Steemit Crypto Academy Contest / S1W1 - Favorite Blockchain Network by @ebuahsang1

^{Pinterest Edited Postermywall"}

Hello fellow steemians it is another Unique opportunity to be participating in yet another great initiative of the Steemit team. Today I will be talking about my favorite Blockchain network. Please be patient to read through this post, it will truly be beneficial for you.

SOLANA BLOCKCHAIN

Today I want to talk about the Solana Blockchain. So far this is my favorite Blockchain platform. I was first introduced into the SOLANA Blockchain in the Crypto Academy and ever since then I have had this special interest in the platform as I do believe the project. So let me dive straight into the Project.

What is Solana Blockchain

^Source"

Solana can be defined as a highly functional open source Blockchain platform. The platform banks on the permissionless feature of Blockchain technology to provide a solution for Decentralized Financing.

Solana comes at a time when the Blockchain technology is facing heavy challenges and criticism. The biggest challenge of blockchain technology is what we call the Blockchain Trilemma. The Blockchain Trilemma talks about the trade off that Blockchain developers needs to decide on when developing a Blockchain platform. The Trilemma talks about the three main components of Blockchain technology, the SCALABILITY, SECURITY AND DECENTRALIZATION. It is very difficult for a platform to completely achieve these three facet and so developers need to decide a trade off between this 3. Take for example the first and leading Blockchain platform which is BITCOIN that was developed in 2009. The company had to choose Security and Decentralization as opposed to Scalability. The speed of carrying out a transaction on Bitcoin is very slow.

SOLANA there comes to solve the problem of Blockchain Trilemma by using it's unique one of a kind Consensus protocol known as Proof of History. We will talk about it later in details.

The native currency of the Solana Blockchain is called SOL. It is used to carry out transactions on the Solana platform. At the time of this post, the following information was true about Solana

• Price: $98.01
• Rank: 6
• Market Cap: $32,666,040,726
• Volume 24h: $1,378,661,674
• Circulating Supply: 333,703,163.09 SOL.

HISTORY OF SOLANA BLOCKCHAIN

Solana is a pretty new Blockchain that was created in 2017. The founder of Solana is no other person than Anatoly Yakovenko. Anatoly has a very rich history when it comes to the tech industry. He started a very fruitful career in the tech company known as Qualcomm. His journey in this company was very successful as he moved up the ranks in the company to become in a senior staff in a very short time.

^Source"

And then in the year 2017 he started working on the Solana project along side some members from the Qualcomm company. However the Solana project and SOL token was officially in the year 2020

WHY IS IT YOUR FAVORITE BLOCKCHAIN

As I have earlier mentioned in this post, Solana Blockchain was introduced to me through the course taught in this academy and ever since then I have loved the platform. Below are some of the reasons I love this platform.

1. Speed. One of the biggest difficulties faced by different Blockchain platform is the problem of speed in executing transactions. It takes approximately 10 minutes to validate a transaction on the world leading crypto currency, Bitcoin and 15seconds to five minutes on Ethereum Blockchain. With Solana block more than 65,000 transactions are validated per second. That is super fast to carry out transaction using Solana.

2. Tackling the Blockchain Trilemma. Due it's high speed of 65,000 transactions per second, it has made the Blockchain network highly Scalable. Also, the Solana Blockchain is highly secured and decentralized. It is seen to have tackled the issue of Trilemma through its Proof of History consensus mechanism and thus attracting new users daily.

3. Low Cost of Transactions. Another unique characteristics of the Solana Blockchain is it's low cost of carrying out transactions as compared to other platforms.

4. A good platform for DeFi applications. Solana due to its speed, security, decentralization and low cost of transaction has serve as an attraction to many developers and DeFi projects. The boom in the NFTs Market has given rise to more and more DeFi applications on the Solana mainnet.

5. Growth of the platform. As I did mention before, the mainnet of Solana was released to the public in 2020. The Currency ended the year at about $2 and that's the same value that started in 2021. And just within the year 2021 the price of Solana skyrocketed to over $200. An amazing growth within a very short time and this is potential of growth for this platform.

EARLIER SHORTCOMINGS OF SOLANA BLOCKCHAIN

Solana like any other project in life and the Blockchain technology is not void of shortcomings. I will be discussing the earlier shortcomings of Solana in this section.

