Emily Clarke

What is Solana?

If you're new to cryptocurrencies, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by all the jargon you're learning. Coins, tokens, blockchain, Bitcoin - where do you even start? It's perfectly normal to feel this way, and in fact, many experienced cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investors sometimes have a hard time keeping up. One of the latest terms you may hear thrown around is Solana, but this is one you should pay attention to if you're in the business of trading and investing cryptocurrencies or you monitor crypto markets overall.

Solana as a Platform

Solana is a decentralized platform for blockchain hosting. While the Solana Foundation runs the project behind the platform, the blockchain itself was developed by San Francisco-based Solana Labs. If you've done any research into cryptocurrencies lately, you've probably come across a Solana price feed API on an exchange website. A Solana price feed API is a way to get current pricing info from the Solana blockchain integrated into other websites. Solana is often abbreviated as SOL on exchange APIs.

When buying, selling or trading Solana, fractional amounts can be used. Lamports are amounts that equal 0.000000001 SOL, demonstrating that Solana can be split into minute values for trading and investing. There is a limit of 511.6 million Solana tokens available, and of those, over 350 million have been obtained so far.

The Benefits of Solana

Solana is touted as having several benefits and advantages over other blockchains, including Ethereum. Many cryptocurrency enthusiasts say that Solana is faster than Ethereum and similar technologies, but Solana also has lower transaction fees. This last point is important as heavy traders and investors can incur massive fees that eat into returns fairly quickly with enough trading volume.

Like Ethereum, Solana can make use of smart contracts. These are technologies that cause actions to be executed once certain actions trigger a response. These actions are decided upon ahead of time by all parties to a smart contract. In most cases, actions like trades will be executed once a certain cryptocurrency reaches a specific price.

Author Resource:-

Emily Clarke writes about global equities markets, commodities prices, forex rates and more. You can find her thoughts at advanced analytics blog.