Solana: A new architecture for a high performance blockchain

This whitepaper introduces Solana, a novel blockchain architecture designed to achieve high throughput and low latency without resorting to sharding or Layer 2 solutions. The core innovation lies in its Proof-of-History (PoH) mechanism, a verifiable delay function that creates a cryptographically secure, high-frequency clock across the distributed network. PoH enables nodes to agree on the order of events without relying on timestamps from other nodes, thereby significantly increasing transaction processing speed. Complementing PoH, Solana integrates other architectural advancements including Tower BFT (a PoH-optimized version of PBFT), Gulf Stream (a mempool-less transaction forwarding protocol), Sealevel (a parallel smart contract runtime), and Turbine (a block propagation protocol). The combination of these innovations aims to overcome traditional blockchain bottlenecks, claiming to achieve tens of thousands of transactions per second and sub-second finality. This paper outlines a distinct approach to blockchain scalability, emphasizing internal architectural optimization to enhance performance.