74.12 percent of all SOL is staked: Solana's free float now sets the price

The analysis: 437,116,782 SOL are sitting in staking. That is 74.12 percent of all tokens in circulation, and they cannot simply be sold on a Friday evening.

Here is the evidence: our own query of the Solana mainnet on Friday evening returns 437,116,782 staked SOL against 589,708,989 tokens in circulation, spread across 664 active validators. Our assessment follows further down: this lock-up explains why the price barely gives way on quiet days and swings all the harder on hectic ones. Where the price can point over a horizon of months is set out in our Solana price prediction.

SOL traded at $103.55 on Friday evening, 0.51 percent above the previous day, with a daily high of $105.05 and a low of $103.17 (CoinGecko). That converts to €92.51. Trading volume over the past 24 hours came to $2.02 billion and market capitalisation to $61.07 billion, seventh place.

74.12 percent of the circulating supply is tied up in staking

Staking on Solana means delegating your SOL to a validator that produces and confirms blocks. The tokens stay at your disposal and do not leave your address, but they are tied up for the duration of the delegation and cannot be traded. That lock-up is precisely the figure at issue today.

The query through the network's public mainnet endpoint counts 437,116,782 staked SOL at the time of writing. Against 589,708,989 tokens in circulation, that gives a staking ratio of 74.12 percent. At the current price, around $45.26 billion is tied up. For comparison: Solana's entire market capitalisation stands at $61.07 billion.

There is a second quantity on top of that which is often overlooked. Total supply comes to 636,335,090 SOL, but only 589,708,989 are in circulation. The difference of 46,626,101 SOL sits in accounts the network itself treats as non-circulating, for instance under lock-up periods. Anyone judging Solana's scarcity works with the circulating figure, not with total supply.

Only 152.6 million SOL are genuinely free to trade

Subtract the staked amount from the circulating supply and 152,592,207 SOL remain. At Friday's price that is $15.80 billion. This is the part of the supply that can hit the market on any given day without anyone having to wait for an epoch change first.

Set the daily volume of $2.02 billion against it and the scale becomes clear: on a single trading day, the equivalent of 12.8 percent of the freely available holdings changes hands on this arithmetic. At Ethereum, where the staking ratio is noticeably lower, the same pressure is spread over a broader base.

That explains a behaviour readers often describe: Solana sits strikingly stable on quiet days, and when it moves, it moves fast. A thin free float works in both directions. It cushions small sales and amplifies large ones.

Epoch 1066 ends on Saturday evening

Solana does not count in days but in epochs. An epoch covers 432,000 slots, and a slot is the time window for one block. At the time of the query, epoch 1066 was running at slot index 72,046, leaving 359,954 slots to go.

How long that takes, we measured ourselves rather than working with the textbook figure of 400 milliseconds. Three samples of 60 seconds each produced a consistent 283 to 285 slots, or 0.211 seconds per slot. Extrapolated, around 21 hours remain, which puts the switch to epoch 1067 on Saturday evening. The measurement incidentally shows how far the block rate has tightened since the Alpenglow changeover, which we reported on October 21.

The epoch change is not a cosmetic detail in the calendar but the clock for every change to a stake. A new delegation only becomes active at the change. The same goes for a deactivation: withdraw today and the tokens are freely available again not today but after the change. For holders, that means a decision about staking is always a decision about at least a day of waiting.

Inflation stands at 3.59 percent, and the foundation now gets nothing

Solana has no fixed maximum supply the way Bitcoin does. Instead the protocol issues new tokens and lowers the rate every year. The query for epoch 1066 returns total inflation of 3.5889 percent. The split is notable: 3.5889 percentage points go to validators and those delegating to them, 0.0 to the foundation.

The foundation's share has therefore run out. In the early years a portion of the issuance flowed to the Solana Foundation; that share has fallen to zero. Every newly issued token now lands with those who run the network or entrust their tokens to it.

In absolute terms, a rate of 3.5889 percent on 589,708,989 tokens means around 21.16 million new SOL a year, or roughly 57,980 a day. At Friday's price that is just under $6.0 million of fresh supply arriving daily. Measured against daily volume of $2.02 billion, that inflow is small; measured against a quiet trading day, it is not nothing.

A nominal yield of 4.84 percent, and less after commission

The inflation rate and the staking ratio together give the nominal staking yield. The arithmetic is simple: 3.5889 percent of issuance spread across 74.12 percent of staked tokens works out at 4.84 percent a year, before the validator takes its cut.

Commission is where providers differ. Across all 664 active validators the median sits at 5 percent. After that deduction, around 4.60 percent nominal remains. Depending on the validator, shares of transaction fees and of MEV come on top, and those are not in this calculation because they fluctuate heavily and cannot be derived from protocol data alone.

The difference between nominal and real is what counts. The 4.84 percent is denominated in SOL. Since total supply is growing by 3.5889 percent at the same time, your share of the network rises only by the difference, by a good 1.2 percentage points, if your validator charges the median commission. On this logic, anyone not staking loses 3.59 percent of their share of the network each year to those who do. That is exactly what keeps the ratio above 70 percent.

