Solana is a public blockchain built to run smart contracts and decentralized apps at high speed and low cost. Its native token is SOL, which is used to pay transaction fees and to stake, meaning holders can lock up tokens to help secure the network and earn rewards. The chain aims to handle large volumes of transactions quickly, which has made it a common home for trading apps, marketplaces, and other projects where speed matters.
What sets Solana apart is how it tracks time. Most blockchains have no shared clock, so validators spend effort agreeing on when each transaction happened. Solana adds a technique called Proof of History, built on a verifiable delay function, a calculation that takes a known, steady amount of time to run and can be checked quickly by others. By chaining these calculations together, the network builds a trusted record of the order and timing of events before they are confirmed. That timestamped record lets validators agree faster, because the sequence is already settled.
Proof of History is not a standalone way to secure the network. It works alongside proof of stake, the model where validators put up SOL to take part in producing and confirming blocks. The two split the work. Proof of History orders the transactions, and proof of stake decides which validators agree on them. Together they let Solana confirm transactions in a fraction of a second.
Solana was created by Anatoly Yakovenko, who began the work with the company Solana Labs. The network went live in 2020, with the first block of its main network produced on March 16 of that year. Unlike Bitcoin, SOL does not have a fixed maximum supply. New tokens are issued over time as part of the network's design and paid out partly as staking rewards, which makes the supply inflationary rather than capped.
In the market, Solana is one of the better-known layer-1 chains, the foundational networks that other apps are built on top of, and it is often compared with Ethereum on the basis of speed and cost. Its appeal rests on fast, cheap transactions, which suit high-volume uses. That same push for speed has at times come with reliability questions, including network slowdowns and outages.