Overview

Solana is a public blockchain platform that uses a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and provides smart contract functionality. The platform's native cryptocurrency is SOL. Solana was founded in 2018 by Toly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, and the network was launched in March 2020 by their San Francisco-based company, Solana Labs.

Designed to support decentralized applications and high-throughput transactions, Solana gained traction as a competitor to Ethereum, particularly during the rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in 2021. The platform's architecture aims to provide faster transaction speeds and lower costs than other major blockchains. However, the high volume of transactions has also contributed to several notable network outages that have impacted its stability and reliability.

The history of Solana has been marked by rapid growth and volatility. After a successful funding round in June 2021, the price of SOL grew by nearly 12,000% that year, reaching a market capitalization of over $70 billion. The platform has since faced challenges, including a major wallet hack in August 2022, a price collapse following the bankruptcy of FTX, and legal scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which in 2023 alleged that SOL qualifies as an unregistered security.

Nevertheless, in January 2025 United States President Donald Trump's memecoin, $TRUMP, began using the Solana blockchain causing a brief surge to near all-time highs.

Characteristics

According to the company's white paper, Solana runs on a proof of stake model. The New York Times and Financial Times described the coin as an alternative to Ethereum.

History

Solana was first opened to the public in March 2020, with its first block being created on 16 March 2020. The Solana blockchain was designed to support smart contracts and decentralized apps in particular. Large numbers of simultaneous transactions have contributed to several outages of the Solana blockchain.

In June 2021, Solana Labs sold $314 million worth of its native cryptocurrency, SOL, to a group of funds led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital.

The market capitalization of the Solana blockchain surpassed $63 billion in September 2021, and reached $74 billion in early November 2021, having risen by nearly 12,000% that year to a price of $259.96. The blockchain's popularity at this time was due in part to interest in NFTs.

Outages

On 14 September 2021, the Solana blockchain went offline after a surge of transactions caused the network to fork, and different validators had different views of the state of the network. The network was brought back online the next day on 15 September 2021. The outage lasted a total of about 17 hours.

The Solana blockchain again went offline on 1 May, with the outage lasting roughly seven hours due to it being taken offline by bots. The blockchain went offline again on 31 May 2022, due to a bug in how the blockchain processes offline transactions. This outage lasted about four and a half hours.

On 1 October 2022, the Solana network went down for 6 hours due to a consensus bug in the validator client allowing a misconfigured node to publish multiple valid but different blocks.

Trump cryptocurrency report

On November 25, 2025, U.S Representative Jamie Raskin released a report finding that following an investigation by Democrats on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, it was determined that the cryptocurrency policies of Trump were in fact used to benefit Trump and his family, with Trump in fact adding billions of dollars to his net worth through cryptocurrency schemes which were entangled with foreign governments, corporate allies, and criminal actors, with Solana hosting much of Trump's cryptocurrency transactions.

The report, titled Trump, Crypto, and a New Age of Corruption, also found that Trump dismantled anti-corruption and safeguards and pardoned people who were regarded as "corporate cronies" in order build his cryptocurrency empire.