Solana SOL

What it is

Solana is a high-speed blockchain built for apps that need many cheap transactions, such as trading, payments and games. Its main network launched in March 2020. SOL pays transaction fees and is staked with validators, who process transactions and secure the network. Solana became the busiest home for memecoin trading and also carries a large amount of stablecoins.

Validators take turns producing blocks in quick succession and vote, weighted by stake, on the order of transactions. A major consensus upgrade called Alpenglow, approved by validators in 2025, was scheduled to switch on around October 21, 2026. It aims to cut the time until a transaction is final from about 12.8 seconds to a fraction of a second. Development is led by a few companies, including Anza and the Firedancer team at Jump Crypto, while the Solana Foundation funds the wider ecosystem.

SOL has no maximum supply. New SOL is created every year as staking rewards. The inflation rate started at 8% and steps down each year toward a long-run floor of 1.5%, and in August 2026 validators, voting with their stake, narrowly approved doubling the speed of that decline. Half of each basic transaction fee is burned.

What can go wrong

• Solana has stopped entirely several times, including for roughly 17 hours in September 2021 and about five hours in February 2024. During an outage nobody can move funds.
• Running a validator requires expensive hardware and bandwidth, which limits how many independent parties can take part.
• The memecoin boom came with a flood of rug pulls and copycat tokens. Creating a token on Solana takes minutes, so most new ones have no track record at all.
• Big consensus changes like Alpenglow carry upgrade risk: the switch happens on a live network and depends on most validators upgrading in time.

Anyone can create a token on Solana with any name or ticker. Before buying anything other than SOL itself, check the token's official address (its 'mint') from a trusted source rather than trusting the name.

Safety checks

• Track recordGoodTrading since 2020, about 6 years. It has been through at least one full market cycle.
• Trading activityGood$2.74 billion traded in the last 24 hours, 4.4% of its market value. That's enough activity that a normal-size order shouldn't move the price.
• Coins still to comeGood589.5 million of 636.2 million total coins are in circulation, so about 7% are still to be released. Little new supply is left to hit the market. There is no fixed maximum, so new coins can keep being created.
• Distance from its peakCautionDown 64% from its all-time high of $293.31 in January 2025. Many buyers from the peak are still underwater, and they often sell into any rally.
• Past yearFor context−43.6% over the past year, against −25.3% for bitcoin. It has done worse than simply holding bitcoin.
• Contract powersGoodThis is the native coin of its own network, not a token issued by a smart contract, so there's no owner key that can mint, freeze or tax it. Changes to the rules go through the network's upgrade process.

History of trouble and big events

• 2021: The network halted for about 17 hours in September after a flood of bot transactions.
• 2022: Several more halts followed, and the November collapse of FTX, an early major backer, hit the ecosystem hard.
• 2024: A bug stopped block production for about five hours on February 6.

Holding a token on a smaller network, or got sent one you don't recognize? Run its address through the free checker. Copycat tokens often borrow big names.

Sources

• blockworks.com/news/solana-governance-passes-alpenglow
• solanacompass.com/news/anza-sets-alpenglow-mainnet-date-solanas-consensus-switch-is-scheduled-for-october-21-at-about-1450-utc
• fxstreet.com/cryptocurrencies/news/solana-community-narrowly-approves-double-disinflation-proposal-in-dramatic-governance-vote-202608290259
• decrypt.co/376825/solana-sol-disinflation-vote-passes

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