Solana Price Holds $114: What Holders Check Five Days Before Alpenglow

Update (November 1, 2026): Alpenglow has been active on mainnet since October 21, 2026: according to on-chain data, its feature gate has been active since slot 459,648,000, the first slot of epoch 1064, with a block time of 13:36 UTC, and Anza lists October 21 as the mainnet launch date. September 28, the date this article refers to, was not an Alpenglow date; Anza developers contradicted reports to that effect on September 27 and 28. The price has weakened since publication: after a high of $124.62 on September 27, SOL fell as low as $92.75 on October 30 and traded at $95.55, or 85.31 euros, on November 1 at 00:47 UTC according to CoinMarketCap, around 17 percent below September 23; on the day of activation itself SOL closed almost unchanged at $106.79. For the staking calculation this means: at 85.31 euros per SOL the 256-euro threshold is reached after around 3.0 SOL of rewards, so at a yield of 6.0 to 6.7 percent with roughly 45 to 50 SOL staked.

The Solana price stood at $114.55, or 100.56 euros, at 18:45 German time on September 23, 2026. That is 2.2 percent less than the day before and still 17.7 percent more than seven days ago. Anyone holding Solana therefore has a strong week and a weak day behind them. The more important question arises regardless: at the time the feature gate for the largest overhaul the network has prepared in years was expected on September 28 (it was activated on October 21, 2026), and the tax clock on every SOL bought in September has been running anew since this week. Both are things you can check today. The price merely supplies the occasion.

Solana price on September 23: $114 after 17.7 percent in seven days

The figures come from the CoinGecko market database, as of September 23, 2026. SOL is quoted at $114.55. The daily high was $119.66, the daily low $113.31. Market capitalisation stands at $67.3 billion, trading turnover over the past 24 hours at $5.33 billion.

Over one week there is a gain of 17.7 percent, over one month one of 18.7 percent. Working the weekly gain backwards puts the price seven days ago at around $97. The entire move of this week therefore plays out in a range of roughly $97 to $119.66. SOL remains 60.9 percent away from its all-time high of $293.31. That last figure is the most uncomfortable one in this article, and it belongs at the start: a weekly gain of 17.7 percent sounds like a turn, but it shortens the distance to the record by only a few percentage points.

Today's pullback of 2.2 percent is not a standalone event. Bitcoin gave up 2.5 percent over the same period, Ethereum 2.7 percent, XRP 3.3 percent. SOL is therefore falling somewhat less than the rest of the field and stays ahead over the week. Anyone deriving an action from a single daily loss is measuring noise.

What has carried the SOL price this week

Two things are running in parallel. One is the network side: Anza, the development firm behind the widely used Agave client, published the release plan for version 4.3 in August; market reports read September 28 in it as the target for activating the new consensus procedure on mainnet. That was a date market participants had been counting down to for weeks, but Anza developers rejected it at the end of September; Alpenglow was activated on October 21, 2026.

The other is the supply side. In September the network's inflation rate stood at 4.9 percent according to the analytics service Staking Rewards, with a staking ratio of 69.32 percent of circulating supply; for the current epoch 1073 the network itself reports an inflation rate of 3.58 percent on November 1. Almost seven out of ten SOL are locked up and unavailable to the market in the short term. At the same time, the Solana community approved a doubling of the disinflation rate from minus 15 to minus 30 percent per year in the August 2026 vote SGP-0002; the change is implemented by proposal SIMD-0550, the successor to the earlier SIMD-0411. That shortens the path to the target inflation of 1.5 percent to roughly three years instead of six. Important for context: this switch was not yet active on mainnet as of September 17, and on November 1 the network's interface still reported an annual reduction of 15 percent. It is a proposal, not a network rule in force.

One term that comes up in both contexts deserves a brief definition. A feature gate is a switch in the protocol that arms an already shipped function at a set point in time. The software sits on validators' machines beforehand; it takes effect only once enough stake weight flips the switch.

Alpenglow active since October 21: what delegators should check

Alpenglow is the name of the consensus overhaul. It replaces the previous TowerBFT procedure with a new voting protocol called Votor. The tangible effect: the finality of a transaction is meant to drop from around 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds. Finality describes the moment from which a transaction can practically no longer be reversed. At the same time, the network's fault tolerance rises from 33 to 40 percent. The network can therefore cope with a larger share of failed or malicious validators before it stalls.

