Solana

Solana is a public blockchain built to be fast and cheap to use. It runs apps, which Solana calls programs, and its own coin is SOL. Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal founded the project in 2018. The first block was made on 16 March 2020.

Solana does all its work on one chain. A new block arrives four times a second, and a normal transfer costs a small part of a cent. People use Solana to send dollar tokens, trade coins and tokenized stocks, and run everyday apps.

The network changed a great deal in 2026. Blocks got faster, storage got cheaper, and a new system for agreeing on blocks, called Alpenglow, reached the test networks in September 2026.

How does Solana work? Proof of History, Sealevel and parallel execution

Solana works by letting one computer at a time build blocks while the rest check them and vote. These computers are called validators. Each one locks up SOL as a stake, and you can lend your own SOL to a validator you trust. The more SOL a validator has behind it, the more often it builds blocks and the more its votes count. This model is called proof of stake.

Two ideas explain most of the speed.

The first is a shared clock. Proof of History is a long chain of hashes that shows how much time has passed between events. Solana's own glossary calls it a stack of proofs that a set amount of time has passed. With a shared clock, validators can agree on the order of events without stopping to ask each other the time.

The second is doing many things at once. Every Solana transaction lists the accounts it will touch before it runs. The engine, called Sealevel, uses that list to run unrelated transactions side by side on different processor cores. Most older chains run one at a time.

Three more parts help. Turbine cuts each block into small pieces and passes them on in layers, so no one machine has to send a full block to all the others. Gulf Stream sends your transaction straight to the next block builder, so there is no public queue. Cloudbreak is the database that lets many tasks read and write at once.

For you, the result is plain. You sign in your wallet, and the transfer is done in about a second.

What is Solana used for? Stablecoins, trading and tokenized stocks

Solana is used mostly to move dollars, trade tokens and, more and more, trade tokenized shares. The Solana Foundation's guide lists payments, trading, games, digital art and lending as the main uses. Anyone with an internet link can take part.

Dollar tokens are the clearest case. The supply of stablecoins such as USDC on Solana hit a record on 25 September 2026. We covered it in our report on the stablecoin record.

The chain is busy. Solana Compass data shows 3.18 billion completed user transactions in September 2026. That was a record month at the end of a record quarter.

Read trading volume with care, though. The data firm Bitquery studied 30 days of Solana exchange trades to 22 September 2026. It classed about 58% of the volume as circular or bot-like. Bitquery said this was a rule-based guess and not proof of intent. We explain the method in our piece on the Bitquery study.

Banks and funds are a growing part of the story. On 6 October 2026 the Solana Foundation launched Solana DvP. It is an open standard for swapping a security and its payment in one step. The Foundation said it was built with input from J.P. Morgan. In the US you can also hold SOL through an exchange-traded fund. Bitwise's BSOL fund launched in October 2025 and stakes the SOL it holds.

Solana upgrades in 2026: 250ms block times, cheaper rent and larger transactions

Solana's 2026 upgrades made the chain faster and cheaper to build on. The change you will notice most is block time. From launch until August 2026, Solana aimed for a block every 400 milliseconds. It then cut that in steps. Since 18 September 2026 the target has been 250 milliseconds, per the Solana tracker for slot times. The end goal is 200, which is live on the test networks.

Faster blocks have side effects. Staking rewards are paid once per epoch, and an epoch is a fixed count of blocks. The tracker says an epoch now takes about 30 hours, down from about 48. So your rewards arrive more often. A signed transaction also goes stale sooner. That matters if you sign offline or need a slow sign-off.

Three other changes shipped in 2026, per the Solana upgrades page:

• Each block can hold about two thirds more work than before.
• One transaction can be more than three times larger, so complex actions fit in a single step.
• Rent began to fall on 3 September 2026. Rent is the SOL deposit each account holds to store data. The plan is a 90% cut in five steps, with the last steps due in November 2026.

You get rent back when an account is closed. If your wallet has old, empty token accounts, the Solana Compass tool that closes empty token accounts returns those deposits to you.

