Solana is becoming one of the world's most popular and well-known blockchain projects, spanning itself across DeFi, NFTs, Web3, and much more. It's the world's fastest-running blockchain and the fastest crypto ecosystem. Solana scales for global adoption by ensuring composability between ecosystem projects. Something being composable in simplified terms is the ability of dApps or DAOs to clone and integrate one another effectively, and for software components like tokens and messages to exchange and make use of information between them. Solana does this by maintaining a single global state as the network scales.

“Solana’s design allows great scalability without compromising the transaction and timestamp speed.”

Solana's design allows excellent scalability, which is one's ability to process and store a large number of transactions without compromising the transaction and timestamp speed. They do this by having a leading node (a computer) or the main network that can create paths and communication for other networks, which is chosen on the PoS mechanism.

PoS (proof of stake) is a mechanism that processes transactions and creates new blocks in a blockchain, which reduces the overall workload, resulting in an increased throughput even without a centralized and exact time source. Scalability transactions are at a constant low cost, and network speed is of utmost importance; your transactions are always safe as the network is spread out over thousands of nodes.

Of course, Solana's low gas fees, which are possible through a lower block time (time taken to verify a transaction and create a new block) and high block size (the number of transactions a block can be filled with), make it a great choice. Yet Solana may also not be as decentralized as it could be.

The potential for a cryptocurrency to succeed increases exponentially with every node that participates in running the network. The more nodes, the more decentralized. In Solana's case, they rely solely on one, Solana Foundation, as a central point of control, therefore reducing its decentralization. Solana also has 77% of its tokens (virtual currency) held by insiders and an additional 13% reserved as incentives for future development, leaving a tiny sliver of tokens available to the public. Hopefully, over time, more tokens will become publicly available, allowing crypto holders to put their digital assets to work and earn a passive income without selling a less centralized process.

Solana has hit the ground running with its token prices reaching for the sky. It could be broken down to their block time being 400 milliseconds, compared to Ethereum's 10 seconds. So it's evident Solana can provide quick transactions (with these giant blocks to contain them) and low gas fees, but what else can they offer?

Solana uses proof of history, which means adding a time stamp to each block, so they know what order to process in, additionally using cryptographic proof to validate the time. You can organize these validated blocks after they have been received based on a time stamp. Solana's validators run parallel to their smart contracts allowing you to do multiple activities at once - imagine you had three chores like the dishes, vacuuming, and food shopping. There is no way you can do them all simultaneously, but with parallel smart contracts, you would be able to.

Solana has become one of the biggest cryptocurrencies in the world, alongside Ethereum and Bitcoin, but recently it's been suffering. With the plummeting pricing the crypto market has experienced, Solana has been left with no mercy; at an all-time high in November of 2021 - 260 dollars per coin - it has now dropped 85% to a fluctuating $30.

“A 17-hour outage took place in September of 2021 which was later classified as a ‘denial of service attack’.”

To go along with the string of bad luck, Solana has recently suffered multiple outages. The first outage was in December of 2020 and lasted 6 hours. The outage implied that everting network in the system had the same bug. A 17-hour outage occurred in September of 2021, later classified as a 'denial of service attack.' Solana has suffered five outages since then and most recently sustained another 4 hours of outages. Apps on Solanas blockchain were taken offline as a result.

The question now is how many outages can Solana sustain? How much longer can Solana and its users suffer these outages? Can a more sturdy solution be added to prevent these outages, or is this the downfall of Solana?

To end it on more positive news, Solana recently overtook Ethereum in transaction activity, where Solana saw almost 630,000 transactions in the last seven days, and Ethereum saw 500,000. So is this a new start to a greater and more popular Solana?

Being in control of our data surely is a desire we all have, especially in today's day and age where you mention, let's say, black boots and suddenly get an ad for black boots on your Instagram. Well, Near Protocol wants to help by building the infrastructure for the new internet, making it harder for companies to steal your data. Thus making it as easy as possible for developers to create and launch dApps. Near has made an effort to be the easiest in the world for developers and end-users alike. All while still providing the required scalability that motivates many to invent, explore and create new decentralized experiences.

“Near uses a delegated proof of stake consensus called Doom Slug- the delegated part meaning that if you don’t have the means to set up your own validator, you’re able to lend your coins to someone who can. ”

Near also utilizes Nightshade, a sharding mechanism where the network's infrastructure is split into multiple segments. Each shard has 100 seats for validators, allowing the nodes (computers) to only have to handle a fraction of the transaction, ultimately speeding up the transaction process. This method has permitted Near to process 100,000 transactions per second. Quite impressive, right? So remarkable that this is the method that Ethereum 2.0 is supposedly adopting.

Near has many applications to make the process of using Near much more accessible, such as Rainbow Bridge, allowing easy transfers between Ethereum. Near also has Aurora, a layer 2 (a layer of networks built on top of other blockchains) solution built on Near Protocol. It's intended for developers to launch their ETH dApps on Near's network as it has lower gas fees but still easily links any ETH smart contracts. I mean seems like almost the perfect collaboration.