Loom renamed to Solana
To avoid confusion with the Ethereum-based Loom Network, we've renamed our project to Solana. Why Solana? We're proudly paying homage to the most beautiful place we've lived, Solana Beach, California. The cofounders have fond memories of surfing mushy waves at Fletcher Cove 🌊🦈🌊 and enjoying much grub and grog at Pizza Port just around the corner. 🍺🍕🍺
New in v0.4.0-beta
Solana's TPS Report: now processing 35,000 transactions per second
This release offers a 700% increase in transaction throughput, from 5ktps to 35ktps, over the v0.3.0 release while also laying the groundwork for a slew of new optimizations. Thanks to the new streamer functionality contributed by @aeyakovenko, input to the server is already I/O bound and able to consistently pull transactions off the wire at over 700ktps!
Introducing smart contracts
We added a highly-constrained, but surprisingly flexible form of smart contracts called spending plans to the blockchain. We can represent postdated checks, cancellations of those checks, transaction expirations, and witness signatures.
Sunny days ahead for Solana
35ktps is just the beginning and we're optimistic about our odds of improving that by another 10x in the near-term. Here's why:
Consensus with OCC (no relation to Orange County)
Solana's soon-to-come consensus mechanism, that relies on our unique Proof of History blockchain format, won't degrade performance. We're happily moving forward under the same technical constraints of a centralized system. As we approach our theoretical maximum of 710,000 transactions we'll trade throughput for availability, but that's it!
Blockchain format updated for parallel verification
One of the most exciting aspects of Proof of History is that it allows for parallel verification. We're working to extend that property to all aspects of blockchain verification, including accounting and our smart contracts. Here's some of the changes we made:
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We've moved to a token encoding where the maximum number of tokens can be represented within a signed 64-bit integer. The new format means that we can apply the highly parallel map-reduce technique to calculating balances without spilling into multi-word integers.
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We've relaxed the ledger entry format such that transactions may be added without requiring serialization via a hash from the Proof of History hash chain. That means we get to start shipping huge batches of transactions to GPU for verification. Four thousand cores at our disposal!