Solana is a blockchain designed to process transactions quickly and cheaply on a single network, rather than moving everyday activity onto separate layer 2 chains the way Ethereum does. SOL, its coin, pays fees and is staked to secure the network. The approach has delivered speed and tiny fees, but it has also produced a run of network halts and relies on a smaller group of powerful validators. This guide covers how Solana works after its October 2026 consensus change, what using it costs, its full outage record, staking and client diversity, a side-by-side comparison with Ethereum, and the risks. The crypto hub covers the asset class as a whole.
How is Solana built to be fast?
Solana gets its speed from a known rotation of block producers, very short slots and votes that finalize blocks in one or two rounds.
Validators stake SOL, and the protocol uses those stakes to publish a leader schedule in advance, a rota of which validator produces the block in each slot. Because everyone knows who the next leaders are, wallets and apps route transactions straight to them. Slots lasted 400 milliseconds for most of Solana's history; the Solana Foundation says they were cut to 200 milliseconds in four stages that finished in October 2026, and samples of the network on November 2, 2026 averaged about 214 milliseconds per slot.
Proof of history was the network's original signature idea: a running chain of hashes that each leader computed nonstop, leaving a verifiable record that time had passed between events, so validators could agree on order without trading timestamps. Under the old TowerBFT consensus, validators voted by sending transactions, and a block became final once enough votes had stacked up over 32 slots, which took about 12.8 seconds.
Alpenglow replaced that layer on October 21, 2026. Its voting protocol, Votor, has validators send votes directly to each other and bundle them into certificates, so a block is final after one or two rounds; the Foundation targets finality in roughly 150 milliseconds. Vote transactions no longer fill blocks, and proof of history no longer paces block production. A second component, Rotor, which changes how block data spreads across the network, had no release date. The execution layer did not change, so programs, fees and wallets work as before. For scale, bitcoin adds a block about every 10 minutes. How blockchain works explains consensus and finality in general terms.
What does a Solana transaction cost?
A simple Solana transaction costs 5,000 lamports, or 0.000005 SOL, for each signature it carries, plus an optional priority fee during busy periods.
One SOL equals one billion lamports. The base fee is split: half is burned and half goes to the validator that produced the block. A priority fee is priced per unit of compute the transaction requests, and under a rule change known as SIMD-0096 the validator keeps all of it. Fees are charged even when a transaction fails, which matters for trading bots that fire off many attempts.
Worked example: Fee on a one-signature transfer with a small priority fee
- Base fee: 1 signature × 5,000 lamports = 5,000 lamports
- Priority fee: 200,000 compute units × 10,000 micro-lamports per unit ÷ 1,000,000 = 2,000 lamports
- Total: 7,000 lamports = 0.000007 SOL, about $0.0007 at an illustrative $100 per SOL
- Burned: 5,000 × 50% = 2,500 lamports
- Paid to the block producer: 2,500 + 2,000 = 4,500 lamports
Many transactions pay no priority fee at all. In the 150 most recent slots sampled on November 2, 2026, transactions with a zero priority fee landed in every one, and the network was handling about 1,650 transactions a second, none of them validator votes now that votes travel outside blocks. Fees rise when a popular token launch or a market crash causes congestion. Holding a token for the first time can also require a refundable deposit to open a token account, which the network's rent rules set at 0.00148844 SOL on November 2, 2026. Cross-border payments with stablecoins, including on Solana, are covered in sending money with stablecoins.
How often has Solana gone down?
Solana's own incident reports describe seven halts or severe stalls between December 2020 and February 2024, most lasting between four and a half and 20 hours.
| Date (UTC) | Duration | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| December 4, 2020 | About 6 hours | A validator ran two copies of itself and sent different blocks for the same slot, splitting the network |
| September 14, 2021 | 17 hours | Bots flooded the network during a token sale, and validators ran out of memory |
| April 30 to May 1, 2022 | About 7 hours | Bots chasing an NFT mint sent up to 6 million transactions a second, and validators crashed |
| June 1, 2022 | About 4.5 hours | A bug in durable nonce transactions let a failed transaction be processed twice |
| September 30 to October 1, 2022 | About 8 hours | A misconfigured backup node produced duplicate blocks that exposed a fork-choice bug |
| February 25 to 26, 2023 | About 20 hours of degraded service | An oversized block, forwarded around the network again and again, saturated block propagation; validators restarted on older software |
| February 6, 2024 | About 5 hours | A bug in the program cache trapped validators in an endless recompile loop |
Each recovery required validator operators to agree on a restart point and bring at least 80% of stake back online, so most of the downtime went on coordination rather than repair. The reports say no funds were lost, but nobody could move assets while the chain was stopped. The February 2024 halt is the latest outage report on solana.com as of November 2, 2026. Halts have been the clearest cost of Solana's design so far, and independent client software is one of the main responses.
