Solana Uncovered: An Introduction to the Solana Network
A data-driven overview of the Solana Blockchain
State of Solana Q1 2024
Solana (SOL) is an integrated, open-source blockchain with the goal of synchronizing global information at the speed of light. Solana optimizes for latency and throughput, sacrificing some verifiability. It seeks to accomplish this through features such as its novel timestamp mechanism called Proof-of-History (PoH), block propagation protocol Turbine, and parallel transaction processing. Since mainnet launch in March 2020, several network upgrades have brought further network performance and resilience, including QUIC, stake-weighted Quality of Service (QoS), and local fee markets.

