What Is Solana (SOL) and How Does SOL Crypto Work?

Solana is a blockchain platform designed to host decentralized, scalable applications. Founded in 2017, it is an open-source project currently run by the Solana Foundation based in Geneva, while the blockchain was built by San Francisco-based Solana Labs.1
Solana. "History."
Solana is much faster in terms of the number of transactions it can process and has significantly lower transaction fees than rival blockchains like Ethereum. The cryptocurrency that runs on the Solana blockchain—also named Solana (SOL)—soared almost 12,000% in 2021 and, at one point, had a market capitalization of over $75 billion, making it one of the largest cryptocurrencies by this measure at the time.2
Despite its popularity, SOL did not escape the cryptocurrency wipeout of 2022. By Dec. 29, 2022, SOL had dropped to about $3.63 billion in market capitalization. One year later, it had recovered nearly half of its lost market cap. ALTS ALTS

History of Solana

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko's previous work experience was in the field of distributed systems design with leading technology companies such as Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM). This experience made him aware that a reliable clock simplifies network synchronization, and when that occurs, the resulting network would be exponentially faster, with the only constraint being its bandwidth.1
Yakovenko surmised that using proof-of-history would speed up the blockchain tremendously compared with blockchain systems without clocks, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. These systems struggled to scale beyond 15 transactions per second (TPS) worldwide, a fraction of the throughput handled by centralized payment systems such as Visa (V), which see peaks of up to 65,000 TPS.1