Who validates Solana, and how does staking work?
Several hundred validators produce Solana's blocks, and SOL holders who do not run one can delegate their coins to a validator and share its rewards.
Public RPC data from November 2, 2026 showed 662 validators voting and 34 more marked delinquent, meaning offline or lagging. Active stake totaled about 429.4 million SOL, roughly two-thirds of the 636.8 million SOL in existence. The largest validator held 3.97% of active stake, yet stake is concentrated near the top: the 17 largest validators together held more than a third of it, and the 77 largest more than two-thirds.
New SOL comes from inflation paid to stakers. The schedule started at 8% a year, shrinks by 15% each year and stops at 1.5%; it stood at 3.58% in epoch 1074, early November 2026. Since Alpenglow, each voting validator also pays a Validator Admission Ticket of 0.8 SOL per epoch, which is burned, in place of the roughly 1 SOL per epoch it used to spend on vote transactions. An epoch is 432,000 slots, a little over a day at current slot times.
Worked example: Where new SOL goes in a year
Using the November 2, 2026 snapshot.
- Inflation: 636.8 million SOL × 3.58% ≈ 22.8 million new SOL a year
- Paid only to stake, so the reward rate on staked SOL is about 3.58% ÷ 0.674 ≈ 5.3% a year before validator commission
- Staking 100 SOL earns about 5.3 SOL a year, less the validator's cut; at a 5% commission that is about 5.0 SOL
- Holding 100 SOL without staking keeps the coin count flat while the supply grows about 3.6%, so that holder's share of the network shrinks by roughly 3.5% a year
- Fee burn, assuming one signature per transaction: about 1,650 transactions a second × 2,500 burned lamports ≈ 356 SOL a day, around 130,000 SOL a year
- Admission tickets: about 662 × 0.8 ≈ 530 SOL per epoch, so total burning stays under 2% of new issuance
Staking rewards come from that dilution, not from outside income, so they work nothing like bank interest. What is staking explains delegation, warm-up and cool-down periods and the risks in more depth.
Firedancer and client diversity
A client is the software a validator runs, and a bug in a client that nearly everyone uses can halt the whole network, as several of the outages above showed. For most of Solana's life almost every validator ran software descended from the original Solana Labs code, now maintained by Anza as Agave, or versions such as Jito-Solana that build on it.
Firedancer is an independent client written in C by a team at Jump Crypto. A hybrid called Frankendancer, which mixed Firedancer components with Agave, reached mainnet in September 2024, and the full Firedancer client went live on December 12, 2025. Neither Firedancer nor Frankendancer was supported for the switch to Alpenglow, so operators ran an Agave-based client through the handover; Firedancer release 26.10.2, published October 14, 2026, added Alpenglow support, and its operators then moved back.
By the version numbers validators report to the network, Firedancer ran on 84 voting validators with 15.9% of active stake on November 2, 2026, while Agave and its derivatives ran about 83%. That is real progress, but one codebase still runs more than four-fifths of stake, so a serious Agave bug could still stop the chain. Firedancer's release notes also show the hardware bar: they list mainnet memory use of 159 GiB, far beyond a typical home computer.
How does Solana compare with Ethereum?
