The blockchain industry is still in its early stages, with smart contracts and decentralised applications mainly used to handle digital assets. However, as the technology develops and the foundation is put in place for mainstream adoption, more developers are working on scalable solutions to make blockchains faster and handle more transactions.
One such project is Solana (SOL). You might be wondering what is SOL? Solana describes itself as a “high-performance blockchain that’s fast, secure, and future-proof based out of San Francisco.” The project aims to be one of the first fully functioning blockchains that can potentially handle millions of users at once.
Solana uses the Proof of History consensus mechanism instead of Proof of Work or Proof of Stake to achieve this goal. This mechanism will allow for a throughput that approaches 50,000 transactions per second (TPS), or 10x what Ethereum can currently handle (though this number may change depending on how many validators are running on the network).
It also helps that Solana has some big names behind it: Matthew Roszak, who was an early investor in Ripple; former Facebook engineer Evan Cheng; Qualcomm veteran Naveed Sherwani; Cisco veteran Eric Wu; and most recently Steve Kokinos from Redpoint Ventures have all joined as advisors since their last update in February 2018.
Solana launched their testnet back in August 2017 with plans to launch their main net sometime later this year. It will be interesting to see how they fare against projects like VISANet or SWIFT when they eventually go live with a real product—and whether other cryptos 2.0 platforms like NEO or EOS come up with similar scaling solutions; before then!
How to Buy Solana?
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that Solana is giving some tough competition to prominent cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. It seems promising crypto; if you decide to buy it, then here’s how to buy SOL.
Step 1: Get a Solana Wallet
The first step to buying Solana is getting a wallet to store Solana. You need a place to store your SOL, so it’s ready when you decide to make a trade.
Step 2: Get Some SOL!
The second step is acquiring some coins. To do this, you can go to an exchange like CryptoBridge and purchase them there. Most exchanges will require verification before you can buy from them; it’s often as easy as verifying your email address (or social media account) and then setting up two-factor authentication for extra security. Once you’ve purchased your coins, move them into your new wallet for safekeeping, and don’t forget about the 30 confirmations that need to happen before they’re fully transferred!
Step 3: Trade Your Coins for Stuff!
Now that you have your coins in a working wallet, the fun part begins—trading them for other things! Like with any cryptocurrency, if you want to trade what you have for something else (for example, USD or another cryptocurrency), there are exchanges such as CryptoBridge where you can do that too!
Why Should I Buy SOL?
SOL is a solid option for long-term investors. The project is young, but its tokenomics are potent, and its potential use cases are numerous. It could potentially become a vital blockchain platform and be as ubiquitous as Ethereum or NEO one day.
At this early stage, the value of SOL tokens is likely to grow in both the short term and the mid-term. Since SOL’s ICO has ended, the circulating supply is much smaller than it was at the time of the sale, and even now, months after that point’s conclusion, initial investors have not yet sold all of their tokens.
This means that a large group of buyers are looking to buy more tokens because they believe in the project’s future success. Over time, this demand will pull up prices; with more people looking to buy than sell (which currently seems to be the case), it seems likely that prices will increase over at least a few months, if not longer.
SOL is also relatively cheap at current prices than larger competitors such as Ethereum or NEO, which has led many people to wonder what SOL offers for such a low price tag when these other platforms offer much less utility in exchange for far higher costs.
If you’re considering buying into Solana for your portfolio and want to know why it deserves your consideration—or if you’re just seeking information about what makes Solana so special—it can help to understand how all three types of value work together here: economic value, utility value, and exchange value (known collectively as total addressable market cap).
Wisdom Words
Investors love Solana because the project is open-source, and the leadership team has a proven track record of success.
The best long-term investments are in projects with a strong development team with a track record of success. The Solana project is open-source, with the leadership team having proven themselves in the past by creating successful projects like DFINITY, which has a market cap of over $700 million at the time of writing.
As blockchain technology becomes more and more mainstream, the number of different uses will only continue to grow. An open-source protocol that can process thousands of transactions per second globally is sure to be useful for many other applications.
If you’re looking for a good investment opportunity, check out Solana’s whitepaper and website so you can see how they’re better equipped than their competition to become the backbone of blockchain technology around the world!
