Solana (SOL) is the native cryptocurrency of Solana, a public blockchain built to process thousands of transactions per second for a fraction of a cent each. SOL pays transaction fees, is staked to secure the network and is the base currency for a large ecosystem of apps used for trading, payments, stablecoins, NFTs and memecoins. Solana launched in 2020 and has no maximum supply.
Frequently Asked Questions about Solana
Is Solana the same as SOL?
No. Solana is the blockchain network, and SOL is its native cryptocurrency. SOL pays for transaction fees and is staked to secure the network, in the same way ETH works on Ethereum.
Is Solana a stablecoin?
No. SOL's price moves freely with the market and can rise or fall sharply. Stablecoins such as USDC and USDT run on the Solana network, but they are separate tokens designed to stay at $1.
Anatoly Yakovenko, a former Qualcomm engineer, described the idea in a November 2017 whitepaper and co-founded Solana Labs with Raj Gokal. The mainnet beta launched in March 2020. The network is named after Solana Beach, the California town where Yakovenko and co-founder Greg Fitzgerald lived.
Who owns Solana?
No one owns Solana. It is run by independent validators, and its software is open source. The Solana Foundation, a Swiss non-profit, supports the ecosystem, while companies such as Anza and Jump Crypto build the validator software.
Does Solana have a maximum supply?
No. SOL has no supply cap. New SOL is issued as staking rewards at an inflation rate that was a little under 4% a year in 2026 and is scheduled to keep falling toward a long-term floor of 1.5%. Half of every base transaction fee is burned, which offsets a small part of that issuance.
Can you mine Solana?
No. Solana uses proof of stake, not proof of work, so there is no mining. Instead, SOL holders can stake their coins with a validator to help secure the network and earn rewards.
How fast is Solana?
Solana produces a block about every 400 milliseconds, and most transactions confirm in under a second. Full finality takes about 12.8 seconds today, and the Alpenglow upgrade aims to cut that to around 150 milliseconds. In 2026 the network has typically processed user transactions in the low thousands per second.
How much does a Solana transaction cost?
The base fee is 0.000005 SOL per signature. Users can add a priority fee to be processed faster when the network is busy, but a typical transaction still costs well under one cent.
Is Solana better than Ethereum?
It depends on what you value. Solana is faster and cheaper on its base layer and keeps all activity on one chain. Ethereum has a longer track record, many more validators and more value locked in DeFi, and it scales mainly through layer-2 networks.
How do you stake SOL?
You delegate SOL to a validator from a wallet that supports staking, or buy a liquid staking token that represents staked SOL. Your SOL stays in a stake account you control, and rewards are paid every epoch, which lasts about two days. Staking and unstaking take effect at the start of the next epoch.
Is there a Solana ETF?
Yes. The Bitwise Solana Staking ETF (BSOL) became the first US spot Solana ETF in October 2025, and other issuers followed. These funds track SOL's price through a brokerage account, and some stake the SOL they hold to earn rewards.
Has Solana ever gone down?
Yes. Solana suffered several network-wide outages between 2020 and 2024, the longest lasting nearly 19 hours in February 2023. The last full outage was in February 2024, and the network has run for more than 30 months without one since.
Is Solana a good investment?
We can't tell you whether SOL is right for you. It has real usage and growing institutional interest, but its price is highly volatile, its supply keeps growing and it faces strong competition. Only invest what you can afford to lose, and consider speaking to a licensed financial adviser.
What Is Solana? SOL, How the Blockchain Works and What It Is Used For
Solana is a public blockchain built to handle thousands of transactions per second for a fraction of a cent each. SOL is its native cryptocurrency. It pays for transactions, secures the network through staking and is the base currency of a large ecosystem of apps for trading, payments, stablecoins, NFTs and memecoins.
This guide explains what Solana is, how it works, what SOL is used for, how it compares with Ethereum and Bitcoin, and the risks to understand before you use or buy it.
Feature
Solana
Native token
SOL
Launched
March 2020 (mainnet beta)
Founder
Anatoly Yakovenko, with co-founders at Solana Labs
Consensus
Proof of stake, with Proof of History and Tower BFT
Block time
About 400 milliseconds
Finality
About 12.8 seconds (the Alpenglow upgrade targets about 150 milliseconds)
Base fee
0.000005 SOL per signature, plus an optional priority fee
Supply
No maximum supply; inflation a little under 4% a year in 2026 and falling
Smallest unit
Lamport (one billionth of a SOL)
Smart contracts
Written mostly in Rust and run by the Solana Virtual Machine
What is Solana?
