The Solana blockchain was the platform on which President Trump created the TRUMP memecoin, just days before he took office.
Solana is currently used to trade memecoins – a jokey cryptocurrency token that’s based on vibrations. The network’s long-term vision — for capital markets to all be housed within a shared global system — is much broader than that. Solana is a great candidate to accomplish this goal, thanks in part to its fast transaction speeds and low fees.
Solana, a digital asset ledger decentralized by blockchain. Each bank has an asset ledger. However, the ledgers do not work well together. The existing infrastructure of banks and asset ledgers makes it difficult and costly to transfer money.
The blockchain is made of computers around the world running software to ensure that asset ledgers are accurate. This can be costly. On average, it costs more than a dollar to make a transaction on the Bitcoin network. Ethereum costs $0.05 on average. What’s more, Bitcoin and Ethereum — which are the largest and second-largest blockchains — only process a few handfuls of transactions per second. Capital One’s data indicates that in 2023 credit cards processed an average of 1,700 transaction per second.
Anatoly Yakovenko was the chief architect of Solana. He worked as a software developer at Qualcomm, a wireless technology company. Yakovenko was inspired to build Solana after realizing that some wireless principles could be applied in blockchain. Yakovenko secured venture capital and started building the blockchain along with two co-founders.
Solana launches in 2020. Blockchain’s main innovation is creating. “proof-of-history,” a term used to describe a kind of clock that every validator — the people running the computers with Solana’s software — used to process Solana transactions more quickly than they could otherwise.
SOL (also known as Solana) is the crypto-token issued and used for the Solana blockchain. SOL can be bought and sold like a stock.
People pay SOLs when they transact with Solana. It is usually just a small fraction of a penny, which goes to pay validators who run Solana software. Comparatively, most credit cards charge the merchant 1.5-3.5% on a transaction, which is then passed onto consumers.
Solana can also process 1,000 transactions per second, which is faster than Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Solana asset ledger could theoretically be used to handle more transactions, given the demand.
Solana has had a few outages — events wherein validators stopped producing blocks due to a bug in the software. Last time Solana stopped was in February 2024. This was partly because of Solana’s lack of client diversification, which means there is only one version of Solana. If there is a code bug, it will affect all validators. Firedancer is a Solana Client that has been written completely from scratch, but not yet ready.
FTX was an early adopter of Solana. Solana suffered a major blow after its failure, as the price of SOL dropped below $10 by late 2022. Surprisingly, the network managed to make a dramatic comeback in 2020. SOL reached an all-time peak of $293 in January 2025 after Donald Trump launched a memecoin.
Solana isn’t just used by President Trump to trade memecoins. Solana’s ledger of assets is used mainly for memecoin trades. Many criticise Solana because of its involvement with memecoins. Some argue that less refined uses cases will help scale the technology for serious use. They cite how the demand for online pornography pushed broadband to increase and created the modern internet.
Solana’s more significant use case is what supporters of blockchain call the internet capital market. The idea is that Solana could let all kinds of assets — memecoins but also stocks, bonds, tokenized raw materials, whatever — be traded within the same system. All Solana data is available to network participants. This feature is called global shared state by Solana’s developers. This Solana centric financial system may be more inclusive, efficient, and accessible than current systems where each financial venue maintains its own database.
Solana, with its low-costs and high speed, has a good chance of achieving this future.
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