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

Hello everyone Steemit Crypto Academy Community. Today I want to share with you this presentation about a Network that I believe has come to change the rules of the game, its name: SOLANA.

Let's start

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1. Tell us about your favorite Blockchain network, its history, and why it's your favorite.

SOLANA is not just a Blockchain Network but an entire ecosystem developed by Anatoly Yakovenko Greg Fitzgerald between 2017 and 2020 under the project known as Solana Labs.

If we wanted to define SOLANA in a few words, they would be speed and low-cost fees.

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Solana is designed to offer financial solutions as well as being a blockchain platform that allows the development of Dapps through its open-source code.

Its improved scalability is due to the use of a hybrid and unique consensus protocol which unites the proof of history (POH) and Proof of stake (POS) protocols. Due to this approach, Solana offers low fees that attract not only institutions but also small retailers, as well as very fast verification times.

To put this in context, the VISA network is capable of theoretically performing up to 24,000 transactions per second; while Solana can perform between 65,000 and 7,100,000 transactions per second. Article

On the other hand, the commissions for using the Solana Network are very low, and I want to show you a simple and straightforward example taken from my Binance account. Through this account, we will compare the prices of the rates when trying to transfer USDT through different networks.

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As we can see the Solana Network is highly efficient with a waiting time of fewer than 5 minutes and a commission of only 1 USD. The uni that compares to it is TRON.

On the other hand, we can see the Ethereum network which has a minimum commission of 10 USD. The Matic network on the other hand, although it also has a low commission, has a long waiting time of 10 minutes.

Regarding the Solana site, as we can see there are several options in its interface related to the Network, validators, and community. However, the central part of this site is all the resources for developers who want to build their apps or smart contracts within the Solana network.

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2. Does the network has some earliest shortcomings and how has the network's team taken care of the problem?.

To tell the truth, Solana is a pioneer project in many aspects, and along with the innovations will also come to some inconveniences, some of them have been found in its new Hybrid Consensus Protocol, which, being a beta version in its beginnings, presented several bugs and errors.

More recently, on January 23rd of this year, Solana made public a series of failures in its network, specifically the rollback of some transactions and even the duplication of some of them.

According to some experts, the failures occurred due to a saturation of Solana's main network. Almost immediately the developers of the project released an updated version 1.8.14 which was intended to solve most of the problems. Article

Similarly, in September of last year, the network experienced a 17-hour outage due to congestion.

One thing I have noticed is that the Solana developers have been overwhelmed by the unexpected network boom and public adoption, so they have been constantly upgrading the network.

3. What changes do you think would make the network better?.

I think Solana's main flaw is that it is a network that for the sake of speed has had to sacrifice decentralization. That's right, Solana is a network that tends to be centralized because of its reduced number of nodes.

This is due to the fact that there are not many validators... don't get me wrong, anyone can be a Solana validator, however, the demands from the point of view of computer resources are high.

Solana is currently a layer 1 Blockchain, so an improvement could be to add an extra layer or side chains as in the case of Polkadot so that the main network could be further decentralized by adding more nodes and more verifiers without congesting or slowing down the verification process on a single chain.

4. Write about a Project that is built on your favorite Blockchain.

As some of my friends know, I am a musician; specifically, I play drums, and guitar, I want to learn piano, and once in a while I even write a song. For this reason, a project built in Solana that caught my attention is Audius.

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Audius is a Dapp music streaming provider but at the same time a tool for music creators (like me) where we can share our music and link up with other musicians in the community to collaborate on musical works in a totally decentralized environment.

Some of the strengths of Audius within the Solana network are as follows:

"Cheap: Offering around 1M transactions for $10.
Fast: Block times are 400ms, with confirmations often under 1 second.
Live: Mainnet has been live for nearly 8 months and processed nearly 5B transactions.
Decentralized: With over 180 nodes on mainnet, and over 500 on testnet " ^Source

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For this and many other reasons, my favorite blockchain network at the moment is Solana.

Gracias por leer, y por sus comentarios. / Thank you for reading, and for your comments.