Solana (blockchain platform)

• 1. Introduction

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  Solana's first block was created on the 16th of March 2020. That quiet start marked the launch of a blockchain platform whose founders believed it could outpace every rival. Toly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal had established Solana Labs in San Francisco two years before. By November 2021, the platform's native token, SOL, had climbed nearly 12,000% in a single year to a price of $259.96. The market capitalization touched $74 billion. The New York Times and the Financial Times described the coin as a genuine alternative to Ethereum. Whether that promise would hold was a question the following years would answer with considerable force.

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• 2. Built for Speed

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  Solana runs on a proof-of-stake model, as described in the company's own white paper. The design goal was ambitious: support smart contracts and decentralized applications while handling far more transactions than competing platforms. Speed and cost were the platform's two central selling points. Ethereum, the dominant blockchain at the time, was often criticized for high transaction fees and slow processing. Solana's architecture aimed to address both problems. That combination drew developers and investors who saw a meaningful gap the platform might fill. Their appetite for investment would soon produce results, drawing some of the most prominent names in venture capital.

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• 3. The 2021 Explosion

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  In June 2021, Solana Labs raised $314 million selling SOL tokens, with Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital among the leading participants. That capital injection signaled that institutional investors had placed a significant bet on the platform's future. The market responded quickly. By September 2021, Solana's market capitalization had surpassed $63 billion. Part of that momentum came from the NFT market, which was drawing millions of participants onto blockchain platforms throughout that year. Solana attracted creators looking for a more accessible fee structure than what existing major blockchains offered. The class action lawsuit filed the following year would later allege that not all of this growth had been handled transparently.

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• 4. A Pattern of Outages

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  On the 14th of September 2021, a sudden surge of incoming transactions caused the Solana network to fork. Validators ended up with incompatible views of the network's state, and the system went offline. It took about 17 hours to restore service, with the network coming back on the 15th.

  Bots overwhelmed the Solana network on the 1st of May, bringing the system down for roughly seven hours. On the 31st of May 2022, a bug in how the blockchain handled offline transactions caused another shutdown. That outage lasted about four and a half hours.

  On the 1st of October 2022, a consensus bug in the validator client allowed a misconfigured node to publish multiple valid but conflicting blocks. The network went down for six more hours. Each of these failures shared a consistent consequence: the value of SOL tended to fall whenever the network went dark.

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• 5. A Year of Crises

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  Nine thousand two hundred and thirty-one Solana wallets were compromised on the 3rd of August 2022. Four specific wallet addresses transferred approximately $8 million out of victims' accounts. Solana's own foundation attributed the breach to software from Slope Finance, a digital wallet provider. The hack was damaging, but a larger blow arrived three months later.

  In November 2022, cryptocurrency exchange FTX declared bankruptcy. Alameda Research, a trading firm closely tied to FTX, began selling its holdings. At the time of the collapse, SOL was the second-largest asset in Alameda Research's portfolio. FTX itself had held $982 million in SOL tokens. Within one day of the bankruptcy announcement, the price of SOL fell roughly 40%. By the end of 2022, Solana's market capitalization had dropped by more than $50 billion since the start of that year.

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• 6. Legal and Regulatory Pressure

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  On the 1st of July 2022, a class action lawsuit accused Solana Labs of selling unregistered securities tokens. The suit alleged that Toly Yakovenko had lent more than 11.3 million tokens to a market maker in April 2020. He had not disclosed this arrangement to the public. The lawsuit also claimed that Solana had promised to reduce the token supply by that amount. In practice, it had only burned 3.3 million tokens.

  In June 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. The complaint alleged that Solana was among thirteen currencies on the platform that had failed the Howey Test. That test is the legal standard used to determine whether an asset qualifies as an unregistered security. The SEC had issued Coinbase a Wells notice the previous March. Solana's foundation denied that SOL was a security. The announcement drove SOL's price down nearly 30%, and Robinhood delisted the token in response. By November 2024, Robinhood Crypto had relisted SOL for U.S. customers. That reversal suggested the most acute phase of the regulatory standoff had eased.

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• 7. Real-World Adoption

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  In April 2023, Solana Labs launched a subsidiary called Solana Mobile and released the Solana Saga, an Android smartphone. The device came preinstalled with several decentralized applications built on the Solana network. Five months later, in September 2023, Visa announced it had added Solana to its payment infrastructure. Alongside processors Worldpay and Nuvei, Visa enabled merchants to receive payments using USDC, a stablecoin, settled through the Solana blockchain. These agreements moved the platform from purely speculative territory toward active commercial use. In January 2025, that same network would become the venue for a sitting American president's cryptocurrency debut.

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• 8. Political Entanglements

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  In January 2025, Donald Trump launched a memecoin called $TRUMP using the Solana blockchain. The token's arrival drove SOL to a new all-time high of $294. Later that year, on the 25th of November 2025, Representative Jamie Raskin released a report. It stemmed from an inquiry by Democratic members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. The report was titled Trump, Crypto, and a New Age of Corruption.

  The committee's findings were direct. Trump had crafted cryptocurrency policies that, the report found, had directly benefited himself and his family. The investigation determined that Trump had grown his personal net worth by billions through cryptocurrency dealings. Those dealings were characterized as intertwined with foreign governments, corporate allies, and criminal actors. The report also concluded that Trump had dismantled anti-corruption safeguards. He had pardoned individuals the committee described as corporate cronies to build his cryptocurrency empire. Of all the platforms these transactions touched, Solana was named as the primary host.

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