A couple of months ago, we did an article about Cryptocurrencies, what they are and how to profit from them. This time we will review the cryptocurrency Solana, its advantages and disadvantages compared to other cryptos, and how can you profit from Solana.
1.0 The Definition of Solana
Solana has always been known as one of the biggest competitors of the Ethereum Network, because of its speed, energy consumption, cheapness and versatility/capability of its blockchain software.
Solana is a decentralized blockchain designed to build globally scalable and easy-to-use applications.
The base of this blockchain network is the SOL cryptocurrency which currently has a circulation of “26 million“, as well as decentralized applications such as smart contracts.
2.0 What makes Solana stand out from other blockchain tokens?
Besides the versatility, scalability and the very fact that is being used in different types of projects, for me one oif the most important factors to take into account is the velocity of it’s transactions.
“According to the Solana website, the Solana blockchain is capable of generating up to 65,000 transactions per second” and the average cost of this transaction is of $0.00025 USD for transaction. (at the moment of writing this article the website was at an average of 2,000 transactions per second, which still is much faster than Ethereum or Bitcoin).
This transaction cost is far below the Ethereum and Bitcoin transaction costs, which stands at $1.00 USD for the Ethereum and $95.11 for the Bitcoin.
3.0 What is the story of Solana?
With a market capitalization of $46,800 million dollars, Solana is the seventh biggest cryptocurrency in the world. This is an open-code project that provides decentralized finance solutions (DeFi).
The project started in 2017 when the idea and its base took off.
It was created by the American engineer Anatoly Yakovenko, the actual CEO of Solana Labs; Greg Fitzgerald and Eric Williams.
In 2018 Solana Labs was created, gathering developers from various tech giants such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Dropbox and Qualcomm. They picked Solana because of the beach town near where Yakovenko lives in San Diego, California.
The project obtained a great amount of risk investment, raising more than 20 million dollars through private token selling.
The idea of Solana was to ease the creation and development of Decentralized apps. (Dapp)
The idea is to improve the scalability with the introduction of a Proof of History (PoH) that works combined with the Proof of Stake (PoS). (You can read more about this in the Solana whitepaper).
4.0 How does it work?
Solana has a high capacity for executing transactions, thanks to the fast and safe node synchronization. In a conventional Blockchain, the node synchro takes place in big groups of packetized transaction blocks, With the block synchro, a transaction can only be processed after the block has been created, and that takes time.
In the Proof-of-Work consensus, this time is large enough to avoid having various miners obtaining the same block (Wich in Bitcoin could take up to 10 mins.)
Solana takes a different approach and uses the Proof-of-History consent, the principal nodes of the net (leader nodes) seal the blocks with a piece of cryptographic evidence, making the data entry after the block has been validated. The time validation of the block in Solana is 800 ms (17.5 times fewer than in Ethereum).
5.0 The Solana Universe
Solana has received a great reception in the cryptocurrency world, most of its acceptance is because of its speed and easiness of transactions, which has made various projects flourish under the hood of the Solana project, which is now very diverse and is growing each day.
Among the most known Dapps (Decentralized apps) developed for the Solana universe we can find:
5.1 – DEX Projects
Saber
Serum
Cropper Finance
Lumos Exchange
Bonfida
DEXLab
Solend
HydrwaSwap
Cykura
Diabolo
01
Grape
5.2 Digital Markets
DigitalEyes Market
SolSea
MagicEden
Solanalysis
5.3 Web3 Apps
Squads
Brave Browser
Wum.bo
Solanalysis
5.4 Lending Protocols
Apricot Finance
Francium
Tulip Protocol
Port Finance
5.5 DeFi Projects
Mango
Raydium
Drift
Orca
6.0 How to Earn Money With Solana?
There are various ways how you could earn money with Cryptocurrency, some of them are very easy and others could take a lot of time and effort. We made an article about crypto that has a segment on how to earn money with Cryptocurrency in general, which has some similarities to this one.
6.1 You can Stake your Sol Token
Staking is a process where the owner of a Sol token commits a portion or all of the tokens that this owner has to a validator or various validators increasing this validator’s voting weight.
You assign your tokens to validators by delegating your tokens to them, and they will be the ones who process transactions and run the network (This does not give the validator control or ownership over your tokens).
Staking is important for the network for two reasons:
- The first and more important is that you are earning money passively,
- The second is that you are helping to preserve the token by supporting the exchange.
As you are delegating your tokens to the validators you are giving your “trust” to the validator. As this process is repeated over and over and the validators obtain big amounts of stake delegations from different owners of the token, these validators become more trustworthy and their consensus votes become more important.
By comparing the collective votes from all validators against the proportion of stake that has been delegated to them, the network reaches consensus by this Proof of Stake.
But how much money can you earn with this option? Here is a The Calculator from Staking Rewards that explains it very well, and gives you different validator ratios and all of the expenses.
6.2 Running / Moving
Human beings are creatures of movement, our ancestors were always travelling looking for better living conditions.
And nowadays, we are always running and moving everywhere on the clock.
On the other hand, we have become more sedentary, with a more comfortable life, sometimes forgetting about this past of creatures of movement.
That is why this Dapp was created, as an incentive to make people to Get out of their sofás and start moving while earning tokens for every step.
The fitness industry is a multi-billion dollar market that has sports apparel, exercises, equipment, weights, gyms, coaches,
players, all of them are based on services or products you buy and they profit from these products or services in your desire to do a sport or to get fit.
In this industry is where Stepn makes its introduction as a Decentralized App (DApp) that gives you rewards for doing sports.
How does it work?
Basically, you have to walk, run or move, and for that this app rewards you by earning tokens for every step you take.
You can check this Dapp in this review:
Stepn Review : Earn Money By Running With This Solana NFT Platform
