Solana

Solana’s technical starting point is the whitepaper “Solana: A new architecture for a high performance blockchain,” written by Anatoly Yakovenko. The whitepaper proposes “Proof of History” (PoH): a hash function that cannot be parallelized repeatedly hashes its own output, and the count and current output are recorded periodically, producing a publicly verifiable time sequence that proves an event occurred before or after a given moment. One of the most difficult problems in distributed systems is agreement on time; with this sequence, there is no need to trust the timestamp a message carries. Block producers run the sequence locally with SHA256, so that the ledger itself makes it possible to infer the order of events.⁠[1][2][2][2][2][3][3][3]

In 2018, Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal founded Solana Labs, Inc., a Delaware corporation headquartered in San Francisco; as of June 2023, the two served as the company’s CEO and COO, respectively. On April 18, 2018, the project published an article introducing Proof of History, stating that its testnet at the time consisted of 200 physically distinct nodes and could sustain more than 50,000 transactions per second when running with GPUs; these figures were obtained under testnet conditions.⁠[4][4][4][2][2]

In 2019, the Solana team released a rapid series of testnet versions and published the “8 innovations,” including Proof of History, Tower BFT consensus, Turbine block propagation, Gulf Stream, Sealevel parallel execution, Pipelining, and the Cloudbreak accounts database. The v0.17.0 release in July halved block generation time to 400 milliseconds; in an internal test in August across 200 distributed nodes in 23 regions around the world, the network averaged 29,171 transactions per second, with a peak of 44,838. In June, the team announced Tour de SOL, an incentivized testnet for validators.⁠[5][5][5][5][5]

In June 2019, the Solana Foundation, a non-profit organization responsible for the governance and coordination of the Solana protocol, was established, based at the time in Geneva, Switzerland; as of October 2026, the foundation is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland. In July, Solana announced a $20 million funding raise led by Multicoin Capital.⁠[5][6][5]

In March 2020, with the help of the worldwide validator community, Solana Mainnet Beta was officially initialized. The network carried a “Beta” label to indicate it was still at an early stage. Later that month, Solana Labs sold SOL on the CoinList platform in a Dutch auction; the initial circulating supply stated by the foundation equaled the tokens distributed through this auction plus a small amount distributed through airdrops on Binance.⁠[7][8][4][9]

On April 8, 2020, Solana Labs transferred all intellectual property related to the protocol and 167 million SOL to the Solana Foundation. On April 27, community members found an account holding more than 13.5 million SOL; the foundation then acknowledged that it had agreed to lend a market maker 11,365,067 SOL for a 6-month period but had not disclosed the size and nature of the loan during the CoinList auction and the Binance listing, and it apologized publicly. On May 22, the foundation permanently removed these 11,365,067 SOL from the token supply.⁠[10][9][9][9][9][11]

In July 2020, FTX and Alameda Research, founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, created the Serum Foundation and announced Serum, a non-custodial exchange built on Solana that runs an on-chain central limit order book, citing among other reasons Solana’s ability to update the order book every 400 milliseconds. FTX and Alameda subsequently purchased SOL on multiple occasions: on August 31 and September 11, 2020, Alameda Research bought 4 million and 12 million SOL from the Solana Foundation, and on January 7, 2021, Alameda and FTX bought about 34.52 million more from the foundation (the latter two purchases unlock linearly each month for six years, starting in September 2021 and January 2022, respectively); in February 2021, Alameda Research Ventures also bought 7.5 million SOL from Solana Labs.⁠[12][12][12][13][13][13][13][13]

On September 17, 2020, Solana Labs posted that SOL was open for trading on FTX US, and later the same day posted that Binance.US had announced support for SOL.⁠[4][4][4]

At 1:46 p.m. UTC on December 4, 2020, Mainnet Beta halted new block confirmations. A validator had booted up two machines at once and broadcast multiple different blocks for the same slot, creating three minority partitions, while the block repair path had a known issue that prevented duplicate blocks from being repaired between partitions; 393 validators coordinated to restart the network within about 6 hours, and no funds were affected. By the end of 2020, the network had more than 300 validators and had processed over 8 billion transactions.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][7]

On June 9, 2021, Solana Labs announced it had completed a private sale of SOL totaling $314,159,265, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital, with participation from Alameda Research, Multicoin Capital, Jump Trading, and others; the funds were to be used to launch an incubation studio, a venture investing arm, and a trading desk dedicated to the Solana ecosystem. (The U.S. SEC’s 2023 complaint describes this sale as completed in August 2021.)⁠[14][14][14][4]

On September 14, 2021, the Solana network was offline for 17 hours. At 12:00 UTC that day, Grape Protocol launched its initial DEX offering (IDO) on Raydium, and a flood of bot-generated transactions caused the memory of the forwarder queue to grow without limits; large numbers of validators crashed, and the network could not agree on its current state. The community proposed a hard fork from the last confirmed slot, which required the agreement of at least 80% of active stake, and more than 1,000 validators ultimately coordinated an upgrade and restart; no funds were lost.⁠[15][15][15][15][15]

