Solana (SOL) price, chart and history
Solana is $119.59, down 1.64% in the last 24 hours. Market value $70.34 billion, rank #7.
About Solana
Solana is a public blockchain built to process a very large number of transactions quickly and cheaply. Its native coin, SOL, pays transaction fees and can be staked to help secure the network. People use Solana to trade tokens on decentralized exchanges, send stablecoins, mint NFTs, launch memecoins, and run payment and gaming apps, and major firms have used it for settlement experiments.
The project began in late 2017, when Anatoly Yakovenko published a paper describing a new way to record the order and timing of events on a blockchain. He co-founded Solana Labs in San Francisco with Raj Gokal in 2018, and the network's mainnet beta went live in March 2020. The Solana Foundation supports the ecosystem, and other groups, such as Jump Crypto's Firedancer team, now build separate validator software.
Solana combines proof of stake with Proof of History, a built-in clock that orders transactions before validators vote on them, which helps it run fast. A validator-approved upgrade called Alpenglow aims to replace the voting system for near-instant finality. Critics point to several network-wide outages in its early years, heavy hardware demands on validators that may limit decentralization, an uncapped and inflationary coin supply, and the damage it suffered from close ties to FTX.
- Created by
- Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal (Solana Labs)
- Launched
- March 16, 2020 (mainnet beta)
- How it's secured
- Proof of stake, with Proof of History timestamps
- Supply
- No maximum; new SOL is issued as staking rewards, with yearly inflation stepping down toward 1.5%