Disclaimer: These are my personal views. Nothing here is financial advice. I’m learning in public, and I might be wrong about some things. If you spot an error, hit that “Suggest Changes” link above and let me know.
About the Author
I’m Ashish Jaiswal, CTO at Obmondo — we help you monitor your server with 29 Euro a month. My day job is infrastructure, Kubernetes, and keeping systems alive. But I’m also deeply curious about decentralized systems, and that curiosity led me down the Solana rabbit hole.
What Is Solana?
If you’ve heard of Ethereum, think of Solana as its speed-obsessed cousin. Solana is a Layer 1 blockchain — meaning it’s a standalone chain, not built on top of another one. It was created by Anatoly Yakovenko (ex-Qualcomm engineer) and launched in 2020.
The headline numbers:
- 400ms block times (Ethereum: ~12 seconds)
- Theoretical throughput of 65,000 TPS (transactions per second)
- Transaction fees under $0.01 (often fractions of a cent)
But speed is easy to claim. What makes Solana actually fast?
Proof of History (PoH)
This is Solana’s key innovation. Most blockchains waste time getting validators to agree on when things happened. Solana solves this with Proof of History — a cryptographic clock that creates a verifiable sequence of events before consensus happens.
Think of it like this: instead of everyone in a meeting arguing about what time it is, PoH gives everyone a synchronized watch before the meeting starts. Consensus becomes much faster because ordering is already established.
Under the hood, PoH is a sequential SHA-256 hash chain. Each hash takes the previous hash as input, creating an unforgeable record of time passage. Validators can verify the sequence in parallel, but it can only be generated sequentially — this is what makes it a reliable clock.
The Full Tech Stack
Solana doesn’t rely on just one trick. It’s a combination of eight innovations:
- Proof of History — cryptographic clock for ordering
- Tower BFT — PoH-optimized Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus
- Turbine — block propagation protocol (inspired by BitTorrent)
- Gulf Stream — mempool-less transaction forwarding
- Sealevel — parallel smart contract runtime
- Pipelining — transaction processing optimization
- Cloudbreak — horizontally-scaled accounts database
- Archivers — distributed ledger storage
Why Rust?
Solana programs (smart contracts) are written in Rust. This isn’t accidental. Rust gives you:
- Memory safety without garbage collection
- Predictable performance (no GC pauses)
- Zero-cost abstractions
- A strong type system that catches bugs at compile time
For a blockchain that processes thousands of transactions per second, these properties are non-negotiable. You can’t afford a garbage collector pausing your validator in the middle of consensus.
The Clawrouter Connection
This section is coming soon. I’m still putting together my thoughts on how Clawrouter fits into the Solana ecosystem and what I’ve learned building on it. Stay tuned.
Use Cases: What People Actually Build on Solana
DeFi (Decentralized Finance)
Solana’s speed makes it viable for financial applications that need near-instant settlement:
- Jupiter — DEX aggregator handling billions in volume
- Marinade Finance — liquid staking
- Raydium — AMM and liquidity provider
Low fees mean DeFi is accessible to regular users, not just whales who can afford $50 gas fees.
NFTs and Digital Assets
Solana became a major NFT chain because minting costs pennies instead of dollars. The ecosystem includes marketplaces, gaming assets, and digital collectibles.
Payments
Sub-second finality and near-zero fees make Solana practical for actual payments. Solana Pay integrates with point-of-sale systems, and Shopify has a Solana Pay plugin.
DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks)
This is where it gets interesting for infrastructure people like me:
- Helium — migrated to Solana for its IoT network
- Render Network — distributed GPU rendering
- Hivemapper — decentralized mapping
DePIN projects need high throughput and low fees because they’re processing data from thousands of physical devices.
Challenges: Let’s Be Honest
Network Outages
Solana has had multiple outages, and this is its biggest criticism. The network has gone down several times due to:
- Bot spam overwhelming validators
- Consensus bugs
- Resource exhaustion from NFT mints
To their credit, the team has addressed these issues. QUIC-based networking, priority fees, and local fee markets have significantly improved stability. But the track record is something to be aware of.
Hardware Requirements
Running a Solana validator is expensive. You need:
- 256 GB RAM (minimum, 512 GB recommended)
- 12+ core CPU
- NVMe SSDs
- High-bandwidth, low-latency networking
This raises centralization concerns. Not everyone can afford to run a validator, which concentrates power among well-funded operators.
Ecosystem Maturity
Solana’s tooling has improved dramatically, but it’s still younger than Ethereum’s ecosystem. Developer documentation, debugging tools, and libraries are good but not as battle-tested.
What’s Next for Solana
Firedancer
This is the big one. Jump Crypto is building Firedancer, an independent validator client written in C. Why does this matter?
- Client diversity — if a bug takes down one client, the other keeps the network running
- Performance — early benchmarks show Firedancer handling 1M+ TPS in test environments
- Validation — a second implementation validates the protocol specification
Token Extensions
Token Extensions (formerly Token-2022) add programmable features to SPL tokens:
- Transfer fees built into the token
- Confidential transfers
- Non-transferable tokens (soulbound)
- Interest-bearing tokens
This makes Solana more attractive for regulated financial products.
State Compression
Compressed NFTs on Solana can be minted for fractions of a cent by storing data in Merkle trees instead of individual accounts. This is enabling use cases that were economically impossible before — like giving every user in a game a unique on-chain asset.
Mobile Strategy
Solana’s mobile push (the Saga phone, the dApp Store) is a bet that crypto needs to meet users where they are — on their phones, not in browser extensions.
My Take
As someone who builds and operates infrastructure for a living, I find Solana technically fascinating. The engineering decisions — PoH, Sealevel’s parallel execution, Gulf Stream’s mempool-less design — are genuinely clever solutions to real problems.
Is it perfect? No. The outages are concerning, the hardware requirements create centralization pressure, and the “move fast” culture sometimes moves a little too fast. But the team ships at an impressive pace, and the ecosystem is maturing rapidly.
If you’re a developer curious about blockchain, Solana is worth exploring. The Rust foundation means you’re learning a valuable skill regardless, and the developer experience has gotten significantly better.
I’ll be writing more about my specific experience with Clawrouter and what I’ve learned building on Solana. If you have questions or want to discuss, find me on GitHub or LinkedIn.
This post is part of my “learning in public” series. I’ll update it as I learn more. If you found it useful, share it with someone who’s curious about Solana.