SOL Founder Reflects on Solana's Original Vision: Details

In a recent tweet, Solana labs cofounder Anatoly Yakovenko revisited the original vision behind the Solana blockchain, revealing a perspective that diverges from the common throughput-centric narrative. 

According to the Solana founder, who goes by the name "toly" on X, Solana was not primarily designed for maximum throughput; instead, its core purpose is to synchronize state across the globe as swiftly as the laws of physics permit.

Solana isn’t even designed for maximum throughput. It’s designed to synchronize state to as many boxes around the world as fast as physics allow. https://t.co/lTfDJuG6mp— toly 🇺🇸| bip-420 (@aeyakovenko) May 17, 2024

Solana is an integrated, open-source blockchain that aims to synchronize global information at the speed of light. It prioritizes latency and throughput, sacrificing some verifiability. It intends to accomplish this with features such as its novel timestamp mechanism called proof of history (PoH), block propagation protocol Turbine and parallel transaction processing.

The SOL founder's comments come in the wake of the most recent CoinGecko report, which found Solana to be the fastest among large blockchains, with its actual daily average transactions per second (TPS) hitting a record high of 1,504 on April 6 this year amid the meme coin mania.

Solana was found to be 46 times faster than Ethereum and more than five times faster than Polygon, which has the highest TPS among Ethereum scaling solutions.

While Solana has been lauded for its high throughput capabilities, the SOL founder emphasizes that this was not the primary objective. The focus was not merely creating a "faster" blockchain but building a system that could achieve global state synchronization with unparalleled efficiency.

According to CoinGecko, despite being the fastest blockchain, Solana has only reached 1.6% of its theoretical maximum speed of 65,000 TPS. At the same time, the increased volume of transactions caused network congestion, and it remains to be seen how quickly Solana can achieve greater real TPS with its planned enhancements. 

SOL, the native coin of the Solana blockchain, is the fifth largest cryptocurrency, valued at $74.74 billion and trading at $166.54 at the moment.