Buy Solana (SOL): value and price trends

What is Solana (SOL)

Solana is a layer-1 blockchain launched in March 2020, designed to process many transactions per second with fees of a few cents. It combines a proof of stake consensus mechanism, where those who lock SOL take part in validation, with a component of its own called Proof of History: a cryptographic clock that orders transactions before validators confirm them, so validators do not also have to agree on the time.

SOL is the network’s native crypto-asset. It is used to pay fees, to stake in order to contribute to security and, since 2026, to vote on protocol decisions. One of the most active ecosystems in the sector has formed around Solana: decentralised exchanges, payment applications, NFTs and a long memecoin season that brought a great many new users onto the network in 2024 and 2025.

On Young Platform you can buy and sell the crypto-asset SOL on a spot basis and stake it, as described further down.

Who develops Solana and who governs it

The project started from an idea by Anatoly Yakovenko, a former Qualcomm engineer, who published the Proof of History paper in 2017 and founded Solana Labs with Raj Gokal. The mainnet launched in beta in March 2020. In 2024 the team developing the validator software split from Solana Labs and became Anza, which today maintains the main client, called Agave. The Solana Foundation, based in Switzerland, funds development and coordinates the community.

Governance changed in the summer of 2026. Until then decisions went through advisory votes by validators; on 28 August 2026 the first binding vote closed, in which staked SOL holders also carried weight through their validators. The proposal, called SGP-0002, passed with 67% of votes against a two-thirds threshold, so by a margin of three tenths of a point. We cover it in the staking section, because it concerns how many new SOL are created each year.

How the network works

Each transaction is placed into a block by the validator whose turn it is, called the leader, and then confirmed by the others. The turn lasts one slot, and its duration is one of the parameters the network works on most: since 28 August 2026 a slot lasts 300 milliseconds, down from 350, with a stated target of 200. In mid-2026 there were around 840 active validators, down from a peak above 1,300 a few years earlier: running one requires expensive machines, which keeps the number relatively low.

Those who do not run a validator can delegate their SOL to an existing one and receive part of the rewards the network distributes for validation. Rewards come mostly from new SOL issued by the protocol, at an inflation rate that falls every year, and to a lesser extent from fees. Fees for users remain among the lowest in the sector, although at times of congestion those who want to jump the queue can pay a priority fee.

Outages, FTX and the recovery

Solana’s history has two well-known scars. The first is service outages: between 2021 and 2022 the network stopped several times, and on 6 February 2024 block production halted for around five hours. The cause was always the same: a single piece of software for every validator, so a single bug could stop them all at once. That is why the work on alternative clients, covered in the next section, matters more than any speed record.

The second scar is FTX. Sam Bankman-Fried’s exchange and the Alameda fund were among the biggest backers and holders of SOL; with their collapse in November 2022 the token lost most of its value and for months the project was written off. The recovery came between 2023 and 2025 with developers returning, the memecoin season and the all-time high of January 2025.

The most recent incident dates from 12 August 2026: a network problem at an infrastructure provider knocked around 90 validators offline, equal to 28.8% of stake, for about half an hour. The network did not stop, because the share needed to block finality is one third, but the margin was four and a half points. The number of validators, then, says little if many of them sit in the same data centres.

Firedancer and Alpenglow: what is changing

Since 12 December 2025 Firedancer has been running on mainnet, a validator client written from scratch by Jump Crypto and independent of Agave. For the first time Solana has two complete implementations: if one has a bug, the other can keep the network running. Adoption is gradual: in mid-2026 the full Firedancer handled around 14% of stake, and another 26% ran on Frankendancer, a hybrid version that uses Firedancer’s networking layer on top of the Agave engine.

Alpenglow, on the other hand, is the biggest change since the network launched. Approved by validators in September 2025 with 98% of votes, it replaces both Proof of History and the current voting mechanism with two new components, Votor and Rotor, with the aim of bringing transaction finality down from around 12 seconds to 100-150 milliseconds. It has been running on a validator test cluster since 11 May 2026 and, according to the schedule published by Anza, mainnet activation starts on 28 September 2026. Until then the performance figures are stated targets, not values measured on mainnet.

SOL in regulated markets

Since 28 October 2025 spot exposure products on SOL have been listed in the United States: the first was Bitwise’s on the NYSE, followed by eight other issuers in the following months. By the end of August 2026 these nine products had gathered around 1.34 billion dollars in total, with August as the best month of the year. SOL is thus the third asset, after Bitcoin and Ether, to have a regulated access channel for American investors.

Staking SOL

On Young Platform you can stake SOL to contribute to the security of the network. The SOL rewards received are variable, depend on the dynamics of the Solana protocol and are not guaranteed; they do not constitute financial interest. Staking carries specific risks, including the risk of validator slashing, the possible lock-up period during activation or deactivation and the technological risks of the protocol.

One thing to know is that the amount of new SOL distributed each year is about to fall faster. The vote of 28 August 2026 doubled the disinflation rate, that is, the speed at which annual inflation decreases, from 15% to 30%: the network will reach its long-term level of 1.5% around 2029 instead of 2032, issuing around 18.9 million fewer SOL over six years. The decision is political and still has to be translated into code by the development teams, so at the time of publishing this page the change is not yet operational. When it is, staking rewards will fall accordingly.

What to consider before buying SOL

Solana has a highly volatile price history: between late 2023 and early 2025 its value grew more than tenfold, and in the following year it gave back a significant part of that gain. Beyond volatility, there are three specific elements. The first is technical: Alpenglow rewrites the core of the network, and a transition of this scale can have problems that testing did not reveal. The second is structural: a significant share of validators is still concentrated on a few infrastructure providers, as August 2026 showed. The third concerns flows: the presence of spot ETFs ties part of the demand to the choices of American institutional investors, who can enter and exit quickly.

If you want to transfer SOL to an external wallet, always check the supported destination network in the app: sending on the wrong blockchain can result in the permanent loss of funds.

In summary

Solana is the blockchain that bet everything on performance, paid for that choice with years of outages and the collapse of FTX, and has returned to being one of the most used networks in the sector. 2026 is the year its engine changes: two independent clients, a new consensus on the way and the first binding decision taken by token holders. Understanding how the network works, and where staking rewards come from, is the best way to decide whether and how to add SOL to your crypto-asset portfolio. To compare it with the other major network for applications, see the Ethereum page; for the ecosystem living on Solana, the pages for Jupiter and Raydium.