Solana is a layer-1 blockchain, which means it processes and settles its own transactions instead of relying on another chain for security. Like Ethereum, it is programmable: developers deploy smart contracts, which Solana calls programs, and anyone can use the apps built on them without asking permission.
What sets Solana apart is its design goal. Instead of pushing activity onto separate layer-2 networks, it tries to make one chain fast enough for everything. Blocks arrive roughly every 400 milliseconds, transactions usually confirm in under a second, and every app shares the same up-to-date state, which is a big reason trading platforms, payment companies and consumer apps build on it.
Solana vs SOL: what is the difference?
Solana is the network. SOL is the cryptocurrency that runs on it, in the same way Ethereum is a network and ETH is its coin. You need a small amount of SOL to do anything on Solana, even if you only want to move a different token such as USDC, because every transaction fee is paid in SOL.
SOL is not a stablecoin. Its price floats freely and can swing sharply. Stablecoins such as USDC and USDT also run on Solana, but they are separate tokens designed to hold a steady value of $1.
Who created Solana?
Solana was created by Anatoly Yakovenko, a former Qualcomm engineer, who described its core idea, Proof of History, in a whitepaper published in November 2017. He founded Solana Labs with Raj Gokal, together with former Qualcomm colleagues Greg Fitzgerald and Stephen Akridge.
The project was first called Loom. It was renamed after Solana Beach, the California town north of San Diego where Yakovenko and Fitzgerald lived and surfed, partly to avoid confusion with an unrelated project called Loom Network. Solana's mainnet beta went live in March 2020.
Who owns Solana?
No single company owns Solana. The network is run by independent validators around the world, and its core software is open source. The Solana Foundation, a non-profit based in Zug, Switzerland, funds development and supports the ecosystem. Anza, a company spun out of Solana Labs in 2024, maintains Agave, the most widely used validator software, and Jump Crypto builds Firedancer, a second, fully independent validator client. Changes to the protocol go through public proposals called Solana Improvement Documents (SIMDs), and the biggest ones are put to a vote in which validators vote with the SOL staked to them.
A short history of Solana
Solana grew quickly after launch. SOL rose from under $2 at the start of 2021 to a peak of around $260 that November, as NFT collections and DeFi apps flocked to the network. Then the collapse of FTX in November 2022 hit Solana harder than most networks, because FTX, its trading arm Alameda Research and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried had been among Solana's most prominent backers. SOL fell below $10 by the end of 2022, more than 95% below its peak.
The network survived. From late 2023, memecoins, cheap fees and new consumer apps brought users back. Pump.fun, launched in January 2024, let anyone create a token in minutes, and the launch of the TRUMP memecoin in January 2025 helped push SOL to a new all-time high. The first US spot Solana exchange-traded products began trading in October 2025, and Jump Crypto's Firedancer client went fully live on mainnet that December.
How does Solana work?
Every blockchain has to solve the same problem: thousands of computers that do not trust each other must agree on which transactions happened and in what order. Solana's answer combines a cryptographic clock, a stake-weighted voting system and an engine that runs transactions in parallel.
Proof of History: a clock for the network
Proof of History (PoH) is Solana's best-known innovation, and it is often misunderstood: it is not a consensus mechanism on its own but a way of timestamping events. A validator runs the SHA-256 hash function over and over, feeding each output into the next input. Because each step depends on the one before, the sequence cannot be computed in parallel or faked in advance, so it acts as proof that time has passed. Transactions inserted into the sequence get a verifiable place in time.
The payoff is less chatter. On many blockchains, validators spend a lot of time exchanging messages to agree on the order of events. On Solana, that order is already embedded in the data, and other validators can check it far faster than it took to create.
Proof of stake and Tower BFT
Security comes from proof of stake. Validators lock up SOL, either their own or SOL delegated to them by holders. The more stake a validator has, the more often it is chosen to produce blocks and the more weight its votes carry.
