Brief Introduction Solana offers a new insight into blockchain architecture by combining a new mechanism known as Proof of History (PoH) along with Proof of State (PoS) to bring high availability throughout Solana’s distributed network. A permissionless network boasting to perform at 710k TPS, seems somewhat far-fetched, but hopefully after this write-up, a logical conclusion can be derived regarding the ambitious nature of this blockchain project. Proof of History is a sequence of computations on a secure hash function that provides a way to cryptographically verify time elapsed between two events. The process involves taking the hash computed by an iteration of the hash function and reusing it as the input for another iteration, while also periodically recording the current output, and how many times the hash function has been called. In addition to this, data can also be inserted into the sequence by appending the hash of the data to the previous state. Once appended, all other outputs are affected unpredictably, making the proof secure as it is impossible to generate desired hashes or create an alternative history given two identical hashes. An illustrative example of theoretical Proof of History is the newspaper; without loss of generality, consider the New York Times newspaper. A reader is confident that the various events published in the New York Times occurred before the newspaper was written. This is proof that time has passed between two append operations and that the creation of data comes before it is appended to the Proof of History sequence. One interesting thing about Proof of History is that the input to the Proof of History sequence can also be a reference to some previously acknowledged Proof of History state. This is like taking a photograph of yourself holding the New York Times (You act as the verifier with your signature - in this case, your physical presence) and a few days later, the New York Times publishes your photograph. While the Proof of History sequence can only be generated with a single CPU core, Solana allows parallelization of cores to assist in verification of the output. To give some perspective on this, a modern day GPU with 4000 cores can verify a second of Proof of History in 0.25 milliseconds. Solana’s underlying sequential design benefits from the aspect of horizontal scalability by synchronizing multiple Proof of History generators, and mixing their sequence states from each generator to each other generator. This scaling requires no sharding and ensures high probability of availability. Synchronizing the generators allows each generator to handle a portion of external traffic, thus the overall system can handle a larger amount of events to track. Furthermore, Solana utilizes Proof of Stake for voting, selecting the next PoH generator, and punishing misbehaving validators in the network. Solana’s Avalanche proof of stake system ensures efficient growth of the network with the increase of network connections per node. Strengths and Opportunities Solana’s multi-node testnet is live, performing at 140k -170k TPS Low finality times even as the network grows exponentially Higher performance smart contracts will bring favourable adoption to Solana Strong team composed of hardware enthusiasts, computer scientists, and marketing experts - professional experience working at Qualcomm, Dropbox, Google, CERN, Salesforce, and Intel Corporation Partnerships with GlobalID, Hard Yaka, and Helium Frequently updated Github repository Weaknesses and Threats Possibility of not-so-favourable incentives in the consensus protocol could lead to modified 51% attacks Threats exist for Proof of Replication Investing wise, uncertainty in token metrics might be unappealing for investors, especially for the long-term outlook Not-so-unique in terms of modelling consensus with aspect to time and being a permissionless network: Chia Network, Radix DLT, Spacemesh to name a few Verdict Solana is very zealous project, promising many improvements from current public blockchains in terms of speed and performance, which stand in the way of key adoption for global ecosystems to utilize blockchain technology. 710k TPS sounds very excessive for the average participant, but heavy performance-reliant infrastructures, such as exchanges and even distributed web services require such speeds. To fully comprehend Solana’s usage, it requires insight into the future when decentralised exchanges and decentralised web services and storage are available. From that perspective, Solana aims to eliminate high markup and human capital costs. On the other hand, there are a few unanswered questions regarding consensus model and token economics for Solana. There is an investor appeal and popularity trend around Solana as a project; however, the Token Generation Event is still far from launching (Q1 2019) and little information is made available regarding token metrics. With that being said, the team is delivering and constantly bringing updates to the community and personally with the long term prospect in mind, I think this has great potential. I will enter a conservative amount, long term position.