Solana: Betting on One Fast Chain Instead of Many Layers
A smart contract L1 built on speed and parallel execution
Solana is a smart contract blockchain, live since March 2020, that chose to make one chain as fast as possible instead of spreading work across layers. SOL is its own coin, used for fees and staking.
1. Who built it and what SOL does
Solana began in November 2017, when former Qualcomm engineer Anatoly Yakovenko published a white paper on “Proof of History.” He co-founded Solana Labs with Raj Gokal and others, and the mainnet beta opened in March 2020. The non-profit Solana Foundation in Switzerland funds ecosystem grants.
SOL pays fees and is staked with validators to secure the network. New issuance started at 8% a year and shrinks by 15% annually toward a long-term 1.5%, and half of every base fee is burned. On the Crypto Nation map, SOL is the city-hall tower at the centre of Solana City.
2. Proof of History and parallel execution
Proof of History works like a cryptographic clock: an unbroken chain of hashes that records what happened and in what order. Because validators spend less effort agreeing on time, Solana opens a new block slot about every 0.4 seconds. Consensus itself comes from Tower BFT, a proof-of-stake voting system.
The other key piece is Sealevel, which runs transactions in parallel. Each transaction declares in advance which accounts it will touch, so transactions that do not overlap can run on many CPU cores at once. The trade-off is that validators need fast connections and powerful servers, unlike chains that aim for nodes on home computers.
3. Ecosystem and milestones
Solana hosts the trading aggregator Jupiter, exchanges such as Raydium, and stablecoins including USDC and PYUSD. In 2023, infrastructure networks (DePIN) such as Helium and Render moved to Solana, and pump.fun, a meme-coin launch site opened in January 2024, set off a wave of new tokens.
In November 2022 the collapse of FTX, one of Solana’s biggest backers, hit the ecosystem hard. In September 2024 the first form of Firedancer, a second validator client built by Jump Crypto, reached mainnet, and in September 2025 validators approved Alpenglow, a new consensus design meant to cut finality times sharply. Spot SOL ETFs began trading in the United States in October 2025.
4. Things to know
Solana suffered several outages in 2021 and 2022, including a halt of about 17 hours in September 2021, and block production stopped for about five hours in February 2024. Many say reliability has improved since, but critics argue that its speed and heavy hardware needs come partly at the cost of decentralisation.
Because tokens are so easy to create, speculative meme coins, scam tokens and “sandwich attacks” that exploit transaction ordering are frequent complaints. How concentrated stake is among large validators, and how smoothly Firedancer and Alpenglow settle in, are also worth watching.
Written from information public up to October 2026. It does not recommend or rate any coin and is not investment advice. If something is wrong, please tell us through the contact page.