What is Solana?
Solana is a blockchain platform that provides fast, secure, and scalable decentralized apps and marketplaces by using a combination of proof of stake consensus and proof of history. SOL is the native currency of Solana and used to pay for transactions.
History of Solana
The Solana (SOL) platform was founded back in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko. Anatoly later teamed up with former Qualcomm colleagues Greg Fitzgerald and Stephen Akridge, and three others to found the company that would eventually become Solana Labs. The founding team included former Apple engineers in addition to the Qualcomm veterans.
Solana launched on Mainnet Beta in March 2020, shortly after raising $1.76 million in a public token auction hosted on CoinList. The project's beta network featured basic transaction capabilities and smart contract support. Solana can purportedly handle 50,000 transactions per second.
What is Solana (SOL) used for?
Solana can power several applications that offer a variety of features, including smart contracts, NFTs, decentralized finance, and various digital apps.
The SOL token is the native currency in Solana’s ecosystem and is used to interact with various decentralized apps and to make payments. SOL also has additional use cases, including governance and staking the token to earn additional rewards. Its maximum supply caps at 489 million SOL.
How does Solana (SOL) work?
Solana’s major innovation is speed through new technologies including a consensus mechanism called proof of history. Because of this, it can process many more transactions per second, and has much lower transaction fees, than rival blockchains like Ethereum.
The concept of Solana’s Proof of History consensus mechanism involves proving that a message occurred before or after a known event, rather than relying on a timestamp. Solana uses Bitcoin’s SHA256 mining algorithm with the addition of a Verifiable Delay Function to create a historical record of events on the blockchain.
Advantages of Solana (SOL)
How do I buy Solana in Canada (SOL to CAD)?
To buy Solana in Canada, you can set up an account on a cryptocurrency trading platform such as NDAX and buy SOL directly with the Canadian dollar.
You can also buy SOL in Canada using a peer-to-peer trade. However, using platforms such as NDAX will allow for affordable, safe, and fast transactions.
How do I store Solana?
It is highly recommended that you always store Solana (SOL) in a cryptocurrency hardware wallet. However, at NDAX we have all the security measures in place to allow you to safely store your cryptocurrency on our platform. See NDAX Security. For cold wallets, check out Ledger or Trezor for your hardware wallet needs.