In one sentence
Ethereum’s approach is “keep the main chain steady and leave speed to Layer 2s”. Solana does the opposite: there is one chain, every transaction runs on it, and hardware and engineering push it to the limit. The result is blocks measured in milliseconds and transfers that cost less than a cent.
It is a different family from the previous two guides: Solana does not use the EVM, its contracts (called “programs”) are mainly written in Rust, and its wallets, address format and token standards are all different.
Where it came from
In 2017 Anatoly Yakovenko, an engineer who had spent more than a decade at Qualcomm, published the idea of “Proof of History” and then founded Solana Labs. Mainnet Beta went live in March 2020.
- 2021: SOL rose more than a hundredfold in the bull market, and NFTs and DeFi on the chain took off.
- 2021–2022: the network stopped producing blocks several times, some outages lasting more than ten hours; “Solana is down again” became a running joke.
- November 2022: FTX collapsed. FTX and its affiliate Alameda were among the Solana ecosystem’s biggest backers, and SOL fell below $10 at one point.
- From 2024: pump.fun turned launching a meme coin into a one-click action and on-chain volume exploded; Firedancer, an independent client developed by Jump, began rolling out, reducing reliance on a single client.
- 2025: the community voted through Alpenglow, a new consensus design aiming to bring finality under one second, rolling out in stages under the official roadmap.
Why it is fast
Ordinary blockchains are slow largely because nodes spend time agreeing on the order of events and then execute transactions one at a time. Solana’s approach:
- Proof of History (PoH) as a clock: the block producer keeps hashing the previous result, forming a timeline nobody can forge. Transactions are slotted into that timeline, so their order is settled without nodes repeatedly checking who came first.
- The leader schedule is set in advance: before each epoch (about two days) starts, the producer of every upcoming slot is assigned by stake. Transactions can go straight to the “next leader” instead of waiting in a network-wide mempool.
- Parallel execution (Sealevel): each transaction declares in advance which accounts it will read and write. Unrelated transactions can run at the same time on several CPU cores instead of one by one.
- Tower BFT voting: validators vote on blocks; the longer a vote stands, the more firmly it is locked, and once a majority confirms a block it is not rolled back.
Measured, a slot is about 216 ms (faster than the original 400 ms design), and the last hour averaged ~1,932 tx non-vote transactions per second. 672 validators are currently voting.
- 01Signed and sent
The transaction lists the accounts it will read and write, is signed and sent to an RPC node.
Instant - 02Straight to the leader
There is no network-wide mempool; the RPC forwards the transaction to the leaders of the next few slots according to the schedule.
- 03Executed in parallel
The leader executes non-conflicting transactions in parallel and writes them into the current slot.
About 216 ms per slot - 04Validators vote
Other validators replay the block and vote on it.
- 05Finalised
Once more than two-thirds of stake has voted, the transaction cannot be rolled back.
Within ten-odd seconds
Once Alpenglow ships, voting and finality will work differently, with finality expected to drop below one second.
SOL and fees
- Base fee: a fixed 5,000 lamports (0.000005 SOL) per signature, half of which is burned.
- Priority fee: pay extra to be included faster; this part goes to the block-producing validator.
- Rent: storing data on-chain requires a small SOL deposit (for example when opening a token account), refunded when the account is closed.
SOL has no supply cap; new SOL is issued each year at a declining inflation rate as staking rewards. About 589.27M SOL are in circulation, a market cap of $62.21B.
What is on-chain today
- USDT 18% $2.84B
- USDC 44% $6.97B
- Other 38% $6.06B
Sources: CoinGecko (market cap, supply), DefiLlama (TVL, stablecoins, DEX volume, fees, protocols), measurements from public nodes (block time, validators).
Things worth noticing:
- Very active trading: 24-hour DEX volume is $2.41B, the highest of the chains on this site. Much of it comes from meme coins and high-frequency bots.
- Stablecoins are mainly USDC: by this page’s data Solana holds more USDC than USDT, the opposite of BNB Chain, Ethereum and Tron.
- Staking dominates locked value: liquid staking protocols such as Jito and Sanctum, plus lending and trading protocols such as Kamino and Jupiter.
Strengths and trade-offs
- Fast and cheap: millisecond blocks and fees under a cent, suited to high-frequency trading and payments.
- Single-chain experience: every app lives on the same chain, with no bridging, so assets and liquidity are not fragmented.
- Fast engineering iteration: multiple clients and new consensus are both under way.
- Running a validator needs a powerful server and bandwidth, so there are far fewer nodes than on Ethereum.
- Several outages in its history. It has been much more stable in the last two years, but "maximum performance" means more complexity.
- Launching tokens is too easy; meme coins and front-running bots are everywhere, and ordinary buyers often end up holding the bag.
- 01
Has the mint authority been renounced? If not, the team can mint more at any time.
- 02
Has the freeze authority been renounced? If not, the team can freeze anyone's balance of the token, and you will not be able to sell.
- 03
Among the top ten holders, first exclude liquidity pools, exchanges and launchpad contracts, then check whether the remaining addresses were funded from the same source.
- 04
Have the pool's LP tokens been burned? Tokens that graduate from pump.fun are handled automatically; tokens launched elsewhere need checking.
- 05
Does it use the Token-2022 standard? It supports extensions such as transfer fees and transfer hooks, so check which are switched on.
Data and sources
- Live figures: CoinGecko, DefiLlama and public Solana nodes (getRecentPerformanceSamples for slot time and transaction counts, getVoteAccounts for validators).
- Mechanisms are based on the official Solana documentation and SIMD proposals.
- This guide is educational and is not investment advice.
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