For you as a delegator, meaning someone who makes their own SOL available to a third-party validator, one concrete check follows from this. First: is your validator running a client version that supports Alpenglow? Validators that were running an outdated version on the cut-off date could miss blocks, and missed blocks mean lower rewards for everyone delegating to them. You will find the version details on your validator's page in any common network explorer.

Second: how high is your validator's commission, and has it been changed recently? A commission raised at short notice is the most common silent drag on returns. Third: how much stake weight does your validator bundle? Very large validators are convenient, but they concentrate the network. We described the details of the timetable and the requirements more fully in our assessment of the Alpenglow activation from September 1.

What this date explicitly was not: a price forecast. A protocol upgrade with a date known for weeks is largely priced in. Anyone who bought because September 28 was approaching was buying information everyone else had had for a long time; on the day of the actual activation, October 21, SOL closed almost unchanged at $106.79 according to CoinMarketCap.

Holding period under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act: buying into the September rally restarts the clock

This is where the price move turns into a tax question. In Germany, gains from selling crypto assets held as private assets are tax-free under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act if more than one year lies between acquisition and sale. Sell earlier and the gain is taxable, at your personal income tax rate and not at the 25 percent flat withholding tax.

This week's advance has very probably triggered purchases. Each of those purchases sets its own one-year clock running. Anyone who bought on September 18 is free on September 19, 2027, not earlier. That sounds trivial and is regularly overlooked in practice, because many investors think of their holdings as one block rather than as a series of individually dated additions.

There are two things you should record today, while the figures are fresh. First, the acquisition date of each tranche, to the day. Second, the acquisition price in euros at the time of purchase, not in dollars. The tax office calculates in euros, and anyone back-calculating from dollar prices later builds in a source of error that can hardly be resolved cleanly after the fact. A portfolio tracker takes this bookkeeping off your hands; which tools deliver German reports is set out in our overview of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.

For the order of sales, the rule is generally individual attribution per wallet, or failing that the first in, first out method. Which tranche you sell therefore co-determines whether a gain falls into the tax net. Anyone holding an old position kept well beyond a year alongside a fresh one from this week should settle that before a sale rather than after.

Staking yield at 6.0 to 6.7 percent: when the 256-euro exemption threshold breaks

For tax purposes, staking rewards are something different from price gains. Under Section 22 number 3 of the Income Tax Act they count as other income from services. An exemption threshold of 256 euros per calendar year applies to them. Exemption threshold means: stay below it and the entire amount is tax-free. Reach or exceed it and the entire amount becomes taxable, not merely the excess. The difference from an allowance is the whole point here.

Each reward is valued at the moment it accrues, in euros. And this is exactly where this week's price advance reaches into your tax return. Work it through on the figures of September 23. One SOL cost 100.56 euros. The 256-euro threshold was therefore reached after around 2.55 SOL of rewards. Staking Rewards reports a reward rate of 6.67 percent on September 23; other surveys from the same week came in at a good 6.0 percent. So take the range: at an annual yield of 6.0 to 6.7 percent you need roughly 38 to 42 SOL staked to break the threshold within a year.

A month ago the same calculation looked different. With SOL 18.7 percent lower, that worked out at roughly 85 euros a piece, assuming an unchanged euro-dollar relationship. The threshold would then only have been reached at around three SOL of rewards, and for that you would have had to stake roughly 45 to 50 SOL. The price advance therefore lowers the bar by about seven to eight SOL without your having done anything at all. That is exactly why this check belongs in a price article and not in the week before the filing deadline.

Two additions that are often missing. The 256 euros apply to all income under Section 22 number 3 taken together, not per coin and not per exchange. Anyone staking or lending assets besides SOL has to add them up. And the coins received start a one-year holding period of their own from the moment they accrue. In its circular of March 6, 2025, the Federal Ministry of Finance confirmed that an extension to ten years does not apply to staking and lending. That question was considered open for years and has not been since.

Validator commission: what is really left of the staking yield

The reward rate quoted is a gross figure. Your validator's commission comes off it, a percentage of the reward that the operator retains for running the node. Values between zero and ten percent are common. Work it through on the upper estimate: at a five percent commission, 6.67 percent becomes roughly 6.34 percent; at a ten percent commission, roughly 6.0 percent.