At about 20:30 UTC on April 30, 2022, Mainnet Beta stopped producing blocks for about 7 hours because consensus stalled. Bots trying to win NFTs minted with the Candy Machine program sent about 6 million transactions per second to the network, with traffic exceeding 100 Gbps at individual nodes; validators crashed after running out of memory, and block production resumed at 03:30 UTC on May 1. The foundation said the network had suffered repeated congestion from NFT-minting bots since January 2022.⁠[16][16][16][16][16][16]

At about 16:30 UTC on June 1, 2022, a runtime bug in the durable nonce transactions feature allowed a failed transaction to be processed twice, causing nondeterminism between nodes: more than 33% of validators accepted a block, but this fell short of the 66% required for reconciliation, and the network stopped producing blocks for about 4.5 hours; durable nonce transactions were temporarily disabled during the restart, and block production resumed at 21:00 UTC.⁠[17][17][17][17]

On June 23, 2022, in New York, Solana Mobile, a subsidiary of Solana Labs, unveiled Saga, an Android phone tightly integrated with the Solana blockchain, along with the Solana Mobile Stack for developers building mobile wallets and apps; the phone was designed and manufactured by OSOM, opened for pre-orders, and was scheduled for delivery in early 2023.⁠[18][18][18][18]

Starting at 22:37 UTC on August 2, 2022, and over about 4 hours, attackers drained assets worth about $4.1 million from 9,231 wallets. The investigation found that the affected addresses had all been created or imported in Slope Finance’s wallet apps, and that the Slope app had inadvertently transmitted users’ private key material to an application monitoring service; the Solana Foundation said this was not a protocol-level vulnerability and block production was not affected.⁠[19][19][19][19][19]

At 22:41 UTC on September 30, 2022, a hot-spare node that a validator had deployed for high availability malfunctioned; the primary and spare nodes produced blocks simultaneously under the same identity, creating duplicate blocks at the same slot and triggering a bug in the fork-choice logic of the consensus implementation, which halted the network. After a coordinated restart, block production resumed at about 6:57 UTC on October 1.⁠[20][20][20]

On November 11, 2022, FTX and Alameda announced Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings. Before that, because FTX and Bankman-Fried had massively propped up SOL over the years, the crypto community regarded SOL as one of the “Sam coins” associated with him; as of the afternoon of November 8, it had fallen about 40% over 24 hours and about 50% over a week, trading at about $14.⁠[13][21][21][21]

The Solana Foundation disclosed that when FTX.com stopped processing withdrawals, the foundation had about $1 million in cash on the platform (less than 1% of its cash), and held about 3.24 million shares of FTX Trading common stock, about 3.43 million FTT, and about 134.54 million SRM, with no SOL custodied on FTX.com; the settlement of the SOL purchased by FTX and Alameda would depend on the bankruptcy proceedings. As of November 10, wrapped assets on Solana based on the Sollet custodial bridge were valued at about $40 million, and the status of their underlying assets was unknown; the Serum community, meanwhile, deployed a new verified build. The foundation said the security of the network had not been negatively affected by the FTX collapse or by movements in asset prices, and that the network had averaged more than 2,000 transactions per second since November 8.⁠[13][13][13][13][13][13][13][22]

At about 05:46 UTC on February 25, 2023, block finalization times on Mainnet Beta grew dramatically, and block producers automatically entered a vote-only safety mode. Services running custom block-forwarding software repeatedly re-forwarded the data of an abnormally large block, saturating the block propagation protocol Turbine; validators performed a manual restart with a downgrade, normal operation resumed at about 01:28 UTC on February 26, and the restart did not roll back any finalized transactions of economic value.⁠[23][23][23][23][23][23]

On June 5 and 6, 2023, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao, and then Coinbase; in both complaints, it listed SOL, together with tokens such as ADA and MATIC, among crypto assets offered and sold as investment contracts and therefore securities (“Crypto Asset Securities”). The SEC alleged that from May 2018 to early March 2020, Solana Labs sold about 177 million SOL through Simple Agreements for Future Tokens (SAFTs), raising over $23 million, and filed forms with the SEC claiming these offerings were exempt from registration under Rule 506(c) of Regulation D; that later in March 2020 it sold about 8 million SOL on CoinList in a Dutch auction at an average of about $0.22 per SOL; that of the 500 million SOL initially minted, the founders and the foundation each received 12.5%; and that Solana Labs’ public statements led purchasers reasonably to expect profits from its development efforts. These are the SEC’s allegations; the defendants in the two cases were Binance-related entities and Changpeng Zhao, and two Coinbase companies, respectively, and neither Solana Labs nor the Solana Foundation was a defendant.⁠[24][24][24][4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4][25][26]

