diff --git a/Cargo.toml b/Cargo.toml index 038a85477..5b8e9da12 100644 --- a/Cargo.toml +++ b/Cargo.toml @@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ name = "solana" description = "High Performance Blockchain" version = "0.4.0" documentation = "https://docs.rs/solana" -homepage = "http://loomprotocol.com/" +homepage = "http://solana.io/" repository = "https://github.com/solana-labs/solana" authors = [ "Anatoly Yakovenko ", diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index fa3a9ba1f..634ab131e 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -14,6 +14,11 @@ Solana: High Performance Blockchain Solana™ is a new architecture for a high performance blockchain. It aims to support over 700 thousand transactions per second on a gigabit network. +Introduction +=== + +It's possible for a centralized database to process 710,000 transactions per second on a standard gigabit network if the transactions are, on average, no more than 178 bytes. A centralized database can also replicate itself and maintain high availability without significantly compromising that transaction rate using the distributed system technique known as Optimistic Concurrency Control [H.T.Kung, J.T.Robinson (1981)]. At Solana, we're demonstrating that these same theoretical limits apply just as well to blockchain on an adversarial network. The key ingredient? Finding a way to share time when nodes can't trust one-another. Once nodes can trust time, suddenly ~40 years of distributed systems research becomes applicable to blockchain! Furthermore, and much to our surprise, it can implemented using a mechanism that has existed in Bitcoin since day one. The Bitcoin feature is called nLocktime and it can be used to postdate transactions using block height instead of a timestamp. As a Bitcoin client, you'd use block height instead of a timestamp if you don't trust the network. Block height turns out to be an instance of what's being called a Verifiable Delay Function in cryptography circles. It's a cryptographically secure way to say time has passed. In Solana, we use a far more granular verifiable delay function, a SHA 256 hash chain, to checkpoint the ledger and coordinate consensus. With it, we implement Optimistic Concurrency Control and are now well in route towards that theoretical limit of 710,000 transactions per second. + Running the demo ===