Alpenglow: 150ms finality and the end of Proof of History

Alpenglow is a new way for Solana validators to agree on blocks. It was built by Anza. Its goal is to make a transaction final in about 150 milliseconds. Under the old system that takes about 12.8 seconds, says the Alpenglow migration guide. Final means the transfer can no longer be undone. Validators backed the design in vote SIMD-0326, with more than 98% in favour.

Alpenglow swaps the old voting system, Tower BFT, for a new one called Votor, as Anza's docs explain. Two things change. First, validator votes stop being on-chain transactions. They no longer fill blocks or pad the transaction count. Second, Proof of History stops setting the pace of blocks. The shared clock described above goes away once Alpenglow is live on the main network.

Alpenglow went live on Solana's testnet on 24 September 2026 and on devnet a day later. The main network had not yet switched when we updated this page on 6 October 2026. Anza said on 5 October 2026 that Alpenglow was headed to the main network soon. It gave no date. Our report on the devnet switch has more.

Alpenglow also brings a new rule for validators. Since 22 July 2026 each one has needed a Validator Admission Ticket. The ticket carries a fee in SOL and caps the network at 2,000 validators, per the Solana upgrades page.

Firedancer and Solana's validator clients

Firedancer is a second, separate build of the Solana validator software. Jump Crypto wrote it from scratch in C and C++. It went live on the main network on 12 December 2025, after about three years of work. The launch was announced at Breakpoint in Abu Dhabi. Our Firedancer page covers the software itself.

A second build matters because of how chains fail. Most Solana validators run Agave, the Rust software kept up by Anza. If all validators run the same code, one bug can stop the whole chain. With two code bases, the same bug would have to be in both.

The Alpenglow rollout shows the limits of that safety net so far. On 22 September 2026 Anza told testnet operators that Firedancer and Frankendancer do not support the Alpenglow switch. They had to move to Agave first. Frankendancer is a hybrid that mixes parts of Firedancer and Agave.

What is SOL? Fees, staking rewards and inflation

SOL is the coin that pays for all activity on Solana. You need a little SOL in your wallet to send any transaction. You can also stake SOL to help secure the chain and earn rewards.

Fees have two parts, set out in the Solana fee docs. The base fee is 5,000 lamports per signature. A lamport is one billionth of a SOL. Half of the base fee is burned, and half goes to the validator. You can add a priority fee to jump the queue at busy times. All of that goes to the validator.

Staking rewards come mostly from new SOL. Solana began with new supply of 8% a year. That rate falls by 15% each year until it settles at 1.5%. Helius put it just under 4% in June 2026.

In August 2026 stakers voted to make that rate fall twice as fast. The change is called SIMD-0550. It cleared the two-thirds bar by a third of a point, as we said in our report on the vote. It was not yet active on 6 October 2026. Anza has said one more change must ship first.

If you want to stake, our staking page walks you through it. You can also compare validators by commission and uptime before you choose. Solana Compass runs a validator, so we have an interest here.

Who is Solana for?

Solana suits people who make many small transactions and care about cost and speed. Three groups stand out.

• Traders and payment users, for whom a fee of a dollar or more per transfer would be a deal-breaker.
• Developers who are happy to write in Rust and want their users and funds on one chain.
• Firms that issue tokenized dollars, funds or shares and need fast, cheap settlement.

Solana is a weaker fit in two cases. The first is if you want to run your own full node at home. A September 2026 report by ARK Invest and Glassnode put the hardware for a Solana full node at about 21,500 dollars. For Bitcoin or Ethereum it was a few hundred. The second is if you need a base chain that has never stopped. Solana's past outages count against it.

Is Solana safe? Outages, decentralization and other risks

Solana has run since 2020 and large firms now build on it, but it carries four clear risks. The chain has stopped in the past. Its validators sit mostly in data centers. Apps and wallets built on it have lost money. And the price of SOL swings hard.

