About Solana (SOL)

Founded in 2017 by former Qualcomm and Intel engineers, Solana (SOL) is a single-chain, delegated-Proof-of-Stake protocol focused on delivering scalability without compromising security. 

The Solana blockchain is underpinned by Proof of History (PoH) which is a proof for verifying the order and time passage between events.

If a developer is trying to create something decentralized, whether some form of online prediction marketplace or a payments network, the Solana blockchain aims to be a one-stop hub with speed and scale as its calling cards.

Created in 2017, SOL set out to create an ultrafast network that could efficiently support monumentally expanded "transaction throughput," or how many transactions can take place each second.

The Bitcoin and Ethereum networks, as users increased, haven’t been able to transact fast enough.

Solana the blockchain claims it can process more than 50,000 transactions per second.

SOL the token, in addition to providing participation permissions to staked users, can also be used for generating staking rewards, paying transaction fees on the network and for PoS voting (governance). 

Some 500 million SOL were initially created. Of those, a relatively small portion (12.5%) was kept by founders. Another 12.5% are held by the Solana Foundation.

More than one-third of the supply (38%) was designated as community tokens; roughly another one-third (35.4%) was allocated to locked investors.  

By design, Solana transaction fees are paid in SOL and burnt (or permanently destroyed) as a deflationary mechanism to reduce the total supply and thereby maintain a healthy SOL price.

In October, Solana launched the Wormhole connecting Ethereum to Solana’s network, enabling projects, platforms, and communities to move tokenized assets without interruption, benefiting from Solana’s high speed and low cost.

What is the price of Solana (SOL)? 

After sinking to as low as $0.50 in May of 2020, SOL has increased since then by about 700%. As of mid-January 2021, SOL was roughly $4 and back on the rise after a turbulent period following its September 2020 high mark of just above $5. Since flirting with sub-$1 in November of 2020, SOL has continued to break all resistance levels with more analysts convinced that new highs are close at hand. Because the DeFi sector is booming, there’s greater demand for Ethereum alternatives which has sent SOL’s trading volume to record-highs, now nearly $100 million per day on average.

Long-term investors can look to the Solana blockchain as being key to support stablecoins, considered a powerful source of growth in the crypto sector, particularly considering the outlook for digital banking in the wake of the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) having recently said that banks may use new technologies, including independent node verification networks (INVNs) and related stablecoins, to perform bank-permissible functions, such as payment activities.