Solana is faster and cheaper on its main chain, while Ethereum runs far more validators and keeps its base layer deliberately slower, leaning on layer 2 networks.
| Measure | Solana | Ethereum |
|---|---|---|
| Time between blocks | About 0.2 seconds (about 214 ms on average, November 2, 2026) | 12 seconds |
| Time to finality | Roughly 150 milliseconds targeted under Alpenglow, down from about 12.8 seconds | About 12.8 minutes (two epochs) |
| Base cost of a simple transfer | 5,000 lamports (0.000005 SOL) per signature | 21,000 gas × base fee, about 0.0000009 ETH at 0.044 gwei |
| What happens to fees | Half the base fee burned; priority fees to the validator | Base fee burned; tips to the validator |
| Validators | 662 voting (November 2, 2026) | 815,282 (November 2, 2026), many run in bulk by large operators |
| Share of supply staked | About two-thirds | About 36% |
| New supply | 3.58% a year, tapering toward 1.5% | About 0.8% a year after burning (12 months to November 1, 2026) |
| Scaling approach | One fast base layer | A slower base layer plus rollups that post data back in blobs |
The validator counts flatter Ethereum and the speed figures flatter Solana. Many of Ethereum's validators are run by the same staking companies, and Solana's near-instant finality depends on validators with data-center hardware and bandwidth. Cost comparisons also hinge on the coin price: a fee of 0.000005 SOL or 0.0000009 ETH is tiny today, but both are paid in volatile assets. What is Ethereum covers Ethereum's side in full, layer 2 networks explained covers the rollup model, and bitcoin vs Ethereum sets Ethereum against the oldest network.
SOL's price swings
SOL has been one of the more volatile large cryptocurrencies, and the latest price for one SOL is $94.65 (Nov 2, 2026).
Daily closing prices on Coinbase Exchange, taken at midnight UTC, show two deep slides since 2021:
| Slide | High close | Low close | Fall |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 to 2022 | $258.76 on November 6, 2021 | $9.64 on December 29, 2022 | 96.3% |
| 2025 to 2026 | $261.99 on January 18, 2025 | $62.15 on June 6, 2026 | 76.3% |
SOL rose more than tenfold during 2023 after the first slide, and on November 1, 2026 it closed 64.0% below its January 2025 high. Its annualized volatility over the 12 months to November 1, 2026 was about 64% on the same data. None of this is a timing signal; crypto market cycles explains why past cycles do not predict the next one, and the Solana price page has the live chart.
Can you buy a spot Solana ETF?
Yes: spot Solana ETFs have traded in the US since October 2025, and the first ones stake their SOL to earn network rewards.
Bitwise's Solana Staking ETF (BSOL) began trading on the NYSE on October 28, 2025 with a 0.20% management fee, and the sponsor said it aimed to stake all of the fund's SOL. Grayscale's Solana Trust ETF (GSOL), a trust since 2021, began trading on NYSE Arca on October 29, 2025 under the SEC's new generic listing standards, with a sponsor fee of 0.35% and a stated plan to pass 77% of staking rewards to investors on a net basis. Those are launch disclosures and can change. The SEC's March 17, 2026 interpretation later named SOL among 16 digital commodities and said protocol staking is not a securities transaction. A fund removes the need to manage keys but adds an expense ratio, trades only during market hours and leaves staking decisions to the sponsor; bitcoin ETFs vs owning bitcoin lays out the same trade-off for bitcoin.
What are the main risks of Solana?
SOL can lose most or all of its value, and Solana carries network-specific risks on top of the price swings common to all crypto.
- Downtime. Seven halts or major stalls in just over three years show that the network can stop, and a halt can strike exactly when holders most want to sell or manage a loan.
- Brand-new consensus. Alpenglow had been live for less than two weeks on November 2, 2026. Mainnet is where new consensus code meets real conditions, and Rotor, the second phase, had not shipped.
- Concentration. Seventeen validators held more than a third of active stake, data-center-grade hardware keeps the validator set small, and Agave-based software ran about 83% of stake.
- Dilution. Inflation of 3.58% a year shifts value from holders who do not stake to those who do.
- Price. SOL's daily close fell 96.3% across 2021 and 2022 and 76.3% across 2025 and 2026.
- Token and scam risk. Creating a token on Solana is cheap, so new tokens appear constantly, and many fail or are outright frauds; how to research a cryptocurrency and crypto scams cover the warning signs.
- Custody mistakes. Lost keys or a wrong address are usually permanent; hot vs cold wallets compares storage options.
Network statistics on this page come from a snapshot taken on November 2, 2026 and change daily, so treat them as a dated example rather than a live reading.