Solana, betting on raw performance
Launched in March 2020 by Anatoly Yakovenko, ex-Qualcomm engineer specialized in telecom compression, Solana was designed from day one to solve what he called the "blockchain trilemma" with a radically different approach: scale up performance instead of distributing across Layer 2s. Its flagship innovation is Proof-of-History, a mechanism that creates a cryptographic timestamp of transactions before consensus, enabling a theoretical throughput of 65,000 transactions per second.
A rise marked by network outages
Solana's history is paradoxical. On one hand, the network experienced several complete halts in 2021-2022 (up to 17 hours offline in September 2021), then got caught in the FTX collapse late 2022 which caused a -97 % drawdown. On the other, the network showed remarkable resilience: it restarted, fixed its bugs, and the community stayed loyal. SOL crossed back above $200 in 2024-2025, multiplying 30× from its 2022 low.
The use cases driving Solana in 2026
- Memecoins: pump.fun launched 5M+ tokens since 2024. Solana became THE memecoin trading platform, with ridiculously low fees making micro-trading viable
- DeFi: Jupiter (DEX aggregator), Marinade (liquid staking), Kamino — TVL at $8-10 billion in 2026
- Stablecoin payments: USDC on Solana used for large-scale cross-border payments (Stripe, Visa)
- NFTs: Magic Eden, Tensor — Solana became the 2nd NFT blockchain after Ethereum
Structural risks
Centralization remains the main critique: only ~1,700 validators (vs 1 million on Ethereum), and running a Solana validator costs ~$50,000/year in hardware (vs ~$30/year for Ethereum). The network also heavily depends on a few funds (a16z, Multicoin, Solana Foundation) holding significant SOL — sell pressure risk during scheduled unlocks.