Everything You Want To Know About The SOLAR Bridge
Hi Readers👩💻,
If you’ve been keeping up with the proof-of-stake ecosystem, you’ve most likely heard about the Solana Protocol. Solana’s is a radically new approach for blockchains’ mass adoption. The protocol was founded back in 2017 and is an open-source project that implements a new high-performance, permissionless blockchain. Solana’s mission is to support all high-growth and high-frequency, blockchain applications and to democratize the world’s financial systems.
In 2020, the network launched its Mainnet Beta and grew the global community to over 650k participants. A lot of the network’s success has been made possible through the collaboration with other blockchain companies such as Arweave. Which brings us to the subject of this article, the SOLAR bridge, created for Arweave and Solana.
So, what is Arweave? It is a type of storage that backs data with sustainable and perpetual endowments, which lets users and developers store data forever. That is unique and the first time that this is possible. In a nutshell, Arweave works as a collectively owned hard drive that never forgets and allows you to remember and preserve valuable information on apps and history indefinitely. By preserving, it prevents others from rewriting, keeping your applications safer.
SOLAR bridge is created by Bering Waters, a technology group based in Hong Kong. The bridge is an important development for Solana’s continued growth because it makes it the first blockchain to move and store its transaction history on a dedicated storage network.
Blockchains like Solana create immense amounts of data due to the increased production of blocks. Censorship resistant availability of the entire ledger history is necessary for allowing network participants to audit the current state.
Solana can support a peak capacity of 65k transactions per second and 400ms block times with over 50 nodes. Sincethe network ecosystem continues to grow at lightning speed it is only a matter of time before the transactions per second increase again.
What is a blockchain bridge?
A blockchain bridge makes it possible for two different blockchain ecosystems to transfer tokens or data between each other. As you might know, the lack of interoperability within the blockchain ecosystem is a significant challenge. At the moment, whenever a developer builds a DApp on a blockchain, they’re basically unable to move it and are stuck with that blockchain.
By using a bridge, developers can have 2 blockchains interact with each other.. Blockchain bridges often use some kind of burn protocol to keep the token supply constant across all platforms. That means when the digital asset leaves the blockchain, it is burned or locked and an equivalent of the asset is minted on the opposite blockchain.
- If you’d like to learn more about blockchain interoperability, click here.
Through the use of a blockchain bridge, developers can send their assets onto another blockchain for processing at a higher speed and a lower cost. Additionally, both connected blockchain ecosystems benefit from using the bridge, as it reduces network traffic by dispersing it over other blockchains.
What does this mean for Solana?
In the short term, Arweave will be funded by a grant with the long-term goal of paying for Arweave without payout rewards for light client proof of storage of Solana blocks. With the integration of Arweave, Solana will no longer be pursuing replicators as a means for storage.
Arweave is a better alternative because Solana does not have to worry about storage. This allows the Solana team to focus on what they are great at, high-performance replicated state machines, and Arweave can focus on decentralized storage solutions.
DISCLAIMER: This is not financial advice. Staking, delegation, and cryptocurrencies involve a high degree of risk, and there is always the possibility of loss, including the loss of all staked digital assets. Additionally, delegators are at risk of slashing in case of security or liveness faults on some protocols. We advise you to do your due diligence before choosing a validator.
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