Solana publishes a leader schedule in advance, so everyone knows which validator will produce the block for each 400-millisecond slot. Validators vote on blocks using Tower BFT, a version of practical Byzantine fault tolerance that uses Proof of History as its clock. A block becomes final once a supermajority of stake has voted for it and enough later blocks have been built on top, which today takes about 12.8 seconds. In practice, wallets show a transaction as confirmed well before that.
Parallel execution and no mempool
Every Solana transaction lists in advance the accounts it will read from and write to. That lets the runtime, called Sealevel, process transactions that do not touch the same accounts at the same time, across many processor cores. Ethereum's original design processes transactions one after another.
Solana also does away with the public waiting room of pending transactions, known as a mempool, that Bitcoin and Ethereum use. Under a protocol called Gulf Stream, wallets and apps send transactions straight to the validators scheduled to lead the next few slots. Once a block is produced, a system called Turbine breaks it into small pieces and spreads them across the network in a tree pattern.
Accounts, programs and SPL tokens
Solana stores everything, from wallet balances to app data, in accounts. Programs hold only code, and the data they work on lives in separate accounts, which is part of what makes parallel execution possible. Programs are mostly written in Rust and run in the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM).
Tokens work differently from Ethereum too. Instead of every token deploying its own contract, Solana uses shared token programs: the original SPL Token program and a newer version called Token-2022, or Token Extensions, which adds built-in features such as transfer fees and confidential transfers. USDC, memecoins and tokenized stocks on Solana are all SPL tokens.
Firedancer and client diversity
For most of its history, nearly every Solana validator ran the same software, today maintained by Anza as the Agave client. That meant a single bug could halt the whole network, and several times one did. Firedancer, written from scratch by Jump Crypto's engineers, was built to fix that and to raise performance. A hybrid version called Frankendancer has run on mainnet since 2024, the full client went live in December 2025, and by mid-2026 a large minority of staked SOL was running on one or the other. The more evenly stake is split between independent clients, the less likely it is that one bug can stop the chain.
Alpenglow: the next big upgrade
In September 2025, validators approved Alpenglow, the biggest change to Solana's consensus since launch. It replaces Tower BFT with a protocol called Votor, in which validators send votes directly to each other instead of posting them as on-chain transactions, and a later phase replaces Turbine with a faster relay layer called Rotor. Proof of History no longer paces block production.
The headline goal is finality in around 150 milliseconds, down from about 12.8 seconds. As of late September 2026, Alpenglow is live on Solana's test networks but has not been switched on for mainnet, and no activation date has been confirmed. You can follow its progress on the official Alpenglow page.
What is SOL used for?
SOL has four main jobs on the network.
The first is paying for transactions. Every transaction pays a base fee of 5,000 lamports, or 0.000005 SOL, per signature, and users can add an optional priority fee to be processed faster when the network is busy. Half of every base fee is burned, permanently removing that SOL from circulation. The other half, plus all priority fees, goes to the validator that processed the transaction. Even with a priority fee, a typical transaction costs well under a cent.
The second is securing the network through staking, which is covered in more detail below. The more SOL is staked, the more expensive it becomes to attack the network.
The third is paying for storage. Every account on Solana must hold a small minimum balance of SOL, known as a rent-exempt deposit, which stops the chain from filling up with abandoned data. You get it back when the account is closed.
The fourth is acting as the network's base money. SOL is the main trading pair on Solana's decentralized exchanges and a common form of collateral in lending apps.
SOL supply and inflation
SOL has no maximum supply. New SOL is created every epoch, a period of about two days, and paid out as staking rewards. Inflation started at 8% a year in early 2021 and falls by 15% of its current rate each year, toward a long-term floor of 1.5%. By 2026 it had fallen to a little under 4%.
In August 2026, validators voted with 67% support to double that rate of decline to 30% a year, which would bring SOL to its 1.5% floor several years sooner. The change still has to be implemented before it takes effect. Fee burning offsets part of the new issuance, although at current activity levels far less SOL is burned than created. Live figures for circulating supply and market capitalization are shown in the market data on this page.
One SOL divides into one billion lamports, a unit named after the computer scientist Leslie Lamport.
What is Solana used for?
Solana's low fees make it practical for things that would be too expensive on slower chains, such as active trading, small payments and apps with millions of users.
