Solana was officially launched in March 2020 by the Solana Foundation headquartered in Geneva (Switzerland). Like Ethereum and others, Solana aims to use smart contract technology to create decentralized applications (dApps) – however defers in its design principles to address common problems with the earlier blockchains such as transaction settlement speed and bandwidth.
Among those design principles, Solana utilizes proof of history timing mechanism within a proof of stake protocol structure. This concept allows for greater scalability of Solana, which in turn boosts usability.
The native programming language in Solana is Rust – emphasizing performance and reliability over ease of use. This means that developing for Solana is harder than Ethereum (which uses Solidity), but also can produce more reliable dApps.
Solana aims positions itself as an incredibly fast, secure, and scalable blockchain network with low transaction costs when executing transaction and smart contract.