Solana

SOL is the native coin of Solana, a fast blockchain for payments, trading and apps.

Solana is a public blockchain designed to process many transactions quickly and cheaply. Its mainnet launched on 16 March 2020. The design comes from a whitepaper by Anatoly Yakovenko, who founded Solana Labs. SOL is the network's native coin: it pays transaction fees and storage deposits, and holders stake it with validators, the computers that confirm transactions.

SOL has no fixed supply cap. Total supply was about 634.2 million SOL on 16 September 2026. New SOL is issued to validators and stakers: inflation started at 8% a year, falls by 15% each year toward 1.5%, and stood at about 3.64%. Half of each base transaction fee is burned. In August 2026 validators voted to make inflation fall twice as fast, but that change was not yet active.

Today Solana carries about $15 billion of stablecoins. Companies such as Visa, PayPal, Western Union and MoneyGram use it for payments and settlement, and it hosts tokenised assets, decentralised exchanges and a large memecoin market. In the US, SOL is held by spot exchange-traded funds, the first of which began trading in October 2025.

No single company runs the network. Anza (a spin-off of Solana Labs) and Jump (with its Firedancer client) develop the validator software. The Solana Foundation supports development and validator decentralisation, and about 690 validator vote accounts secure the network and vote on governance proposals.