I will keep these broad strokes because I'll have to dive much more deeply into future posts and different aspects that will be touched on here. Solana is its own blockchain, officially launched around the infamous COVID crash in March 2020. This was considered a black swan event in the market where everything tanked in price. It took Solana about 3 years to go live after introducing the idea. In the interest of keeping this explanation high level, we'll talk about the famous tradeoff in cryptocurrency between security and efficiency. On one side of the spectrum, we have Bitcoin, considered the most secure network, but it's insanely slow. Bitcoin uses a "Proof-of-Work," where computing power dictates the following blocks created on the ledger. This uses physical hardware computers worldwide to create Bitcoin, which is starting to get an avalanche of negative press for its energy consumption and adverse environmental effects. More on another day. Many of the