Solana

The development of the blockchain technology has made great progress in the last few years. However, issues of transaction speed and transaction costs prevent blockchain technology from becoming mainstream. The current low capacity of the main blockchain protocols and cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum), more specifically 10-30 transactions per second (TPS), cannot cover the world's commerce anytime. In contrast, Visa claims to have 56,000 TPS on its network, while Alipay has achieved 200,000 peaks TPS in November 2017. The scalability problem of the current blockchain-based systems poses significant limits for their extensive applications. How to scale up blockchain TPS without compromising its security and decentralisation remains elusive. In order to solve this problem, several projects have already launched the alternative protocols that aim to significantly increase the throughput of the blockchain protocols. For instance, EOS launched its infrastructure for dApps, which Test Network can sustain over 10,000 TPS. EOS raised $197M during its ICO in June 2017 and now is the 5th largest cryptocurrency in the world by market cap. IOTA is able to process 500-800 TPS, raised $400M and now 11th by market cap in the world of cryptocurrencies. That is why the potential growth and community attention to AERGO might be lower. Overall, the scalable protocols for dApss gain large public attention during token sales and have comparably high ROI. However, competition in this sphere of blockchain is more severe than in others, so it has to be taken into consideration.

Solana has a multinode testnet currently performing at 250k TPS, peaking at 400k TPS. Solana has a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in the form of a testnet launched in February,  boasting a highly active Github development. Their approach is based on “proof of history” and is an innovative approach to the consensus that doesn’t require all nodes in the network to confirm the transactions like, (BTC or ETH) it just requires that all agree that event A took place before event B.
Solana has released the first version of its testnet on February 2018. The second version is due to be released in June 2018. The public beta will be released by September 2018 and the mainnet launch will be scheduled for Q4 2018.

Solana uses a Proof-of-Stake (POS) consensus algorithm, together with a new mechanism called Proof-of-History (POH) as the scaling solution. POH is used in verifying order and passage of time between events, with the objective of encoding the trustless passage of time into a ledger. The POS algorithm will be used to validate and confirm the blocks produced by the POH generator.

Currently, the token details have not yet been publicly released. Solana is scheduled to release their tokens at the first quarter of 2019, which means that the token information would be released probably in Q3 2018.

Anatoly Yakovenko is the Founder and CEO of Solana. Anatoly worked as Senior Staff Engineer Manager at Qualcomm, after leaving Qualcomm, he began engineering distributed systems for Mesosphere and later, Dropbox. Anatoly holds 4 patents in his name, including one for the invention of a lossless data compression system that leverages recurrent neural networks. Greg Fitzgerald is Co-founder and CTO of Solana; he previously served as Senior Staff Software Engineer at Qualcomm.
Although Solana is still in the early stages, they have managed to form partnerships with two projects: GlobalID: An application that focuses on a reliable, safe, private way for all people to have an identification. Yaka Labs: Venture Capital firm that makes early round investments in exchange space startups