Solana (SOL)

Solana (SOL) is the native cryptocurrency of the Solana blockchain, a high-speed network designed to process thousands of transactions per second at very low cost. SOL pays transaction fees, is staked to secure the network, and is held as an investment. Its smallest unit is the lamport, one billionth of a SOL, named after the computer scientist Leslie Lamport.

Solana is a single, monolithic blockchain: it aims to handle execution, settlement and data on one fast layer rather than relying on separate layer-2 networks, which sets it apart from the Ethereum Blockchain and its rollups. It is widely used for trading, payments and meme coins, and token issuers build on its Token-2022 program.

Picture a busy toll road. Many blockchains are like a road where every car must stop at a booth while the attendants agree on the exact order in which cars arrived. Solana tries to avoid the queue by giving every car a precise timestamp as it arrives, so the attendants spend far less time arguing about order and far more time waving traffic through.

The result is a network that confirms payments in well under a second and usually charges a fraction of a cent. SOL is the coin that pays those tolls. People who hold SOL can also lend it to the attendants (the validators) to help run the road, and earn a small share of the new coins the network creates each year in return. The trade-off is that the road needs very powerful, expensive equipment to operate.

Anatoly Yakovenko, a former Qualcomm engineer, described Solana's core idea in a November 2017 white paper and co-founded Solana Labs to build it. After several private token sales, the network launched in beta in March 2020, and the Solana Foundation in Switzerland supports its development. SOL's price fell sharply in November 2022 when the FTX exchange, one of its largest backers, collapsed, but activity recovered in 2023 and 2024, helped by memecoin trading and stablecoin payments. In October 2025 the first US spot Solana exchange-traded products began trading, including funds that stake the SOL they hold.

Solana uses proof of stake, combined with a timing technique called proof of history: a running cryptographic clock that puts transactions in order before validators vote on them, so the network spends less time agreeing on sequence. Blocks are produced roughly every 400 milliseconds, and the network can run many transactions at the same time when they touch different accounts. A basic transaction pays a fee of 5,000 lamports per signature, and users can add a priority fee to be processed faster when the network is busy. Holders can delegate SOL to validators without giving up ownership, and earn a share of the rewards; see staking. A second, independent validator client, Firedancer, built by Jump Crypto, is being introduced to reduce the risk of a single software bug halting the chain.

SOL has no maximum supply. New SOL is issued to stakers under an inflation schedule that started at 8 percent a year in 2021 and falls by 15 percent each year until it reaches a long-term rate of 1.5 percent:

• $r_{t}$ is the annual inflation rate in year $t$.
• $t$ is the number of years since the schedule began in 2021.
• $0.85$ reflects the 15 percent yearly reduction.

In year 3 the rate is $8\% \times 0.85^{3} \approx 4.9\%$. The floor of 1.5 percent is reached after about ten years. Part of each transaction's base fee is burned, which offsets a small share of new issuance. Holders who do not stake are diluted over time, which is why most SOL is staked.

• Fees and staking. Every transaction is paid in SOL, and staked SOL secures the network.
• Trading. Solana hosts busy decentralized exchanges and memecoin launchpads, which made it one of the most-used networks by transaction count.
• Payments. Stablecoins such as USDC are issued natively on Solana and used for fast, cheap transfers; see stablecoin payments.
• Investment. SOL is held directly and through exchange-traded products in the United States and Europe.

In 2023 the US Securities and Exchange Commission described SOL as a security in lawsuits against several exchanges; those cases were dropped in 2025, and the approval of SOL exchange-traded products followed. The network has suffered several outages, including one of about 17 hours in September 2021 and one of about five hours in February 2024, which critics cite as the cost of its speed. Others point to the high hardware requirements for validators, which limit how many people can run one, and to the share of tokens held by early investors and insiders. Memecoin activity on Solana has also been linked to scams and rapid losses for retail traders.

• Solana
• Solana white paper
• Faisal Khan: Can an ETF be deployed on the Solana Blockchain?