That difference looks small and, calculated over a year, it is. It becomes relevant once the gross yield falls anyway. That is exactly what lies ahead: rewards are fed by network inflation, and that is declining as planned. What the decision on the falling payout means in concrete terms is written up in our analysis of the falling Solana staking yield. Anyone paying a ten percent commission today will still be paying it when the gross yield is four percent. An overview of providers and their terms can be found in the comparison of the best staking platforms.

A note on the distinction: staking through a centralised exchange and delegating yourself from a wallet are the same category of income for tax, but they differ considerably in counterparty risk. At the exchange, the provider holds the keys. When delegating yourself, the key stays with you and the validator receives only the voting right, never control over the coins.

Buying under MiCA: how to recognise an authorised exchange

When the price rises, people buy, and in doing so investors regularly end up with providers that are no longer permitted to operate in Germany at all. The European Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, MiCAR for short, has applied directly since December 30, 2024. Germany shortened the available transition period through its Crypto Markets Supervision Act: under Section 50 of that act it ended on December 31, 2025. Since January 1, 2026, crypto service providers without MiCAR authorisation may no longer provide services in Germany.

The check takes two minutes. Look the provider up in BaFin's company database or in ESMA's European register. If it is not listed there as an authorised crypto service provider, that is not a detail for lawyers but your problem: in a dispute you have no supervisory route, and deposit protection does not apply to crypto assets in any case. Which trading venues hold European authorisation is compiled in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

Pay attention to the execution route as well. A purchase through a contract for difference or a certificate does not deliver you SOL but a claim against the issuer. You cannot stake with it, and different tax rules apply, namely those for investment income with flat withholding tax. Anyone buying because of the holding period has to actually own the coins.

Custody and unstaking: why your SOL is not immediately ready to sell

Delegated SOL is not available instantly. Deactivating a delegation only takes effect at the end of the current epoch, and an epoch on Solana usually lasts about two to three days. So anyone wanting to sell at the high cannot readily do so with staked holdings. Between your decision and the available balance lies the remainder of the epoch.

A simple split follows from this, one many investors run anyway: part of the holdings staked for yield, part liquid for the ability to act. How large those parts are depends on your own situation and not on a rule of thumb from the internet.

On custody itself: anyone holding larger amounts does not belong on an exchange. A hardware wallet separates the private key from the internet-connected computer, and delegating is possible from a hardware wallet too. The recovery phrase remains crucial: keep it offline, in two physically separate places, and never as a photo or a text file on a device.

Levels above and below: $119.66 against $113.31

The levels that counted on September 23 are measured values and not drawn lines. On the upside, the next relevant figure was the daily high at $119.66. It sat just below the round $120 mark, and the price had not taken that one yet in the attempt at the time. As long as that remained the case, the move of the past seven days is a forceful recovery within a range and not a confirmed breakout.

On the downside, the first figure was the daily low at $113.31. Below that lay the middle of the weekly range at roughly $108, and below that the starting point of the move at around $97. A fall back to there would erase the entire weekly gain without anything having had to change on the network side. That, too, belongs to a realistic reading of a 17.7 percent gain over seven days. That fall has since happened; the figures for November 1 are in the update at the top.

The basis for these three values is deliberately narrow: the daily high and daily low are collected figures from live trading, and the weekly starting point is back-calculated from the weekly change. Anything beyond that would be an expectation, and expectations belong attributed by name rather than presented as fact.

Checking the Solana price: what to take away

1. Record this week's tranches with their date and euro price. Every purchase starts its own one-year clock under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act. Capturing that today spares you the reconstruction next year. Tools for it are in the comparison of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.
2. Measure your staking rewards against the 256-euro exemption threshold. At a price of 100.56 euros and a yield of 6.0 to 6.7 percent, roughly 38 to 42 SOL staked will break the threshold within a year; at the November 1 price of 85.31 euros it takes roughly 45 to 50 SOL. Check your validator's commission at the same time, because it comes off the gross yield. Provider terms can be found in the comparison of the best staking platforms.
3. Now that Alpenglow is active, check your validator's client version and your exchange's authorisation. A validator on an outdated version costs rewards, and a provider without MiCAR authorisation has not been allowed to serve you in Germany since January 1, 2026. Authorised trading venues are listed in the overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

You can read the legal basis yourself: the exemption threshold for other income in Section 22 of the Income Tax Act and the treatment of staking and lending in the Federal Ministry of Finance circular of March 6, 2025.

(As of September 23, 2026, updated November 1, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)