Trading and DeFi
Trading is Solana's biggest use case. Decentralized finance (DeFi) apps on Solana let users swap tokens, lend, borrow and trade perpetual futures without an intermediary. Decentralized exchanges such as Raydium, Orca and Meteora supply the liquidity, and aggregators such as Jupiter route each trade across them to find the best price. Lending markets such as Kamino let users earn interest or borrow against their crypto.
Stablecoins and payments
Solana has become one of the main networks for stablecoins. Circle issues USDC natively on Solana, Tether issues USDT there, and PayPal added its PYUSD stablecoin to the network in 2024. Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement pilot to Solana in 2023. Because fees are tiny and transfers settle in seconds, stablecoins on Solana are used for remittances, merchant payments and moving dollars between exchanges.
Memecoins and token launches
Solana is also the center of the memecoin boom. Launchpads such as pump.fun let anyone create and trade a token in minutes at little or no cost, and coins such as BONK, dogwifhat (WIF) and the official TRUMP token all launched on Solana. Memecoin trading has brought huge numbers of users and fees to the network. It is also extremely risky: most memecoins lose nearly all their value, and scams and "rug pulls" are common.
NFTs and consumer apps
Cheap transactions made Solana a popular home for NFTs. Marketplaces such as Magic Eden, which started on Solana, and Tensor grew alongside collections on the network. A technique called state compression lets projects mint millions of NFTs for a tiny fraction of the usual cost, and the same approach is used for in-game items and digital collectibles.
Tokenized assets and real-world networks
Traditional finance has started to use Solana too. BlackRock's BUIDL tokenized fund expanded to Solana in 2025, and tokenized versions of US stocks, such as the xStocks range, launched on the network the same year. Solana also hosts decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN): Helium, a wireless network, moved to Solana in 2023, as did Render, a marketplace for GPU computing power.
Advantages and disadvantages of Solana
Advantages
Speed and cost come first. Blocks every 400 milliseconds and fees that are usually well under a cent make Solana practical for everyday payments and active trading. In 2026 the network has typically processed user transactions in the low thousands per second, far below the 65,000 figure often quoted as a theoretical ceiling but well above most other major blockchains.
Everything also happens on one chain. On Ethereum, activity is spread across many layer-2 networks, and moving assets between them means bridges and extra steps. On Solana, every app shares the same liquidity and state, which keeps things simpler for users and makes it easier for apps to work together.
The ecosystem is deep, too. Solana has one of the largest developer communities in crypto, heavy trading volumes, large stablecoin balances and a growing range of regulated products such as ETFs. And reliability has improved sharply: as of September 2026, Solana has gone more than 30 months without a network-wide outage.
Disadvantages and risks
Solana's biggest weakness has been its outage record. The network halted for about 17 hours in September 2021 when bots flooded it with transactions, and went down several more times in 2022 and 2023, including a halt of nearly 19 hours in February 2023. The most recent full outage, in February 2024, lasted about 5 hours and was caused by a software bug. None has happened since, but the history explains why some users and developers remain cautious.
Decentralization is a second concern. Running a Solana validator takes expensive, high-performance hardware and a significant amount of SOL to cover voting costs, which has pushed smaller operators out. The number of validators fell from a peak of about 2,560 in March 2023 to under 800 by January 2026, and the network's Nakamoto coefficient, the smallest number of validators that together control enough stake to halt it, dropped to around 20. Ethereum has far more validators and a much lower hardware bar.
Third, SOL is inflationary. With no supply cap and inflation near 4% a year, holders who do not stake see their share of the network diluted over time. A large share of the original supply also went to insiders, early investors and the Solana Foundation, with only a small public sale, and the FTX collapse showed how concentrated holdings can hit the price.
Finally, the cheap fees that make Solana useful also attract spammers and scammers. In early 2024, a surge of memecoin trading and bot traffic caused many transactions to fail until fixes to the fee market were rolled out, and fake airdrops and wallet-draining websites remain common.
Solana vs Ethereum
Ethereum and Solana are the two largest smart contract platforms, and they have taken opposite approaches to scaling. Ethereum keeps its base layer relatively slow and highly decentralized and relies on layer-2 rollups such as Arbitrum and Base for most everyday activity. Solana puts everything on one fast layer 1 and asks validators to run powerful hardware to keep up.
