CoolBitX is excited to announce that CoolWallet Pro, the world’s most convenient DeFi hardware wallet, now supports the Solana network’s native SOL asset, with both SOL staking and support for SPL tokens of Tether (USDT), Chainlink (LINK), The Graph (GRT), and STEPN (GMT) also scheduled for the middle of Q3 2022. This makes it one of the first Solana hardware wallet options for users.
CoolWallet’s Solana integration follows our existing native cold storage support of the world’s best layer-1 and layer-2 network and ecosystem chains such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, Tezos, Polygon, Arbitrum, Cardano and more, and opens up a vibrant new crypto frontier for our CoolWallet users. Layer-1 networks are creating dynamic new crypto ecosystems and CoolWallet aims to secure them all with superior ice cold storage.
Solana Hot Wallet Hack August 4 2022 Update: A devastating Solana private key exploit hack this week drained millions of dollars in SOL and SPL assets from 8000 Solana hot wallets (Phantom and Slope). The attack is ongoing against compromised wallets and the Solana Foundation and security experts have advised users to transfer funds to a hardware wallet or centralized exchange if possible and abandon their existing hot wallet thereafter.
Looking to keep your Solana safely in elite cold storage?
Buy your Solana-supporting CoolWallet Pro here.
(please note that only SOL tokens are supported at present. SPL tokens will be supported at a later stage)
CoolWallet Now Supports Solana (SOL)!
CoolWallet’s elite safety features such as its EAL6+ secure element, tamperproof and waterproof design, military-grade encrypted Bluetooth and various biometric verification measures finally bring enhanced Solana hardware wallet security that is both affordable and easy to use to this passionate crypto community.
Interested to keep your Solana safely on CoolWallet in cold storage, especially after this week’s devastating Solana hot wallet hacks on Phantom and Slope?
Let’s take a look under Solana’s powerful hood to see why it’s growing so rapidly and is highly touted by the crypto industry for its unique capabilities that saw it crowned as the world’s fastest and cheapest blockchain.
What is Solana (SOL)?
Solana is a high-performance blockchain supporting builders around the world creating crypto apps that require scale. Considered the fastest blockchain in the world, with the ability to conduct up to 65,000 transactions per second (TPS), Solana also lays claim to having the fastest growing crypto ecosystem with thousands of projects being developed across the DeFi, NFTs, GameFi and NFT industries.
Simply put, Solana is incredibly fast and cheap to use (an average transaction only costs $0.00025 in gas fees!), and this has led to the creation of an incredibly passionate and loyal community of builders and users. Add a forward-thinking vision, as was demonstrated recently with the unveiling of a new blockchain smartphone, Solana Saga, and the appeal is easy to understand.
Anatoly Yakovenko and Greg Fitzgerald founded Solana in 2017 by as an open-source project by the Geneva-based Solana Foundation, while its blockchain was created by Solana Labs in San Francisco. It received the backing of several top-tier early investors, such as FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research and Multicoin Capital, raising over $300m in funding rounds.
Solana, currently the world’s 9th biggest cryptocurrency by market cap (nearly $14 billion at the time of writing), had an incredible upswing during the 2020-2021 bull run, surging in value from under $1 at launch in March 2020 to an all-time high of $260 in November last year. Since then it has dropped in tandem with the industry during the bear market to a present price of around $40.
How Does Solana Work?
Solana is a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain that uses a new technology called Proof of History (PoH). This hybrid system allows validators to process transactions based on their stake, while PoH helps these transactions to get timestamped and validated ultra-fast.
Solana ensures composability between ecosystem projects by maintaining a single global state as the network scales, thus requiring only a single integration and helping them to avoid fragmented Layer 2 systems or sharded chains.
What is Proof-of History (PoH)?
Most crypto users are by now familiar with the concept of Proof-of-Stake, the eco-friendly consensus mechanism that helps to verify blockchains through asset staking rather than Proof-of-Work (PoW) computing power such as done with Bitcoin.
In 2017 Yakovenko published his Proof of History whitepaper, which posited that since then-blockchains were not reliant on time, with each network using its own local clock without knowing the clocks of other network participants, there was no trusted standardized clock that could ensure that all network participants used the same timestamp to accept or reject a message. Creating such a time-based proof would help to make blockchain transaction verifications exponentially faster.
Yakovenko soon put his theory in practice and Solana’s PoH attracted the attention of some of the world’s biggest venture capital and investment funds for its incredible potential to be unlocked.
The PoH mechanism allows all nodes in the network to rely on the blockchain ledger’s recorded time in order, thus enabling the trait of trustlessness that is so essential to the successful functioning of blockchain technology.
