Solana Fundamentals
Most blockchain courses treat every chain as a slight variation on Ethereum: same contract-storage model, same single-threaded execution, just tuned for different speed and cost tradeoffs. Solana breaks that assumption at the architecture level. This course walks through the four ideas that actually make Solana different: an account model where every piece of on-chain data, including code, lives in a uniform account structure instead of being locked inside contract storage, a Proof of History mechanism that gives validators a verifiable sense of time so they can agree on transaction order without constant round-trip communication, a parallel execution engine that runs non-conflicting transactions concurrently instead of processing them one at a time, and a program model where smart contracts are compiled Rust binaries rather than interpreted bytecode. It closes with an honest look at what that throughput costs in validator hardware, bandwidth, and historical network stability, no marketing gloss, just the tradeoffs as they actually stand.
