Solana (SOL) — a fast network and its coin

Solana in plain words

People use the Solana network to send crypto and run apps. What cryptocurrency is in general is explained in what is cryptocurrency.

Picture sending 50 dollars to a relative in another country in the USDC stablecoin, a digital dollar on a blockchain, over the Solana network. The transfer arrives in seconds, at night and on non-working days too, and the fee is usually tiny.

An ordinary bank transfer abroad can take several days and cost noticeably more. What a stablecoin is, the article what is a stablecoin explains.

How Solana works

Why Solana is so fast

In any blockchain network, thousands of participants have to agree on which transfer happened first and which came later. If that takes them long, the whole network is slow.

To speed things up, the network's participants vote very quickly and directly with one another. It is like a meeting where decisions are made by a show of hands. If a large majority raise their hands in favor at once, the decision is made and nobody needs to count again. If not, one more quick round is held. On Solana such a round is designed to take a fraction of a second, so a transfer becomes final almost at once. The network has worked this way since October 2026, after an upgrade called Alpenglow³.

The network is protected by a deposit of coins. The participants who check operations (they are called validators) lock up their SOL, and the bigger the deposit, the more their vote counts. For poor work they lose rewards and the trust of the people who gave them coins to stake⁴. Agreement in a network and the role of validators are explained in what is consensus and miners and validators, and the design of the network on the page Solana.

What your wallet needs to send a transfer on Solana

• You usually need a little SOL for the fee, because on Solana the fee is always paid in SOL. If your wallet (the app that keeps your keys) holds 50 USDC and zero SOL, an ordinary wallet will not send the transfer. Some wallets and services pay the SOL fee for you and charge you in USDC, though not all of them can do this⁵. Other ways to lower the fee or pay it in the crypto you are sending are covered in the article on network fees.
• To hold a new token, that is, crypto issued on top of the network, a wallet needs a separate slot, and the network charges a small refundable deposit in SOL for it. Whoever creates the slot pays. That is you if you bought a new token yourself, or the sender if they were the first to send you that token. The deposit comes back when the empty slot is closed, to the address its owner names, so for a slot in someone else's wallet it usually will not come back to you⁶⁷. What deposit the network charges is shown in a block explorer, a website where you can see every transfer.
  where to check: Solana Explorer, e.g. explorer.solana.com
• The same USDC exists on Solana, on Ethereum and on other networks, so you need the right network when topping up. If you top up your wallet from an exchange, pick the Solana network for the withdrawal. If you choose another network, the money can end up in the wrong place, and getting it back will be hard. How networks differ and how to avoid a mistake is covered in token standards.
• Tokens from strangers call for caution, because unfamiliar tokens and NFTs with a caption like "claim your reward" often show up on Solana by themselves. This is bait, so do not follow such links and do not connect your wallet to them. How to recognize the trick is explained in phishing and scams.

Where Solana is already used and where it is still being tried

Where the Solana network already works today:

• PayPal's dollar stablecoin, PayPal USD (PYUSD), has run on the Solana network since May 2024, and here it can be sent faster and more cheaply than on Ethereum⁸.
• In April 2023 the Helium connectivity network moved to Solana⁹. People set up small devices at home that provide mobile coverage and earn tokens for it.
• Meme-token trading is one of the most visible and riskiest parts of the network, with its own section below.

Still only being tried:

• Since December 2025 the first US banks have been settling with Visa in the USDC stablecoin over the Solana network, on non-working days too¹⁰.
• In May 2026 Western Union launched its own dollar stablecoin on the Solana network. At that point the company was still only preparing round-the-clock settlement with its cash pickup locations and a service for ordinary people¹¹.
• For paying for purchases in shops, Solana has a module called Solana Pay¹².

Meme tokens on Solana and why they are dangerous

Meme tokens are joke tokens that promise no real use and are created for hype and quick trading. For what a token is in general, see what is a token.

Solana has especially many of them, because launching your own token here is very cheap. Since January 2024 the pump.fun service has let anyone do it in literally a couple of clicks, so millions of such tokens have appeared¹³.

Usually the creator launches a token, people snap it up on a wave of hype, and then the creator sells their whole share at once, and within minutes the price drops almost to zero. Meme tokens include a lot of empty shells and outright scams, so treat them like a lottery.

What SOL staking is

Staking means you hand your SOL over to the shared deposit of a validator you choose, a participant who checks operations on the network, and get part of its reward in return. The coins are still yours and visible in your wallet, but while they are staked you cannot spend them. For the current reward, see a validator explorer.

On the surface this looks like a bank deposit: the coins sit there and the reward builds up. There are four differences from a deposit.

1. The reward is paid in SOL, and SOL's price changes. If it falls by more than the reward adds to your coins, you end up behind in ordinary money.
2. The government does not insure these coins the way it insures a bank deposit. In the US, for example, government deposit insurance (FDIC) does not cover crypto¹⁴.
3. If a validator breaks the rules, some networks can take away part of the deposit. Solana has no such penalty as of 20.10.2026, and a validator that works badly only loses its reward⁴.
4. You cannot get the coins back from staking right away. You have to wait until the current network period (an epoch) ends, which usually takes up to a day¹⁵. A block explorer shows how much of the period is left. where to check: Solana Explorer, e.g. explorer.solana.com

How a transfer on Solana differs from Ethereum and a bank

	Solana	Ethereum	Bank abroad
Works around the clock, every day?	yes	yes	no
Arrives in seconds?	yes	varies1	no
Fee usually tiny?	yes	varies2	no
Need the network's coin for the fee?	yes	yes	no
Can a mistaken transfer be reversed?	no	no	varies
Need a bank account?	no	no	yes

1. A transfer usually becomes final within a few minutes. ↩
2. Depends on how busy the network is; it can be cheap or expensive. ↩

A bank can help with a mistaken transfer, yet it requires an account and works slowly. Crypto networks need no bank account, only a little of the network coin to pay fees, and a mistake in them can no longer be undone.

Pros and cons of a transfer via Solana, Ethereum and a bank

Before an important transfer, check whether the network is working.

Ethereum is covered in the Ethereum profile.

Solana outages and risks

• From 2021 to February 2024 the network stopped completely several times. One of the longest halts, in September 2021, lasted about seventeen hours¹⁶¹⁷. If you had sent a transfer to a relative on 6 February 2024, it simply would not have gone through. The money would have stayed in your wallet, and once the network restarted, about five hours later, you would have had to send the transfer again¹⁸². There have been no complete halts since. This is an observation on 20 October 2026 and no guarantee for the future; the full history is on the page Solana.
• The SOL coin is tied to nothing, so its price swings a lot: something worth a hundred units today may be worth sixty or a hundred and forty a month from now.
• Your wallet is your responsibility, and if you lose your seed phrase, the set of 12 or 24 words from which a wallet is restored, no one can get the money back. What this phrase is and how to keep it safe are explained in what is a seed phrase and how to store crypto.

Where to check current data

The network's current speed and average fee are in a block explorer.

The status page shows if the network is up right now.

Look up the current price and trading volume of SOL on a site that collects data from different exchanges.

Frequently asked questions

More detail on how Solana is used

The large asset manager BlackRock has issued shares of its BUIDL money market fund on Solana since March 2025, in addition to Ethereum²².