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Solana has gained significant attention as a next-generation, highly scalable blockchain, largely due to its exceptional performance capabilities that can handle thousands of transactions per second with almost no fees. One of the key elements of Solana's advanced technology is its execution environment, the Solana Virtual Machine, which includes the Sealevel parallelization engine.
Solana VM protocol presents a comprehensive solution to various challenges, primarily categorized as transactional challenges and ecosystem access challenges.
The Solana Virtual Machine, also referred to as the Solana Virtual Machine, is the execution environment that processes transactions and smart contracts or programs on the Solana network. To fully understand the Solana Virtual Machine, it's important to first grasp the function of a virtual machine within a cryptocurrency network.
In blockchain technology, a virtual machine (VM) is a software platform that acts as a runtime environment to execute smart contracts for a crypto network. When a transaction is submitted, the network's virtual machine processes it and manages the state of the blockchain (the current status of the entire network), impacted by this transaction's execution. The VM specifies the rules for modifying the network's state.
During transaction processing, the VM translates the smart contract code into a format executable by the validators' hardware. On Solana, the primary languages for developing smart contracts are Rust, C, and C++. These are compiled into BPF bytecode by the Solana Virtual Machine, enhancing the efficiency of transaction execution by the network’s validators.
The inherent differences in transactional structures between Ethereum and Solana have posed challenges for Ethereum dApp developers seeking to leverage the innovative transactional capabilities of Solana. Until now, there has not been a viable solution that enables seamless integration between the two ecosystems.
Much like mobile app developers historically faced the dilemma of developing for both Android and iOS platforms to access wider markets, Ethereum dApp developers have had to custom tailor their applications to target additional Layer 1 (L1) markets. However, this process often required significant effort due to the specialized nature of Ethereum's programming language, Solidity, and the unique tooling associated with it.
Solana VM protocol addresses this issue by providing a transformative solution for cross-L1 blockchain development. Analogous to cross-platform mobile app development tools like Xamarin and Flutter, Solana VM enables dApp developers to migrate their applications from Ethereum to Solana with minimal adjustments to their existing codebase.
By bridging the gap between Ethereum and Solana, Solana VM opens up Solana's expansive user base to Ethereum dApps, fostering interoperability and expanding the reach of decentralized applications across disparate blockchain ecosystems. This interoperability not only simplifies the development process for Ethereum dApp developers but also unlocks new opportunities for collaboration and innovation within the decentralized finance space.
Ethereum continues to lead as a blockchain protocol for smart contracts, offering an advanced infrastructure conducive to app development. Yet, its throughput faces limitations, capping at about 58 transactions per second (TPS) currently, while sidechains such as Polygon achieve a maximum of 470 TPS.
Ethereum's technical limitations partly arise from its state representation and update mechanisms. The Ethereum state is depicted by a Merkle-Patricia Trie, storing key-value pairs pertinent to all smart contracts, which are often composed in Solidity. These contracts lack independent references to shared data and their code, necessitating sequential execution to maintain deterministic outcomes, thus bottlenecking throughput. This sequential necessity slows transaction speeds during peak network usage, and gas prices tend to surge as users compete for transaction processing, rendering Ethereum inefficient and expensive for certain decentralized applications (dApps).
Layer 2 (L2) scaling solutions native to Ethereum aim to address these issues by transferring transactions from the Layer 1 (L1) mainnet and batching them together. Rollups, a popular form of L2 scaling, have shown to significantly mitigate gas costs, reportedly by as much as 100 times and more commonly by about tenfold.
In stark contrast, Solana is architected to enable substantial scaling of decentralized applications. It boasts a theoretical maximum throughput exceeding 50,000 TPS, with a live mainnet record of 5184 TPS. Solana's pioneering includes a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, augmented by a Proof-of-History protocol, which permits parallel transaction processing. This approach effectively utilizes computational resources and allows for scalability across various CPUs and SSDs. Additionally, Solana's mempool system is refined to enhance throughput rates.
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These technical advancements position Solana to compete favorably against both L1 and L2 protocols. For instance, while Ethereum's average transaction fee for ETH transfers hovers around $2, L2 solutions offer reduced fees ranging from $0.5 to $0.1, translating to a savings of 4 to 20 times. By comparison, the average fee for a transaction on the Solana network is approximately 0.00001 SOL ($0.0002), offering a staggering 10,000-fold reduction in costs.
Solana has garnered significant interest as a trailblazing blockchain platform noted for its scalability and high performance, with the capacity to process thousands of transactions per second at negligible costs. At the heart of Solana's technological prowess is its execution environment, the Solana Virtual Machine (Solana VM), which incorporates the Sealevel parallelization engine.
This discussion delves into the Solana Virtual Machine and the way its cutting-edge framework empowers the Solana blockchain to outperform conventional EVM-based blockchains, such as Ethereum, in terms of efficiency.