Solana has halted several times. The longest stop lasted about 17 hours in September 2021. Three more came in 2022, per Wikipedia's list of outages. The last full halt we found a report of was on 6 February 2024. The chain was down for about five hours. During a halt, nothing can move until validators restart the chain.

Decentralization is mixed. The ARK Invest and Glassnode report gave Solana a Nakamoto coefficient of 19. That means 19 operators would have to work together to disrupt the chain. Bitcoin and Ethereum each scored 3. But the same report found that nearly all Solana validators run in commercial data centers, and that more than half of all stake sits in three countries. See our piece on the scorecard.

The rules change fast. Several deep changes shipped within weeks of each other in 2026, and each one is a chance for a bug. Solana also has no slashing. Slashing is a penalty that destroys the stake of a validator that cheats. It is not in the protocol yet. So stakers do not face that loss, but cheats face a weaker threat.

Apps and wallets built on Solana are a separate source of loss. Drift Protocol DRIFT$0.020-14.1%, a Solana exchange for derivatives, was exploited on 1 April 2026 for about 295 million dollars. Its claims process for users who lost funds opened on 1 October 2026. In August 2022 more than 9,000 wallets were drained. The Solana Foundation traced that to wallet software from Slope. You hold your own keys on Solana. A leaked seed phrase or a signed scam transaction cannot be undone.

SOL itself is volatile. It fell 40% in one day in November 2022 when the exchange FTX, a large holder of SOL, collapsed.

Solana vs Ethereum, and how Solana compares with Bitcoin

Solana is faster and cheaper than Ethereum's base chain. Ethereum is more spread out and has a longer record of staying online. The gap comes down to design.

Ethereum keeps its base chain slow and safe, with a block every 12 seconds. It pushes most activity out to add-on networks called layer 2s. Solana does it all on one chain. A Ledger guide from November 2025 counts more than a million Ethereum validators on home-grade hardware. Solana has over 1,000 validators, by the Solana Foundation's count. They need far more costly machines.

What this means for you depends on what you do. On Solana, your tokens, apps and trading pools share one network, so you rarely need a bridge. On Ethereum, you get a larger pool of lending and trading apps and a base chain that a normal computer can check. The price is higher fees on the base chain, or a choice between layer 2s.

Bitcoin is a different kind of network. The Solana Foundation's own guide says Bitcoin excels as a store of value. Solana is built to run complex apps at higher speed and lower cost.

Who runs Solana? Founders, the Solana Foundation and governance votes

No one owns Solana. Validators run it, and three groups do most of the core work. The Solana Foundation calls itself a non-profit based in Zug, Switzerland. Its stated job is to grow the network and keep it secure. Anza looks after Agave, the software most validators run. Jump Crypto builds Firedancer.

Changes to the rules are written up as SIMDs, short for Solana Improvement Documents. A change takes effect only when validators run the new software and switch the feature on.

In August 2026 Solana held its first formal on-chain votes. Voting ran from 22 to 27 August, as reported while the vote was open. Three plans were on the ballot. A constitution that sets the rules for future votes passed with 86% in favour. The plan to cut new SOL supply faster passed by a hair. A plan to replace the flat base fee with fees based on resource use failed.

The Solana Foundation named Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and Jamal Raees as head of payments on 24 September 2026, per its news page. Breakpoint, the yearly Solana event, is in London in November 2026.

Solana history: from the 2021 outages and FTX to Firedancer

Solana's story so far has three parts. The first ran from launch in March 2020 to late 2022. Growth was fast, and so were the failures. The 17-hour halt in September 2021 was the worst of them.

The second part began when FTX fell in November 2022. FTX and its sister firm Alameda Research held a lot of SOL. In June 2023 the US markets regulator, the SEC, called SOL a security in its case against Coinbase. Some exchanges then dropped the coin.

The third part is the comeback. Builders and users came back. Robinhood listed SOL again for US users in November 2024. Funds that hold SOL reached US exchanges in 2025. Firedancer went live in December 2025. Then came the 2026 upgrades on this page. A network once known for stopping is being rebuilt, while live, to settle a transfer in a small part of a second.