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# System prepended metadata

title: Solana

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# Solana

## History
Solana’s founder and CEO is Anatoly Yakovenko.

Yakovenko was instrumental in developing the technology found in all our smartphones during his 12 years at Qualcomm.

## What is it
Solana is a high-performance cryptocurrency blockchain which supports smart contracts and decentralized applications. It uses a proof of stake consensus mechanism with a low barrier to entry along with timestamped transactions to maximize efficiency.

In contrast to other similar projects such as Polkadot and Ethereum 2.0 (once it is released), Solana is a single blockchain (layer 1) and does not delegate operations to other attached chains (layer 2).

## How Does It Work

The core component of the Solana protocol is proof-of-history, a sequence of computations that provides a digital record that confirms that an event has occurred on the network at any point in time.

It allocates different tasks to different nodes on the network as needed to optimize speed, and all transactions are timestamped to ensure they are correct. This means that a cluster of nodes (Solana Cluster) could be responsible for hosting a DeFi platform such as Uniswap, and another Solana Cluster could be responsible for processing microtransactions made in Decentraland’s virtual world. This makes Solana decentralized, scalable, and secure without compromise.

## Tokenomics
SOL is a cryptocurrency native to the Solana blockchain. It is burned to pay for fees on the Solana network. SOL can also be staked to become a blockchain node.

In the future, SOL will be used to vote on changes to Solana. At the time of writing it is unclear whether SOL is inflationary or deflationary due to conflicting documentation, though it appears to be deflationary.

There will be more than 500 million tokens released in circulation with the current total supply of Solana exceeding 511 million tokens — Solana’s circulating supply is just over half that. Around 60% of SOL tokens are controlled by Solana’s founders and the Solana Foundation, with only 38% reserved for the community.

## Roadmap

Solana does not currently have a clearly defined roadmap. The last roadmap they provided reveals that they missed just about every single milestone by a longshot. This is not without reason, however. Anatoly Yakovenko noted in March this year that just about everything that could have gone wrong with Solana’s development did. Solana’s main net is consequently still in beta.


## News
The Solana blockchain is back up and running after last weekend's glitch, the latest in a string of crypto network outages that have occurred in less than a year. As a result of a misconfigured node within the system, validators were unable to process blocks, and Solana's network experienced another outage.
This is not the first time a glitch has briefly shut down Solana's network. The support system for the digital asset experienced a four-hour outage in June. Blackouts and service problems that lasted as long as 18 hours in January infuriated traders, who watched the value of their portfolios fall while unable to sell their tokens.