Solana Price: SOL Live Price Chart, Market Cap & News Today | CoinGecko

About Solana (SOL)

Solana is a Layer 1 blockchain that offers users fast speeds and affordable costs. It supports smart contracts and facilitates the creation of decentralized applications (dApps). Projects built on Solana include a variety of DeFi platforms as well as NFT marketplaces, where users can buy Solana-based NFT projects. Its high performance means Solana doesn’t require a traditional scaling Layer 2 solution; instead, Layer 2s on Solana focus on interoperability and connecting Solana to other chains.

Solana combines the Proof-of-History (PoH) consensus mechanism alongside the more common Proof-of-Stake. This ensures Solana achieves consensus more quickly while reducing the workload and solving the blockchain trilemma, where developers have to balance decentralization, security, and scalability.

What is Proof of History?

Proof-of-History is a time-based consensus mechanism that develops a historical record of an activity based on its position in the blockchain, which is represented by a hash tree. This lets any node quickly verify the order of all transactions by checking the hashes on the hash tree, allowing for fast and efficient validation without requiring the nodes to store the full history of every transaction.

Who founded Solana?

Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana’s main founder, created the first version of Proof-of-History (PoH) in 2017. Teaming up with Raj Gokal, Greg Fitzgerald, and Stephen Akridge, they worked on building a high-performance blockchain that would solve scalability issues faced by popular blockchains like Ethereum, which often became slow and expensive at times of high demand. Solana Labs was launched in 2018 to support these efforts, and Solana was officially launched in 2020.

What can Solana be used for?

With its fast transactions and low gas fees, Solana has attracted many developers to build their protocols on its blockchain. Today, the Solana ecosystem consists of a diverse range of projects, such as:

DEXs like Radium allow users to swap tokens on Solana. Users can also provide liquidity to earn trading fees.
DePIN projects like Helium reward users for providing physical infrastructure resources such as wireless connectivity and data storage.
Liquid Staking protocols like Jito allow users to deposit their assets on the platform and be rewarded with liquid staking tokens.
Memecoins like dogwifhat and Book of Meme

Solana Outages

Solana has faced recurring network outages, totaling eight major and ten partial incidents at the time of writing. These have ranged from a 17-hour downtime in September 2021 to a 5-hour outage in February 2024, caused by issues like bot transactions and bugs.

In response, Solana’s team has implemented various upgrades such as a new data transfer protocol called QUIC, a stake-weighted Quality-of-Service to ensure transaction packets are sent to the leader, and local fee markets to send priority fees to validators.

Solana Key Events

The Solana team has been working hard improving its blockchain and ecosystem. One example is Solana’s growing validator client diversity with Jito Labs, Firedancer and Sig, which is important for blockchain resilience and decentralization as it minimizes the risk of bugs and any single client compromising the entire chain.

Secondly, Solana introduces its new compiler Solang that is compatibility with Ethereum Solidity. It allows Ethereum smart contract developers to deploy smart contracts on Solana without Rust or C, Solana’s primary programming language.

In 2023, Solana has unveiled its own Web3 smartphone Saga with a native store for dApps. Unfortunately, the Saga received negative reviews with a YouTuber MKBHD stating that the features didn’t justify the US$1,000 price tag.

What is the utility of SOL token?

SOL is the native token of the Solana blockchain. It can be used to pay for transaction fees (also known as gas fees) when sending transactions or interacting with smart contracts. It can also be used to secure the network through staking. Users can either stake their SOL directly, or delegate their holdings to an active validator in exchange for a share of the rewards.

FAQs on Solana

Where can you buy Solana?

SOL tokens can be traded on centralized crypto exchanges. The most popular exchange to buy and trade Solana is Gate.io, where the most active trading pair SOL/USDT has a trading volume of $18,647,138.73 in the last 24 hours. Other popular options include WhiteBIT and Binance.

What is the daily trading volume of Solana (SOL)?

The trading volume of Solana (SOL) is $1,954,667,055.82 in the last 24 hours, representing a -37.40% decrease from one day ago and signalling a recent fall in market activity.

What is the all-time high for Solana (SOL)?

The highest price paid for Solana (SOL) is BTC0.004608, which was recorded on Nov 06, 2021 (over 2 years). Comparatively, the current price is