Solana

Solana is a Layer 1 smart contract platform built for high throughput and low transaction costs. It targets mass adoption by keeping the entire network on a single, unified ledger rather than splitting state across shards or multiple layers.

The network was founded in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko and is now supported by the Switzerland-based Solana Foundation. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital. The native token, SOL, is used for transaction fees, staking, and governance.

Solana has attracted institutional attention ranging from spot Solana ETFs to major partnerships. In 2025, Visa launched USDC settlement on the network, and Galaxy Digital tokenized public equity using the platform.

Solana combines Proof of Stake with Proof of History, a mechanism that acts as a decentralised clock. Proof of History timestamps transactions before they enter a block, reducing the communication rounds validators need to agree on ordering. This lets the network reach consensus faster.

Smart contract execution runs through Sealevel, a parallel execution engine that processes non-conflicting transactions simultaneously across multiple CPU cores. The Gulf Stream protocol further reduces confirmation times by forwarding transactions to validators before the current block is finalised, cutting mempool wait times.

Together, these components allow Solana to process thousands of transactions per second with sub-second finality. Transaction costs are typically less than a penny.

SOL has a circulating supply of 582,978,536 tokens and a total supply of 630,994,881 tokens. There is no fixed maximum supply. New tokens are issued continuously to reward validators and stakers, creating ongoing inflationary pressure.

SOL is used to pay transaction fees, participate in governance, and secure the network through staking. Because supply is uncapped, the long-term value of SOL depends on demand from network usage and staking absorbing or exceeding the rate of new issuance.

The gap between circulating and total supply is relatively narrow, meaning most tokens are already in circulation. However, the absence of a hard cap means dilution is a permanent feature of the economic model.

Solana's core differentiator is its single-layer design paired with Proof of History. By avoiding sharding and Layer 2 rollups, it keeps liquidity and state in one place, simplifying composability for decentralised applications.

Sealevel's parallel execution gives it a performance advantage over many EVM-based chains that process transactions sequentially. This architecture has attracted high-frequency use cases and institutional pilots that require fast, cheap finality.

Solana scales globally without sharding or multiple layers, maintaining a single unified ledger to avoid liquidity fragmentation.

Institutional adoption is a growing moat. Visa's USDC settlement and Galaxy Digital's equity tokenisation are not typical for a general-purpose L1, and they signal that traditional finance is testing Solana as settlement infrastructure.