Encode Club

1. Introduction

2. What’s in store?
8 event education series
Learn about Solana in depth
Aimed at a technical and non-technical audience

3. What is Encode Club?

4. We are a web3 education community
We train talent through
programmes like:
🥾 bootcamps
🥾 hackathons
🚀 accelerators
🥾 workshops
We then help that
talent either:
💼 get a job
💸 get funding

5. Let’s learn and build together to achieve
your goals in web3.

6. get exposure to new trends
learn to code in blockchain
build a hack project
launch a startup
get a job

7. Free and global

8. But today, let’s learn about Solana

9. Disclaimer, this is a very short
introduction, an amuse bouche of sorts

10. What is Solana?
Solana is an open-source project implementing a high-
performance, permissionless blockchain

11. There is fervent developer activity
around Solana

12. There is fervent investor activity

13. But why?
First, blockchain theory.

14. Blockchain theory
We want to achieve a much more ‘efficient’ (to be defined) way
to do certain activities involving lots of people.

15. Sounds vague.

16. Blockchain theory
Specifically, we want to remove the need for centralised forces
where possible.

17. Centralisation
Centralisation can be good. But it can also be a source of adverse
outcomes like censorship, gating, points of failure, inefficiency
and slow speed of change.

18. Again. Sounds vague.

19. Specifially
We are going to talk about how we can use decentralised
databases and distributed systems to build far more efficiency
digital institutions that we all own.

20. Still vague

21. Let’s talk about money.

22. Money is a database.

23. Money kinda requires a central authority.

24. What if we replaced this central
authority with code.

25. Bitcoin.

26. But what if we want to add logic and
additional functionality.

27. Ethereum.

28. But what comes next?

29. We are searching for the holy grail of
scalability, security and decentralisation

30. Make it fast, make it accessible, make it
scalable, make it secure, make it into so
much more than just transactions.

31. Ethereum is not fast and scalable (it
satisfy the other things)

32. But why?

33. Many reasons, but one is keeping lots of
nodes and individual users in sync with
one another.

34. History lesson

35. In November 2017, Anatoly Yakovenko
published a white paper

36. Proof of History

37. A reliable clock makes network
synchronisation very simple, and
therefore fast

38. Bitcoin and Ethereum don’t have clocks
and struggle to produce more than 15
transactions per second.

39. Solana is fast (and cheap)

40. It’s also a single-shard (versus Eth 2.0

41. It’s architecture enables transactions to
be ordered as they enter the network,
rather than by block.

42. Proof of History is a cryptographic way to
reliability order transactions.

43. The result is no problem of agreeing on
time, with instant finality.

44. PoH is not a consensus mechanism, it
simply improves the performance of
Solana’s Proof of Stake mechanism.

45. Solana does not use blocks in the same
way Ethereum does.

46. Blocks are broken up into smaller
batches of transactions known as entries.

47. Blocks in Solana are just sequences of
entries that validators vote on to achieve
confirmation.

48. Validators within Solana’s PoS are the
entities responsible for confirming if
these entries are valid.

49. There are other optimisations

50. There are other optimisations we will
cover later

51. Solana does not come without tradeoffs

52. To quote one source (2501babe) ‘what is being traded against,
dear developer, is your time and your sanity. much of the
complexity that solana requires to achieve the tps it does is
simply placed on your doorstep.’

53. There are ways to abstract this
complexity (Anchor) but if you want the
full experience you’ll need to use Rust

54. Anchor is a similar experience to
developing with Solidity, it’s a framework
for making Solana’s programs more
intuitive

55. We have an event on it coming up!

56. Rust was chosen as the programming
language, since it offers safety
guarantees

57. The Solana cluster.

58. The cluster is a set of validators working
together to serve client transactions and
maintain the integrity of the ledger.

59. They can co-exist

60. Or they can ignore each other

61. Programs and accounts

62. The biggest practical difference between
Solana and Ethereum is that it very
aggressively separates code and data

63. Programs are stateless contracts

64. There’s nothing like class variables or
globals like in solidity

65. Accounts are buffers, they are owned by
the system program by default

66. Accounts are used to store data and
state

67. The advantage of the program/account
model is that you have one generic
program that operates on various data

68. E.g the SPI token program -> you don’t
need to deploy code, you can create an
account that can mint tokens and some
to receive them

69. The mint address uniquely determines
the token type, and these are all passed
as arguments to one static program
instance.

70. There are also program derived
addresses (PDAs)

71. These are home to accounts designed to
be controlled by a specific program.

72. Programs can programmatically sign for
certain addresses without needing a
private key

73. They allow Solana apps to be
composable with one another

74. Transactions and instructions

75. An instruction is one call into a
programme

76. One or more instructions can be bundled
into a message

77. A message plus an array of signatures
constitutes a transaction

78. This has huge consequences and also
can be very tricky!

79. This is just a taste

80. There are other innovations

81. Tower BFT

82. Turbine

83. Gulf Stream

84. Sealevel

85. Pipelining

86. Cloudbreaking

87. Archivers

88. We haven’t even talked about the
ecosystem.

89. https://solana.com/ecosystem

90. Some great resources

91. Next week - Technical Overview of
Solana