The Solana Ecosystem
While Solana has been criticized for its perceived large degree of centralization, it’s important to note that the network is still in its beta phase and that according to the Foundation, Solana is in fact censor-resistant and decentralized thanks to its thousands of independent nodes.
Solana’s attractiveness as a layer-1 network alternative due to extremely low fees and ultra-fast transactions made it probably the biggest “Ethereum Killer” in 2021, with thousands of developers and users jumping ship to participate in the DeFi and NFT booms, thus creating an intensely innovative ecosystem of builders and users.
This has put the young network under strain at times, which has resulted in occasional outages, something to be expected with a network that is still in beta and operates on the basis of “Move Fast, Break Things” in order to push the envelope on what blockchain technology can achieve. In this regard, it’s the very antithesis of the more academic and peer-reviewed Cardano (ADA) chain, which moves very slowly in terms of development. In fact, its first major conference was held in Portugal last year and was ironically called “Breakpoint”!
As a result of this willingness to innovate and ability to iterate on the go, as well as a nearly zero fee for NFT minting, Solana is a favorite in the experimental crypto gaming and NFT communities, causing some like NFT marketplace Magic Eden and DEXs such as Raydium and Serum achieving stellar growth in a very short period. This has convinced the likes of OpenSea to also integrate with Solana in order to better serve their users.
According to DeFiLlama, Solana’s total value locked (TVL) is $2.6 billion (3% of the DeFi market) making it the 5th biggest chain in terms of TVL and it also has 73 protocols.
Solana’s 10 biggest protocols in terms of TVL at present are:
- Marinade Finance (Liquid Staking)
- Solend (Lending)
- Serum (DEX)
- Raydium (DEX)
- Atrix (DEX)
- Tulip Protocol (Yield)
- Mango Markets (Lending)
- Quarry (Yield)
- Sunny (Yield)
- Lido (Liquid Staking)
What is Solana’s Solana Program Library (SPL) token standard?
Solana network projects use the SPL token standard, similar to ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum network and BEP-20 tokens on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). Many of the most popular cryptocurrencies such as Tether (USDT), Chainlink and Arweave have SPL token versions, while new-gen projects such as The Graph (GRT) and STEPN (GMT) are also very popular.
The Solana Program Library (SPL) is a collection of on-chain programs targeting the Sealevel parallel runtime. Solana tests these programs against its implementation of Sealevel, Solana-runtime, and deploys it to its mainnet.
What is the Best Solana (SOL) Hardware Wallet?
CoolWallet Pro is a top Solana hardware wallet that offers secure native SOL storage, and soon, SPL support. This hardware wallet, first launched in 2016 as a Bitcoin-only device, is best for Solana wallet owners, because it is so convenient, safe and easy to use.
Safety: CoolWallet provides top Solana cold storage security and peace of mind thanks to its powerful hardware security features, such as:
- EAL6+ secure element
- encrypted military-grade Bluetooth communication
- 2+1 FA biometric verification that requires a physical button push for all transactions.
- e-ink screen to visually confirm all DOT transaction details
Convenience: CoolWallet Pro looks like a credit card and is completely waterproof and tamper-proof thanks to its patented cold compression design, making it the perfect SOL hardware wallet to discreetly keep with you wherever you go.
Ease-of-Use: Solana users can stake their SOL via the intuitive CoolWallet app (iOS/Android) in only a few clicks and earn up to 15% APY in DOT rewards. You can also interact with leading DeFi and NFT projects like Uniswap, 1Inch, Rabby, OpenSea and Rarible, to name a few, and store many other top layer-1 cryptos like ETH, DOT, BNB, AVAX, TRX, ATOM and supported tokens.
Soon, CoolWallet Pro will also offer Solana staking in cold storage. Stay tuned!
Conclusion
With the addition of Solana cold storage to our stable of supported blue-chip cryptocurrencies, CoolWallet now offers support for the biggest layer-1 networks, which include Ethereum, Cardano, Polkadot, Cosmos, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, Cronos, Tezos, Luna as well as scaling protocols such as Polygon and Arbitrum.
In Q4 we are scheduled to roll out support for Near Protocol, Fantom and Algorand. Exciting times are ahead, so stay strong during the bear market and start doing your research on these groundbreaking ecosystems in order to keep the right crypto assets on your CoolWallet Pro and S.
Why not start your research with Solana though, currently considered to be at a discount price-wise? With many very critical advantages over competitors, a flourishing ecosystem, and deep-pocketed and highly influential backers, it’s all but certain that Solana will continue to shine for a very long time.
And as August’s devastating Solana software wallet hack has demonstrated, there is only one proven cure to keep your crypto assets safe in the long run: Get cold storage and keep things sunny on our Solana hardware wallet for serious SOL owners. Don’t delay any further!
