What Is Solana (SOL)?

Solana is based on the technical paper published by Anatoly Yakovenko in 2017; the beta version of the mainnet began in 2020. Proof of History records the order of transactions and events like a cryptographically verifiable clock; thus validators can agree on a shared ordering without constantly communicating about time. The runtime called Sealevel can execute mutually independent transactions in parallel, and the block production interval (slot) is under a second.

SOL is used to pay transaction fees, to stake to secure the network and to delegate to validators. Thanks to its low fees, Solana is heavily used for decentralized exchanges, NFT marketplaces, payment applications and memecoin trading. Programs (smart contracts) are mostly written in the Rust language and use an account model different from the EVM on Ethereum.

Solana's high performance comes with strong hardware requirements for validators; this is criticized in terms of decentralization. Especially in its early years, the network experienced several outages lasting hours. To reduce these risks, new validator clients developed by different teams, such as Firedancer, and fee mechanisms aimed at managing network congestion are being introduced.