What is Solana (SOL) Pay, and how does it work?
PayPal was a massive innovation in the payments processing industry. The financial brainchild of Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and eventually, Elon Musk aimed far ahead of its time, facilitating instant payments between customers, businesses and more while utilizing the internet.
Solana (SOL) Pay is considered by many to be the next innovation in the payments processing arena, facilitating payments while taking nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and Web3 into account. Some are going so far as to call Solana’s new payment protocol the Visa or PayPal of Web3. This post will break down Solana Pay and how it works so you can decide whether the project is all it’s cracked up to be.
But first, it’s vital to understand Solana before getting into the digital payment platform Solana Pay.
Related: What is Web3: A beginner's guide to the decentralized internet of the future
Solana was founded in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko, a software engineer with a background at Dropbox and other big tech companies.
Yakovenko believed that while other blockchains are efficient or at least working toward efficiency, many of them fail to factor in time. Instead of every block relying on a standardized clock, each block runs on the local time of their relevant node.
Why is this a problem? Without a standardized clock, transaction timestamps will vary for each block and the time of confirmation is yet another factor that all nodes must validate. The more factors a node has to validate, the slower the transaction time.
On Solana, all nodes run on the same clock, removing one validation factor and speeding up the network as a result. Yakovenko refers to this consensus method as proof-of-history (PoH) — a modified version of proof-of-stake (PoS) that factors in time for
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