This article is solely based on my understanding of Solana Blockchain. It is only for the knowledge purpose and doesn’t encourage any kind of investment or endorsement.

What is Solana?

Solana is a layer 1 blockchain that aims to scale the dApps, other web protocols, and NFTs and allows the development of the smart contracts. More than 350 dApps are created on the Solana blockchain. It is mostly used for NFTs, DeFi and staking.
Most of the blockchains work on proof of work or proof of Stake Protocol. Solana has introduced a new concept of validation with the Proof of History Protocol. Whenever we perform transactions on blockchain, we need confirmations. The confirmation is validated by miners through solving the hashes in the proof of work protocol. Similarly, in the proof of stake the amount of crypto staked validates the transactions. There is no essence of time in these protocols while proof of history internalizes the sequences of events and validates the timestamp of the transaction.
With the 25 confirmations for transactions performed, it works on the proof of history protocol, can also be considered the decentralized clock. It is integrated into the protocol proof of stake which makes it a faster and more secure blockchain. The transaction speed i.e. 71,000 TPS is highly acknowledgeable and looks promising. It’s native token is SOL.

How is it different than other blockchain?

Solana is the emerging blockchain with its fastest speed. It is also backed by the CEO of one of the popular exchanges FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried which makes it more trustworthy and popular as a new blockchain. He believes it can rule the blockchain world.

“Yeah, I think that is one of the most compelling parts is that it has the potential to scale to the place where things are needing to scale if blockchain gets huge. And it has the potential to host DeFi applications for hundreds of millions to billions of people on top of it with a giant composable ecosystem. Again, that’s not saying necessarily will happen, but it could happen,” said Fried.

One of the astonishing specialty of the Solana blockchain is it works on the new concept it developed, the proof of history which makes it more reliable, secure and cost efficient also consuming less energy than the other blockchains that works on proof of work.
Proof of history allows the validator to validate the transactions creating interrelationship among the sequence of events that took within timestamp of the transaction rather than solving the hashes to create a block. The speed is also commendable. It claims to perform 71,000 transactions per second. It also has very less fee in comparison to other blockchain.
It has popularity among the investors for its staking rewards as well. Besides, Solana uses low level language which makes it difficult for the developers to adapt for creating dApps. Nonetheless, it makes Solana network faster than the other blockchains. To add, Solana burns its fee which helps in maintaining the price of SOL.

Wallets and explorers:

Unlike other blockchains that depends mostly on metamask, Solana uses other wallets like Sollet, Softlare, Phantom, Solong, Math wallet etc. Phantom and Sollet are the frequently connected wallets. The features are different as per the wallets. For example, Phantom provides the user to stake using the nodes within their wallet while sollet doesn’t. So, the users can select the wallets as per their requirements and comfort. Moreover, it uses Wormhole as a bridge to connect to other chains.
Solana explorer is its main explorer but SolScan is more trusted and frequently used.

DeFi DEXes and Web3 apps/protocols:

Solana uses many web3 and DEXes for NFT, LP and staking transactions. Raydium is one of the popular DEXes built on Serum protocol. Similarly, Mango Market and web3 app Bonfida allows the Collateral trading. We can also find other apps on the Solana Ecosystem.

NFT Marketplaces:

Solana has varieties of marketplaces where we can buy, sell and trade NFTs. Due to its rapid speed and lower transactions fee, it seems reasonable to perform NFT transactions on Solana marketplaces. Solsea is its first NFT marketplace on Solana “that enables creators to choose and embed licenses when they mint”. Similarly, MagicEden is the most popular at the moment which recently announced that it raised $27 million funding. Besides, there are Solanart, DigitalEyes, Metaplex, Alpha.art, Exchange.Art, etc.