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Solana

SOL · Field entry
Smart-contract platformPayments & moneySmart contractsDeFi

A fast, low-fee blockchain for trading, payments and consumer apps, secured by staked SOL

$121.010.35%Snapshot · October 4, 2026 · updates live
Market cap
$71.21B
24h volume
$2.21B
Rank
#7
Circulating
588.31M SOL
Max supply
No fixed cap
All-time high
$293.31 January 19, 2025

SOL price chart

7-day snapshot. Chart data from CoinGecko.

What is Solana?

Solana is a high-speed public blockchain designed to handle many transactions at very low cost on a single network. SOL is its native coin, used to pay fees and staked to validators who secure the chain. It is popular for trading, stablecoin payments and consumer apps.

Utility Lens

What Solana actually does

Solana aims to give apps a single fast, cheap blockchain where trading and payments can settle in about a second for a fraction of a cent.

Real-world usage
establishedSolana processes very high volumes of real trading and stablecoin activity every day, although a large share is speculative memecoin trading.
Token necessity
essentialSOL is required for every transaction fee and for the stake that selects and secures validators.
Decentralization
moderateSolana has a large validator set and now a second independent client (Firedancer), but running a validator needs costly hardware and stake is concentrated among big operators.
Track record
provenLive since March 2020, Solana suffered several full network halts between 2021 and 2022 and a roughly five-hour outage in February 2024, and has run without a major halt since.

How we rate

What it’s used for

Solana is heavily used for decentralized trading, including token launches and memecoin markets, as well as for stablecoin transfers and payments. Many users stake SOL through wallets or exchanges to earn rewards. Since October 2025, US investors can also hold SOL through exchange-traded products, some of which stake the SOL they hold.

Role of the SOL token:

gasstaking securitygovernance

Evidence of real use

  • Bitwise launched BSOL, a US spot Solana ETP that stakes its holdings, which began trading on October 28, 2025. Source
  • Solana validators approved the Alpenglow consensus redesign (SIMD-0326) in September 2025 with about 98 percent of participating stake voting yes. Source
  • A March 2026 joint SEC and CFTC interpretation named Solana (SOL) as an example of a digital commodity. Source

How Solana works

Solana runs every app on one shared chain instead of splitting activity across many smaller networks. To move quickly, it uses a timestamping method called Proof of History that lets validators agree on the order of events without constant back-and-forth messaging. Its runtime can also process transactions in parallel when they touch different accounts, which is a big reason fees stay low even under heavy load.

Security comes from proof of stake. Validators lock up SOL, and holders can delegate their SOL to a validator to share in rewards without giving up ownership. The more stake a validator has, the more often it is chosen to produce blocks. Fees are paid in SOL, and users can add a priority fee to get their transaction processed faster when the network is busy.

Solana is in the middle of large upgrades. Firedancer, a separate validator client built by Jump Crypto, reached mainnet in late 2025, which reduces the risk that a single software bug halts the whole network. Alpenglow, a new consensus design approved by validators in 2025 that targets finality of around 150 milliseconds, had not yet been activated on mainnet as of October 2026.

Key moments

  1. 2017Anatoly Yakovenko publishes the Solana white paper describing Proof of History.
  2. 2020Solana's mainnet beta launches in March.
  3. 2021The network halts for about 17 hours in September under a flood of bot transactions, the first of several outages.
  4. 2024A roughly five-hour outage in February is caused by a bug in the program cache.
  5. 2025Validators approve Alpenglow in September; US spot Solana ETPs launch in October; Firedancer reaches mainnet.
  6. 2026Stakers narrowly endorse SGP-0002 in August, a proposal to double the pace at which SOL inflation declines.

Supply

SOL has no fixed supply cap. New SOL is issued as staking rewards on a schedule that started at 8 percent a year and falls by 15 percent each year toward a long-term floor of 1.5 percent; in August 2026 stakers narrowly approved a proposal to double that rate of decline. A portion of transaction fees is burned, which partly offsets issuance.

Risks to understand

  • Outage history: Solana has stopped producing blocks several times, and any future halt would freeze transfers and trading until validators restart.
  • Hardware and stake concentration: high validator costs and large staking operators could make the network easier to pressure than chains with lighter requirements.
  • Speculative activity: a big share of on-chain volume comes from memecoin trading, which can swing quickly and is full of rug pulls and scam tokens.
  • Upgrade risk: major changes such as Alpenglow rewrite core consensus, and new code can introduce new bugs.
  • Price volatility: SOL has seen very deep drawdowns, including a collapse of more than 90 percent from its 2021 high during the 2022 bear market.

Solana FAQ

Why are Solana fees so low?

Solana packs many transactions into each block and runs non-conflicting ones in parallel, so the cost of each one is small. Fees can rise during congestion when users add priority fees.

Can I stake SOL?

Yes. Most Solana wallets let you delegate SOL to a validator and earn rewards while keeping control of your coins; unstaking takes until the end of the current epoch, typically about two days.

Has Solana ever gone down?

Yes. It had several full halts in 2021 and 2022 and an outage of about five hours in February 2024; it has not had a comparable halt since then as of October 2026.

Sources

  1. 02-06-24 Solana Mainnet Beta Outage Report — Solana
  2. Alpenglow — Solana Foundation
  3. A Complete History of Solana Outages — Helius
  4. The Bitwise Solana Staking ETF (BSOL) Begins Trading — Bitwise
  5. Solana's Double Disinflation Proposal Goes Down to the Wire, Passing by 0.33% — SolanaFloor
  6. SIMD-0411: Proposal for Doubling the Disinflation Rate — Solana Forum
  7. Application of the Federal Securities Laws to Certain Types of Crypto Assets (Release 33-11412) — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

Last reviewed October 4, 2026 by The Crypto Guide editorial team. Utility Lens ratings are editorial judgments, not investment advice. Market data from CoinGecko. Spot an error? Request a correction.