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When President Trump launched the TRUMP memecoin on the eve of his inauguration, he did so on the Solana blockchain.
Memecoins, that are jokey crypto tokens that commerce based mostly on vibes, are at the moment the preferred use for Solana. The community’s long-term imaginative and prescient — for capital markets to all be housed inside a shared international system — is way broader than that. Solana’s likelihood of reaching this largely comes from its velocity and a budget transaction charges, which additionally occurs to be why memecoin merchants prefer it a lot.
Solana is a blockchain, and a blockchain is a decentralized digital asset ledger. Each financial institution operates an asset ledger, however the ledgers don’t work collectively very effectively. They’re usually gradual and costly to maneuver cash round on as a result of banks and different present asset ledgers use inefficient infrastructure.
Blockchains are made up of world computer systems operating software program that ensures the asset ledger is correct, which might be costly. It prices over a greenback on common to transact on the Bitcoin community, and it prices $0.05 on common to purchase one thing on Ethereum. What’s extra, Bitcoin and Ethereum — that are the biggest and second-largest blockchains — solely course of just a few handfuls of transactions per second. Bank cards dealt with a median of 1,700 transactions per second in 2023, in line with information from Capital One.
Solana’s chief architect, Anatoly Yakovenko, was a software program engineer on the wi-fi expertise agency Qualcomm. Yakovenko endeavored to make blockchains quicker and cheaper by realizing some rules of wi-fi expertise that may very well be utilized to blockchain, which led him down the highway to creating Solana. Yakovenko raised enterprise capital funding and started constructing the blockchain alongside a pair co-founders.
Solana launched in 2020. The blockchain’s key innovation was creating “proof-of-history,” a time period used to explain a type of clock that each validator — the individuals operating the computer systems with Solana’s software program — used to course of Solana transactions extra rapidly than they might in any other case.
SOL, which can also be known as Solana, is the crypto token issued by and used to safe the Solana community. Folks may also purchase and promote SOL, type of like they do a inventory.
When individuals transact on Solana, they pay a SOL-denominated price. That is often a fraction of a cent used partly to compensate validators for operating Solana’s software program. For comparability’s sake, bank cards often cost 1.5-3.5% of a transaction to the service provider, a value which will get handed alongside to customers.
Solana can also be a lot quicker than Bitcoin or Ethereum, dealing with over 1,000 transactions per second. It might theoretically deal with much more given extra demand for Solana’s asset ledger.
Solana has had just a few outages — occasions whereby validators stopped producing blocks on account of a bug within the software program. The final time Solana halted was on Feb. 6, 2024. These outages have been partly brought on by Solana’s lack of consumer variety, which is a method of claiming there’s principally one model of the Solana software program. So if there’s a bug within the code, each validator is affected. There’s a second Solana consumer being written from scratch referred to as Firedancer, however it’s not fairly prepared but.
FTX, a crypto trade that went bankrupt and introduced the entire crypto market tumbling down, was an early Solana adopter. Solana’s repute was badly hit following its collapse, with the value of SOL dipping beneath $10 in late 2022. Remarkably, the community survived and had a roaring comeback in 2024. SOL hit an all-time excessive of $293 after Donald Trump launched a memecoin in January 2025.
President Trump isn’t the one particular person utilizing Solana for memecoins. For all intents and functions, memecoin buying and selling is at the moment the principle use for Solana’s asset ledger. Buying and selling these risky tokens is just about simply playing, and a few knock Solana for its memecoin entanglement. Others argue that much less refined use circumstances might help the expertise scale for extra critical ones, citing how demand for on-line pornography pressured broadband capability to scale up and create the fashionable web.
The extra critical use case Solana hopes for is what the blockchain’s supporters name web capital markets. The thought is that Solana might let all types of belongings — memecoins but in addition shares, bonds, tokenized uncooked supplies, no matter — be traded throughout the similar system. That is partly attributed to all Solana information being out there to all community individuals, which is one thing Solana builders name international shared state. This Solana-centric monetary system may very well be extra inclusive and environment friendly than the present system, the place each monetary venue has its personal database.
That future continues to be a methods away, in fact, however with its velocity and low charges, Solana has pretty much as good an opportunity as any blockchain of pulling it off.