwidth.
It managed to synchronize computers that did not trust each other, resulting in a significantly faster cluster.
Yakovenko began coding the application in the C programming language, and his Qualcomm colleague Greg Fitzgerald He advised him to implement the project in the Rust programming language. On February 13, 2018, Fitzgerald began prototyping the first open source implementation of his friend's whitepaper, and the project was published on GitHub under the name “Silk.” The first version was released on February 28, 2018 and demonstrated that 10,000 signed transactions could be verified and processed in just over half a second. Another Qualcomm cohort, Stephen Akridgeshowed that performance could be greatly improved by offloading signature verification to graphics processors.
The trio came together to co-found a company, which was later called Loom. They later changed the company's name to Solana Labs to avoid confusion with the Ethereum-based “Loom Network” project. The name “Solana” was chosen to give credit to Solana Beach, a small coastal town north of San Diego, where Yakovenko, Fitzgerald and Akridge lived for three years while working for Qualcomm. On March 28, 2018, the trio created the Solana GitHub organization and renamed “Silk” to “Solana.”
In June 2018, the team expanded the technology to run on cloud-based networks, and on July 19, released a 50-node permissioned public testnet that consistently supports bursts of 250,000 transactions per second.
The company raised more than $20 million in multi-token sales between mid-2018 and July 2019. After raising $1.76 million in a public token auction on CoinList, Solana launched Mainnet Beta in March 2020. The beta version It featured transaction capabilities and smart contract support, but did not include staking reward at the time.
See also: How to buy Solana (SOL)
The launch: Solana launched in March 2020, a difficult time when the world was fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. The first block was created on March 16.
Remembering the event, Raj Gokal, A co-founder who joined Solana Labs in late 2017 said in a post on X: “On March 16, 2020, lockdowns were spreading financial panic globally. That day, the Dow Jones fell 12.9%, more than any other day of the Great Depression. “Every founder we spoke to, across all tech sectors, not just crypto, canceled their launch.”
“Only a few dozen people thought Solana's design could work at scale and had the courage to overcome the fear. they had an overriding motivation,” she said.
In June 2021, Solana Labs sold SOL worth $314 million to a group of funds led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain capital.
However, the project also had its setbacks. In its early years, a large number of simultaneous transactions caused interruptions. The company faced a class action lawsuit in July 2022, which alleged that it sold unregistered security tokens since March 24, 2020 and deliberately misled investors regarding the circulating supply of SOL tokens.
The SEC named SOL along with 12 other coins offered by cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase as securities in a lawsuit it filed against the exchange. By offering them as tokens, Coinbase evaded disclosure rules, the regulator alleged.
The present: Solana now has 276 billion transactions, over 1,600 validators, and 254 million blocks. SOL, with a market capitalization of $81.7 billion, is currently the fifth largest cryptocurrency. Over the last 24 hours, around 11 billion crypto units have exchanged hands.
Gokal said: “It now routinely tops the charts with daily trading volume (ATH $3.6 billion yesterday!), active users, new tokens, nfts minted, daily transactions, tps, Nakamoto coefficient and a host of other metrics “.
“But we are still, at best, in the equivalent of the Internet of the early 2000s.”
SOL Returns: A $1,000 investment in SOL in April 2020 would have netted an investor 1,052.63 tokens. The same tokens would be worth $192,590 (based on Friday's closing price of $182.96).
Source: Benzinga Pro data
This would translate into a return of 19,159% over a four-year period. In the same period, the S&P 500 index, a broader gauge of the stock market, rose just 29%.
At last check, Solana was up 0.53% at $184.64, according to Data from Benzinga Pro. This is below its all-time high of $260.06 reached on November 6, 2021.
Read next: Is Solana safe?
Photo: Shutterstock