664 validators, but 18 carry a third of the voting weight

The number of validators says little on its own. More interesting is how unevenly the weight is distributed. The same data yields the Nakamoto coefficient, the smallest number of validators that together hold more than a third of the stake and could therefore halt the network.

For epoch 1066 that value is 18. The ten largest validators together carry 24.5 percent of the total stake. Alongside the 664 active validators, the network lists 14 more as delinquent; they have not voted reliably of late.

For your own staking this is no side issue. Delegate to one of the largest validators and you reinforce the concentration. Delegate to a smaller one and you add to the spread, but you have to look more closely at whether it works reliably. The 14 delinquent validators show that this case occurs. Anyone who has delegated there earns nothing in the meantime.

What has changed since our last prediction piece

On Thursday evening this slot was about the futures market and about 2.57 long accounts per short account. Our article of October 22, Solana's shrinking long ratio, described a tilt towards the buy side. The price has moved since, though not dramatically.

On October 22 SOL averaged $106.94 over the day, and on Friday $103.55. That is 3.2 percent lower in two days. Nothing has broken in the process: the 30-day low stands at $103.36, and the price held just above it on Friday. What has been added is the perspective from the protocol data. The futures market describes the expectations of a few days; the staking ratio describes how much supply is available at all.

The levels: $103.36 below, $109.65 as the next hurdle

Levels are only worth something if they can be justified. We recalculate them ourselves from the daily closing prices of the past 210 days rather than taking them from elsewhere.

On the downside, the first defensible level is $103.36, the low of the past 30 days. Friday's price stands 0.2 percent above it, so the margin is wafer-thin. Below that comes the 100-day line at $96.16, then the 200-day line at $88.20. On the upside, the 50-day line runs at $109.65, around 5.9 percent above the current level. The 30-day high dates from September 26 and stands at $122.08.

The longer view puts that in context: over seven days SOL is practically unchanged at plus 0.08 percent, over 14 days at minus 4.62 percent, over 30 days at minus 9.63 percent. It remains 64.7 percent below the all-time high of $293.31 from January 2025.

Staking from Germany: custody, the holding period and the waiting time

For investors in Germany, three practical questions hang on the decision, and they go beyond the yield.

The first is custody. Staking through an exchange is convenient, but the tokens then sit with the provider. Under MiCA, providers operating in the EU must keep client assets segregated and are authorised, yet that does not make insolvency risk disappear. Staking from your own wallet keeps the keys with you and in return requires you to pick the validator yourself and check its reliability. To see the providers side by side, there is our overview of staking platforms and their terms.

The second is tax. Staking income is taxable in Germany in the year it is received, as other income, valued at the price at the moment of receipt. That holds whether or not you sell the SOL received. For the disposal of the underlying tokens, the one-year holding period continues to apply. Anyone credited with small amounts daily over the year needs clean records for it; the tools for that are in our overview of tax software and portfolio trackers.

The third is the waiting time, and it is the one most often underestimated. At least one epoch change lies between your decision and free availability. Currently that is around 21 hours; in an epoch that has only just begun it would be up to 25 hours. Anyone holding SOL as a reserve available at short notice should not stake that portion.

Our assessment of the situation at Solana

In this newsroom's view, the staking ratio of 74.12 percent is currently the strongest argument against a fast slump and, at the same time, the argument against a fast rise. The arithmetic above supports it: only 152.6 million SOL are free, daily volume equals 12.8 percent of that, and the daily top-up from issuance is $6.0 million, or 0.3 percent of daily volume. Supply pressure from the protocol this is not.

Against that stands the fact that a high ratio can tip at any time. A staking ratio is not a lock but a decision by many holders, one that can be reversed within a single epoch change. Should the 4.84 percent yield become unattractive against other investments, or should the disinflation plans cut the rate further, that ratio will move. Additional supply would then meet a market that has grown used to scarcity. What follows from it: the ratio is a metric to keep an eye on, not a guarantee. It is explicitly not a recommendation to buy or sell.

Solana staking: 74 percent tied up, 21 hours to the epoch change

The situation translates into three steps that can be worked through today.

1. Work out which part of your SOL genuinely has to stay free. Anything you want to be able to sell within a day does not belong in staking, because an epoch change sits between withdrawal and availability. For the rest, the terms of the staking providers compared are worth a look.
2. Look at your validator's commission. The median is 5 percent, which turns 4.84 percent nominal into 4.60 percent. Every percentage point of difference feeds straight through to your yield, and a delinquent validator pays nothing at all.
3. Set the levels at which you will act. $103.36 on the downside and $109.65 on the upside are the defensible bounds of the current range. If you still want to build a SOL position, the cost differences are in our overview of crypto exchanges and their fees.

The figures in this article come from our own query of the Solana mainnet through its public interface and from CoinGecko market data. The moving averages and the levels we calculated ourselves from the daily closing prices of the past 210 days.

(As of October 23, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy. Crypto investments can lead to total loss.)