Outage.

By far the greatest of Solana early shortcomings was the Outage. Solana Blockchain has experience a series of outage since it's conception in 2017 till date. The first most pronounce of these Outage was in the month of September 2021 when the Solana Blockchain went offline for over 17 hours. During this period, the Solana team worked tirelessly to bring the system back to it's full operation.

The CEO and co- founder of SOLANA Anatoly Yakovenko said it was as a result of increased transactions that was experience by the platform that resulted to the crash. The system was brought back to live within 24 hours but this had seen a significant fall in prices of SOL from about $190 to $130 as most holders of the coin decided to dump the coin in light of the news.

Also, several outage has been reported in 2022 and the reason still attributed to the rise in number of users and developers. A growth rate that wasn't really anticipated by the SOLANA team. These Outage are having negative effects on the Blockchain network as the prices are falling significantly.

WHAT CHANGES DO YOU THINK WILL MAKE THE SOLANA BLOCKCHAIN BETTER

Stability
The Solana Blockchain has faced numerous Criticism and set backs in recent months and one of its main difficulties/setback is the numerous outage experience by the network.
These numerous outage are making the platform to lose it's pedestals as one of the fastest growing DeFi platform.

If there's one thing I will love to see that is change on this platform is to bring about stability in the platform. Reduce or better still stop the frequency of outage experience on the platform. The outage is causing the market to loose it's steam and momentum which is super bad for future Investors.

Truly Decentralized
We all know that the Solana Blockchain is a Decentralized Blockchain platform. However, it has faced numerous Criticism as to if it is truly Decentralized as it is believed that most of the token of SOL are in the hands of a few persons or investors know as whales. Most of the token supply are owned by investment companies and venture capitalist.

I will wish to see that the Solana team device a strategy to truly Decentralized the network and discourage the existence of Whales on the platform.

WRITE ABOUT A PROJECT THAT IS BUILT ON YOUR FAVORITE BLOCKCHAIN

SERUM

^Source"

The project on Solana I will love to talk about is the SERUM project. So SERUM is a Decentralized Exchange platform that was build on the Solana Blockchain. These Decentralized applications allows traders to buy and sell various Crypto currencies.

As an application or a project on the SOLANA network, SERUM benefits from the high speed of carrying out transactions on its platform. SERUM tries to mirror the traditional trading/exchange method where by buyers are matched against Sellers by using a Decentralized Orderbook. This allows price flexibility and allow traders to decide on the prices they want to trade with.

Cross-chain interoperability. One of the unique features of Serum is it's interoperability or cross-chain utility. Serum allows traders or it's users to be able to trade tokens or coins that are built on other platforms like Ethereum, Polkadot, Terra Luna just to name a few.

The native native crypto currency of Serum is the SRM. It derives it value from the utilization of the currency on the platform as a means of payment or transfer fees. The advantage of using Serum is that it reduces the cost of transactions on the platform. Another unique token to the Serum is the Mega serum (MGSRM) that is obtain by locking 1million Serum SRM. Apparently it is more beneficial to lock token this way.

At the time of writing this post, the following information could be gotten about the SRM currency.

• Price: $2.13
• Rank: 114
• Market Cap: $559,171,925
• Volume 24h: $80,921,050
• Circulating Supply: 263,244,669.00 SRM

Brief History of Serum

Serum platform was created in the year 2020 by two unique organization, the Alamada Research and FTX exchange. After conception, they decided that to run it on the Solana Blockchain so as to be able to benefits from SOLANAs properties of fast and cheap transactions.

The main person behind the development of Serum and also the FTX exchange was no other than Sam Bankman-Fried.

CONCLUSION

Conclusively, it can be seen that the Solana Blockchain is truly an amazing platform that came in to help bring the world of Blockchain technology by trying to solve the biggest challenge faced by Blockchain, the Trilemma. Due to its Increase in speed and low cost of transaction, it has attracted alot DeFi applications and investors like the Serum exchange platform.

However, it is facing difficult times as the rapid Increase in the use of the platform is causing frequent Outage. This truly has adverse effect on the growth of the platform has prices are seen do fall drastically in recent times.

Thank you for taking out time to read.