How much is Solana worth today?

What Solana is built to do

Solana is a blockchain designed for speed. New blocks arrive in well under a second and fees are typically very small, which has made it popular for payments, trading apps, games and token launches that would cost too much on slower chains.

SOL is the coin that keeps it running. You spend it on transaction fees, and holders can stake it with validators, the computers that process transactions, to help secure the network and earn a share of newly issued coins. Programs on Solana are usually written in Rust, and validators need powerful hardware to keep up with the pace, one of the trade-offs of the design.

Anatoly Yakovenko and the 2020 launch

Anatoly Yakovenko, a former engineer at Qualcomm, set out the idea in a 2017 white paper. His main addition was proof of history, a way of timestamping events so validators can agree on their order quickly. It works alongside proof of stake rather than replacing it. Solana Labs, the company he co-founded, wrote the original software, and the non-profit Solana Foundation supports the wider project.

The network opened as a mainnet beta in March 2020 and grew quickly. It has also had several outages in which block production stopped until validators coordinated a restart.

How the supply of SOL works

There is no maximum number of SOL. New coins are created as staking rewards, at an inflation rate that began high and steps down each year toward a long-term floor. Meanwhile, part of every transaction fee is burned. The net effect is a supply that keeps growing, but more slowly as time passes. At the latest count, 589.32M SOL are in circulation.

The smallest unit is the lamport, one billionth of a SOL, named after the computer scientist Leslie Lamport.

A coin price is only part of the picture

Right now SOL changes hands at $106.51, much less than a bitcoin. That gap reflects how many coins each network has, not how large each one is. A more useful yardstick is total market value, the price times the circulating coins, which puts Solana in position 7 on our list of top coins.

The chart above follows SOL over the past year. For the longer story of the crypto market as a whole, our Bitcoin price history goes back to 2009.