Blockchain platform Solana has joined up with decentralized oracle solution Chainlink to construct an oracle that updates incredibly quickly.

"We recently saw market failures due to congestion on Ethereum, including oracle failures,” Solana CEO and founder Anatoly Yakovenko told Cointelegraph in an interview, adding:

“What we're building with Chainlink is a high-frequency oracle that can give a price update every 400 milliseconds — and because of our capacity, we shouldn't see those kinds of market failures on our network. It's solving a fundamental problem that we see in the decentralized exchange space."

Solana shoots for scalability

Currently a popular network choice for DApps, Ethereum’s blockchain became clogged in September 2019 amid an influx of Ethereum-based Tether (USDT) transactions.

In late 2019, co-founder Vitalik Buterin came forward stating Ethereum's Istanbul fork would eventually support 3,000 transactions per second, or TPS. Solana reportedly touts almost 60,000 TPS.

Solana, in general, is a layer-one blockchain solution that aims to provide high amounts of scaling without sharding. “We are scaling with hardware with Moore's Law,” Yakovenko said. “We’re like a non-sharded layer, one that’s ridiculously scaled.”

The startup recently finished its Coinlist auction

Solana offered 8 million of its coins for sale in a Dutch-style Coinlist auction on March 23, touting a 90% price guarantee, Solana COO Raj Gokal told Cointelegraph. Noting current market volatility, Gokal explained Solana’s sale garnered surprising success. Solana’s auction sold off 1.6% of the project’s total 500,000,000 coin supply.

“We cleared the auction at $0.22,” Gokal said.

“Everyone gets the same price at the end,” he noted, explaining the process further. “The bids came in from anywhere between $4 and $0.04 in pre-bidding, and by the time the price got down to $0.22 — that was where there was enough demand to clear the 8 million tokens that were available.”

Essentially, the market reached equilibrium with the available supply, settling on a price of $0.22 — equalling the highest price bidders were willing to pay, while still ensuring all 8 million coins would be sold.

Solana garnered at least $1.76 million total from the coin auction, although, due to minor price increment issues, the total could be slightly higher, Gokal included.

The startup approaches investor protection from a different angle

Yakovenko also explained Solana’s staking guarantee, built for sheltering early investors.

Gokal said of Solana’s SOL coin:

“It’s actually continuously redeemable for 90% of the auction clearing price, for 12 months — but the only way to register for this price guarantee is to actually stake your tokens. We have record on-chain of that registration, and then it requires continuous staking from the registration to the time that you want to redeem for that 90% price guarantee.”

Solana’s guarantee looks to prevent early investors from getting burned on plummeting prices during the asset’s first year. Additionally, when the time comes for SOL’s listing on exchanges, buyers can still get the price guarantee if they buy the coins on exchanges, Gokal said.

The price guarantee will “be accessible for the next year,” Gokal said, adding that “registrations will be accessible for the next three months, even on exchanges.”

Touted as a regulatory-friendly digital asset sale platform, Coinlist itself tallied $9.2 million worth of investments as part of a funding round, Cointelegraph reported in April 2018.

UPDATE March 24, 23:52 UTC: This article has been updated, correcting the total SOL coin supply from 500,000 to 500,000,000.