Solana Price

Solana is a high-throughput blockchain designed around a single idea: if participants can agree on the order and timing of events without talking to each other, consensus becomes much faster. Its mainnet beta launched in March 2020, based on a whitepaper by Anatoly Yakovenko.

That idea is Proof of History. It produces a sequence of hashes where each one proves that specific data existed before it and that a measurable amount of time passed in between. Because the sequence takes real time to generate but can be verified quickly and in parallel, it functions as a cryptographic clock. Validators do not need to exchange messages to establish what happened first — the ordering is already embedded in the data.

Proof of History is not consensus by itself. Solana pairs it with proof of stake, where blocks are confirmed by a two-thirds supermajority of the validator set, weighted by stake. The clock removes a large part of the coordination overhead that slows other chains.

The design target was explicit throughput: the whitepaper describes handling up to 710,000 transactions per second on a one-gigabit network with contemporary hardware. Real-world figures are lower, and the network has experienced outages during periods of extreme load — a consequence of pushing a single global cluster hard rather than splitting into shards or layers.

That single-cluster choice is deliberate. All validators maintain one ledger, with a rotating leader producing blocks in each slot, so applications share state directly rather than bridging between environments.

Supply is uncapped. Inflation began at eight percent annually and declines by fifteen percent each year toward a long-term floor of one and a half percent. Transaction fees and rent are partly burned, offsetting issuance.

In practice Solana is used where transaction cost and speed dominate: trading applications, consumer payments and high-frequency on-chain activity.