What is Solana?
Solana (SOL) is a high-throughput Layer-1 blockchain launched in 2020 by Solana Labs. It was designed from scratch to push block production to the physical limits of commodity hardware, settling tens of thousands of transactions per second at sub-cent fees - without relying on a second-layer rollup architecture.
Solana uses a combination of Proof-of-Stake and a verifiable delay function called Proof-of-History that orders transactions before consensus. This ordering shortcut is what lets validators process transactions in parallel and is the core of Solana's performance model.
How does Solana work?
Validators stake SOL to propose blocks and earn inflationary rewards plus transaction priority fees. Proof-of-History timestamps each transaction before it reaches consensus, eliminating a round of communication that slows most other chains. Combined with a runtime called Sealevel that executes non-conflicting transactions in parallel, Solana produces blocks every 400 milliseconds.
The trade-off is that running a validator is demanding - fast hardware, high bandwidth and consistent uptime are required. In exchange, users get Visa-like throughput on a single global state machine without having to bridge or switch networks for common actions.