Feature
Solana
Ethereum
Launched
2020
2015
Consensus
Proof of stake, with Proof of History and Tower BFT
Proof of stake
Block time
Neither approach is strictly better. Solana offers a faster, simpler experience on a single chain, while Ethereum has a longer track record, many more validators, more value locked in DeFi and a larger institutional footprint. Plenty of users and developers work with both.
Solana vs Bitcoin
Bitcoin and Solana are built for different jobs. Bitcoin uses proof of work, adds a block roughly every 10 minutes and has a fixed supply of 21 million coins, and it is designed above all to be a secure, predictable store of value. Solana is a programmable platform built for speed, with no supply cap and a far wider range of apps.
How Solana staking works
Staking is how SOL holders help secure the network and earn a share of new issuance. You do not need to run a validator yourself. Instead, you delegate your SOL to one: your coins go into a stake account that you control, and the validator gets the voting weight without ever being able to spend them.
Rewards come mainly from inflation, plus a share of fees and tips that some validators pass on to their stakers, minus the validator's commission. In recent years staking rewards have typically worked out at mid-single-digit percentages a year, but the rate changes with inflation, the share of SOL that is staked and each validator's commission and performance.
Staking and unstaking are not instant. Stake activates and deactivates at the start of a new epoch, so it can take up to a couple of days before new stake starts earning or unstaked SOL can be withdrawn. Your choice of validator matters too: one that goes offline earns nothing for that period, and one with a high commission keeps more of your rewards. Spreading stake across smaller, well-run validators also helps decentralization.
If you want to stay flexible, liquid staking tokens such as JitoSOL and mSOL represent staked SOL that you can still trade or use in DeFi. They add smart contract risk on top of the usual staking considerations.
How to buy and store SOL
You can buy SOL on most major crypto exchanges and through apps that accept card or bank payments, then leave it where you bought it or move it to a wallet you control. A self-custody wallet gives you full control of your SOL, but also full responsibility: if you lose your recovery phrase, nobody can restore your funds.
The Bitcoin.com Wallet supports Solana, so you can hold, send, receive and swap SOL and SPL tokens in a self-custody wallet. For long-term storage, some holders also use a hardware wallet.
A few habits help you avoid expensive mistakes. Send SOL on the Solana network, not as a wrapped version on another chain. Keep a little SOL in your wallet for fees, even if you mainly hold other tokens. Be wary of surprise airdrops and of links that ask you to connect your wallet and approve a transaction, because wallet-draining scams are common on Solana. You can check any transaction or address on a block explorer such as Solscan.
Solana ETFs
You can also get exposure to SOL without holding it. The Bitwise Solana Staking ETF (BSOL) became the first US spot Solana exchange-traded product when it began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on October 28, 2025, and it stakes the SOL it holds. Other issuers, including Grayscale, followed within weeks. An ETF tracks SOL's price through an ordinary brokerage account, but you do not own the SOL yourself, cannot use it on the network and pay an annual management fee.
Is Solana a good investment?
We can't tell you whether to buy SOL, and nobody can reliably predict its price. What we can do is set out the main factors people weigh.
Those who are optimistic about Solana point to its real usage: heavy trading volumes, large stablecoin balances, growing interest from payment companies and asset managers, and a steady run of upgrades such as Firedancer and Alpenglow. Those who are skeptical point to its outage history, its shrinking validator set, ongoing inflation and fierce competition from Ethereum's layer-2 networks and newer high-speed blockchains.
SOL is also highly volatile. It lost more than 95% of its value in 2022 before recovering, and large swings in either direction are normal. If you decide to buy, only use money you can afford to lose, know how you will store it, and consider speaking to a licensed financial adviser.
Conclusion
Solana set out to prove that a single blockchain could be fast and cheap enough for mainstream use, and in many ways it has. Sub-second confirmations and fees measured in fractions of a cent have made it a leading home for trading, stablecoin payments, memecoins and tokenized assets, with SOL at the center as the coin that pays for transactions and secures the network.
The trade-offs are real. Solana asks validators to run demanding hardware, its validator set has shrunk, its supply keeps growing and its outage history still shapes its reputation. Upgrades such as Firedancer and Alpenglow are meant to address those weaknesses, and how well they work will go a long way toward deciding Solana's place in crypto. Whether you plan to use Solana, hold SOL or simply follow it, understanding both sides of that trade-off is the best place to start.
