Solana is a fast, cheap blockchain, and SOL is the token that runs it. Early networks handled a handful of transactions per second. Solana was built for thousands, at fees of fractions of a cent, and that bet made it the home of on-chain trading, memecoins, payments and a growing slice of tokenized traditional finance.
What is Solana?
Solana is a layer 1 blockchain, meaning a base network like Bitcoin or Ethereum, that runs smart contracts and settles transactions. Fees are paid in SOL, and SOL staked with validators is what secures the network. Those fees are small enough that micropayments and high-frequency trading work on-chain, which most chains can't claim.
So retail crypto moved in. Decentralized exchanges, NFT markets, memecoin launches, payment apps and DePIN networks (physical infrastructure coordinated by tokens) all run on Solana. It has passed 200 billion lifetime transactions and hasn't had a major outage since February 2024, which matters given its past.
A full crypto cycle in six years
Anatoly Yakovenko, a former Qualcomm engineer, published the core idea in 2017, and the network launched in March 2020. That idea, proof of history, is a cryptographic clock that orders transactions before validators vote on them, removing a bottleneck that slows other chains down.
SOL ran from a few dollars to around $260 in 2021. Then FTX collapsed in 2022, and because FTX and its trading arm Alameda were major backers and holders of SOL, the token lost more than 95 percent of its value. The network had also suffered several outages in 2021 and 2022. It kept shipping through all of it, and in January 2025 SOL set a new all-time high near $293.
How Solana works
Solana is proof of stake. Validators lock up SOL as a bond, propose and vote on blocks, and earn rewards for following the rules. A validator that misbehaves can be slashed, which means part of its stake is destroyed. The difference from other chains is ordering: proof of history gives every transaction a verifiable timestamp before consensus, so validators can process thousands in parallel instead of one at a time.
Reliability, Solana's old weak spot, has been the recent focus. Firedancer, a second independent validator client built by Jump Crypto, lowers the odds that one software bug takes the whole network down. An upgrade called Alpenglow aims to cut transaction finality to roughly 150 milliseconds, about the blink of an eye. It missed its original late-August 2026 mainnet target and moved to testnet activation in late September instead. Anza, the team behind the main validator client, hasn't announced a mainnet date: devnet comes next, then mainnet after an observation period.
What Solana is used for
Trading comes first. Solana's decentralized exchanges and launchpads handle enormous daily volume, and its perp venues did roughly $183 billion of volume in a single quarter. Payments come second: fees of fractions of a cent make remittances and merchant payments practical, and MoneyGram has built Solana into its payments infrastructure. The catch is that much of the trading is speculative. Memecoins and rapid-fire token launches dry up fast when markets turn risk-off, and fees and attention leave with them.
The newer story is tokenization, meaning traditional financial assets issued on-chain. In December 2025 J.P. Morgan arranged a $50 million commercial paper issuance for Galaxy Digital on Solana, and tokenized credit funds keep expanding there. DeFi on Solana holds around $5 billion in total value locked, down from its 2025 peak mostly because token prices fell, not because users left.
Where Solana stands in September 2026
As of September 23, 2026, SOL trades around $117. That's up from the mid $80s in August and still roughly 60 percent below its all-time high: a long drawdown and a young rally. The next item on the calendar is Alpenglow's move from testnet to mainnet, which has no confirmed date yet. Early investors and the Solana Foundation also hold meaningful supply, which is worth knowing before you size a position.
The institutional layer kept growing through the downturn. US spot Solana ETFs launched in late 2025 and have passed $1 billion in cumulative inflows, with Bitwise's staking ETF the largest at around $600 million in assets. Morgan Stanley listed its own Solana trust, MSOL, on NYSE Arca in July 2026, with Galaxy as a validator staking part of the fund's SOL. That's small next to Bitcoin's ETFs, but it makes SOL a regulated portfolio asset and not only an offshore trade.
How to trade Solana on Based
Based is a self-custody wallet that connects you to the SOL perpetual futures market on Hyperliquid. No brokerage account, no bank account, just a self-custodial wallet funded with USDC. From there you can go long or short, with leverage if you want it, around the clock, weekends included.
Know what you're holding. A SOL perp is a derivative that tracks the price. You don't own SOL, so you can't stake it or vote with it, and there are no coins to withdraw. Funding fees apply while the position is open. SOL is more volatile than BTC and has twice fallen more than 70 percent from a peak, and a leveraged position can be liquidated long before a move that size plays out. Spend ten minutes on the leverage guide first.