On June 8, a Solana Foundation spokesperson responded that the foundation “strongly believes that SOL is not a security.” On June 9, after the SEC complaints named these tokens as securities, Robinhood announced it would delist SOL, ADA, and MATIC beginning June 27; on November 13, 2024, Robinhood Crypto added SOL back to its U.S. platform.⁠[27][28][28][29][29]

At 09:53 UTC on February 6, 2024, block finalization on Mainnet Beta halted. The cause was consistent with a bug in LoadedPrograms, the program JIT compilation cache introduced in the v1.16 release, which had been identified earlier during the investigation of a Devnet outage; engineers released the v1.17.20 fix and chose slot 246,464,040 as the restart point, and consensus resumed at 14:55 UTC, about 5 hours later.⁠[30][30][30][30][30]

On March 2, 2024, Anza, a development company made up of former executives and core engineers from Solana Labs, forked the Solana Labs validator software into a repository it manages and named the new client Agave; the move was also part of supporting the Firedancer client being developed by Jump Crypto.⁠[31][31][31][31]

On February 27, 2025, the U.S. SEC announced that it had filed a joint stipulation with Coinbase to dismiss its civil enforcement action, citing the pending work of the newly formed Crypto Task Force on a regulatory framework, and stated that the dismissal was not based on any assessment of the merits of the claims. On May 29, 2025, the SEC filed a joint stipulation with the Binance defendants to dismiss that action with prejudice.⁠[26][26][26][25][25]

On May 19, 2025, Anza researchers presented Alpenglow, a new consensus protocol that would retire legacy components such as TowerBFT and Proof of History, hand voting and block finalization to Votor, and replace gossip with faster direct communication; they called it the biggest change to Solana’s core protocol ever.⁠[32][32][32][32]

As of June 2025, the Solana network had gone 16 consecutive months without a major outage, including periods of high load in January 2025. The vote on the governance proposal SIMD-228 drew 910 validators, representing 74.3% of staked SOL. On the client side, Agave was run by over 92% of validators; Firedancer, a new client written from the ground up in C++ and maintained by Jump Crypto, released Frankendancer, a hybrid Firedancer/Agave version, which as of April 17, 2025, was used by 34 validators with about 7% of network stake.⁠[33][33][33][33][33][33][33]

On September 17, 2025, the U.S. SEC approved NYSE Arca’s rule change (Rule 8.201-E) permitting the listing and trading of commodity-based exchange-traded products that meet certain generic requirements (the Generic Listing Standards). The Bitwise Solana Staking ETF’s prospectus was dated October 27, 2025, with shares anticipated to be listed on NYSE Arca under the ticker BSOL; its primary objective is to provide exposure to the value of the SOL held by the trust, and its secondary objective is to derive additional SOL through staking. On October 29, the Grayscale Solana Staking ETF began trading on NYSE Arca under the ticker GSOL pursuant to the Generic Listing Standards.⁠[34][34][35][35][35][35][34][34][34]

In February 2026, SOL-denominated total value locked in Solana DeFi crossed 80 million SOL, an all-time high; the foundation’s ecosystem report for that month also noted that Goldman Sachs had disclosed $108 million in SOL holdings, that BlackRock’s BUIDL fund had reached $550 million on Solana, and that Fidelity’s FCAT was running a validator on Solana.⁠[36][36][36]

In July 2026, two protocol changes preparing for Alpenglow were activated on mainnet: BLS pubkey management in vote accounts (SIMD-0387) on July 8, and the Validator Admission Ticket (SIMD-0357) on July 22, after which validators that had not registered a BLS pubkey were excluded from the admitted set and stopped participating in consensus. Agave also merged the final feature flag for turning on Alpenglow. As of October 2026, Votor, the first phase of Alpenglow, was still in development and planned to ship with Agave 4.3, targeting a reduction in transaction finality from about 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds; Rotor, the second phase, will replace Turbine and is not yet scheduled. Slot times are also planned to be cut in stages from 400 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds.⁠[37][37][37][38][37][37][37][37][37][37][37]

As of late September 2026, Solana had processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume in 2026, real-world assets on the network exceeded $4.5 billion, and tokenized equity supply exceeded $620 million.⁠[39][39][39]

Before Alpenglow’s full rollout, Solana uses Proof of History as a synchronized clock for nodes, synchronizing every 400 milliseconds, and reaches consensus through Tower BFT voting, with a block becoming final once votes have accumulated over 32 slots; Sealevel processes transactions in parallel, Turbine spreads block data across the network while keeping the network permissionless, and Cloudbreak supports millions of accounts. SOL can be staked to earn rewards, and a small amount of SOL must be burned for each transaction to deter spam.⁠[7][37][7][37][4][4]

Solana Foundation: Official website: https://solana.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[6]

Anza: Official website: https://www.anza.xyz/ (opens in a new window).⁠[32]

Agave validator client repository: https://github.com/anza-xyz/agave (opens in a new window)⁠[31]