In an interview with Cointelegrapah, Solana CEO and founder Anatoly Yakovenko, explained the reason behind the initiative.
“We recently saw market failures due to congestion on Ethereum, including oracle failures.”
Yakovenko further explained the benefits offered by Chainlink:
“What we’re building with Chainlink is a high-frequency oracle that can give a price update every 400 milliseconds — and because of our capacity, we shouldn’t see those kinds of market failures on our network. It’s solving a fundamental problem that we see in the decentralized exchange space.”
Ethereum blockchain, as of date, remains the most preferred network for DApps, despite facing congestion in September 2019 primarily due a huge inflow of Tether (USDT) trades.
Late last year, co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced that completion of Istanbul fork would enable Ethereum blockchain to validate 3,000 transactions per second (TPS). Solana boasts of facilitating 60,000 TPS.
Basically Solana, being a layer-one blockchain solution, intends to facilitate scaling without sharding. Yakovenko explained how Solana is able to ensure scalability:
“We are scaling with hardware with Moore’s Law. We’re like a non-sharded layer, one that’s ridiculously scaled.”
Solana successfully sold 8 million of its native crypto, SOL coin, with a 90% price guarantee, in a Dutch format Coinlist bidding process two days back.
The auction is backed by a 90% price guarantee by Solana, as per the firm’s COO Raj Gokal.
Pointing to prevailing volatility in the market, Gokal expressed his happiness over successful sale of tokens by Solana.
The company sold 1.6% of 500,000,000 SOL tokens representing entire supply of the venture.
Gokal stated: “We cleared the auction at $0.22.”
He further detailed that “Everyone gets the same price at the end. The bids came in from anywhere between $4 and $0.04 in pre-bidding, and by the time the price got down to $0.22 — that was where there was enough demand to clear the 8 million tokens that were available.”
In essence, the market attained equilibrium with the ready supply, establishing itself at a price of $0.22, matching the highest price participants in bidding process were interested in paying, while still guaranteeing the sale of entire 8 million coins that were offered.
Through this process, Solana raised a minimum of $1.76 million from the auction.
The amount raised could have been slightly higher due to better price realization, Gokal opined. Yakovenko also detailed the guarantee, intended to protect investors, given by Solana for staking.
Regarding Solana’s SOL coin, Raj Gokal explained the need to stake tokens for 90% price guarantee:
“It’s actually continuously redeemable for 90% of the auction clearing price, for 12 months — but the only way to register for this price guarantee is to actually stake your tokens. We have record on-chain of that registration, and then it requires continuous staking from the registration to the time that you want to redeem for that 90% price guarantee.”
Solana’s guarantee seems to have been structured with an aim of safeguarding investors’ interests when tokens lose their value in the first year of listing. Furthermore, when SOL gets listed on exchanges, buyers will be able to receive the same price guarantee in case they purchase SOL cryptos via exchanges. Gokal stated that the price guarantee will “be accessible for the next year.”
Likewise, the COO stated that “registrations will be accessible for the next three months, even on exchanges.”
Claimed to be a regulatory-compliant cryptocurrency sales platform, Coinlist, on its own, invested $9.2 million as a portion of funding round.