What is Solana? The blockchain behind SOL: no supply cap, 589 million tokens in circulation

Solana is a public blockchain that runs programs, tokens and payments without a bank or a company sitting in between. SOL is the token of that network: you pay the fees with it, and the machines that write the blocks post it as security. Technically Solana belongs to the group of layer-1 blockchains, the networks that settle their transactions themselves rather than building on another network.

The mainnet launched in March 2020. Since then the network has processed 563.3 billion transactions by its own count. On October 23, 2026 one SOL cost $103.72, or €92.40, which puts Solana at rank seven among all cryptocurrencies with a market capitalisation of just over $61 billion. The all-time high of $293.31 dates from January 19, 2025.

What is Solana? A layer-1 blockchain that keeps its own clock

The difference from older networks starts with the clock. In a classic blockchain, the network has to agree on the order in which transactions arrived for every single block. Solana turns that around: a method called Proof of History continuously produces a sequence of computed results in which each result requires the previous one. Because nobody can take a shortcut, that sequence proves time has passed between two points. The order is therefore settled before any vote takes place.

Proof of History is thus neither a vote nor a security mechanism but a verifiable clock. The security itself comes from Proof of Stake: anyone who wants to write or confirm blocks posts SOL as collateral. Anyone who plays foul risks that collateral. Together, the two methods allow blocks to be produced at very short intervals without participants constantly negotiating the order.

Slots, epochs and 432,000 time windows: the rhythm of the network

A slot is the time window in which a given validator may propose a block. Twelve samples taken on October 23, 2026 produced a slot time of 212 milliseconds and throughput of roughly 2,150 transactions per second. The slot time stood at 400 milliseconds for a long time; the halving came through a protocol update this year.

Every 432,000 slots form an epoch. That is the network's settlement unit: staking rewards are credited at the end of an epoch, and only then does deposited or withdrawn collateral take effect. The shorter slots have a side effect here that counts in practice. Epoch 1064 began on October 21, 2026 at 13:36 UTC, epoch 1065 on October 22 at 15:06 UTC. One epoch therefore lasted roughly 25.5 hours instead of the former 48. Anyone unstaking SOL today waits about a day for release rather than two.

Not every slot carries a block. In the current epoch, 1,422 of 163,823 assigned time windows lapsed, by our own count, because the validator in charge delivered nothing. That is 0.87 percent. Gaps like these are normal in operation and cost only the validator in question its share.

Alpenglow replaces TowerBFT: the biggest protocol change since 2020

Solana swapped out its voting mechanism on October 21, 2026. TowerBFT, which had run since launch, gave way to Alpenglow and its Votor component. The switch hung on slot 459,653,000. The block immediately before it carries a timestamp of 13:54 UTC according to our own query; the epoch itself had begun at 13:36. Both times circulated side by side in the coverage, but they describe different things.

In substance, Votor merges two voting rounds into one. If validators agree with 80 percent of the voting weight, one round is enough; at 60 percent it takes two. The method was developed by Anza, the development firm behind the most important Solana client. Voters had approved the change in September 2025 with 98.27 percent, on a turnout of 52 percent of the voting weight. Our report on the activation covers the process in detail.

What matters is what has not happened yet: only Votor shipped, that is the voting part. Rotor, the planned rewrite of block propagation, has no date. The 150 milliseconds often quoted are a target from the design paper, not a measured value. The Solana Foundation itself calls the figure an expectation rather than a fixed quantity.

Finality measured: one to three slots between block and irreversibility

Finality means the point from which a payment is fixed so firmly that it can no longer be reversed. That is the number which counts for an exchange, a merchant or for you when withdrawing. Under TowerBFT the gap ran to roughly 12.8 seconds, which at 400-millisecond slots was about 32 blocks.

We measured the distance ourselves, twelve times in a row on October 23, 2026: between the last block seen and the block finally confirmed there were two slots on average, one at best and three at worst. At 212 milliseconds per slot that comes to a good 400 milliseconds. The figure is an upper bound, because each of the two queries travels its own network path. The target of 150 milliseconds has therefore not been reached, but the value sits an order of magnitude below the old one. In practice that means a transfer a recipient once had to wait a quarter of a minute for now counts as complete in under a second.

The SOL token: fees, collateral and voting weight

SOL serves three purposes. First, you pay transaction fees with it, which for simple transfers run to fractions of a cent. Part of every fee is burned, the rest goes to the validator. Second, SOL acts as collateral in Proof of Stake: validators lock their own tokens and those delegated to them and receive a share of the new issuance in return. Third, voting weight in protocol votes follows exactly that locked amount.

Anyone who only wants to hold SOL does not need to run a validator. Delegation is the usual route: you transfer the voting right to a validator while keeping control of your tokens. Where that is possible and at what cost is shown in our crypto exchange comparison.

No supply cap: issuance falls from eight to 1.5 percent

Unlike Bitcoin, Solana has no fixed upper limit. Total supply stood at 636,273,852 SOL on October 23, 2026, of which 589,653,441 were in circulation; the remaining 7.3 percent are locked or not yet released. Instead of a cap there is a declining issuance schedule: the rate started at eight percent a year, falls by 15 percent annually and converges on a long-run value of 1.5 percent. All three figures stand unchanged in the protocol and can be read directly at Anza.

The rate currently stands at 3.59 percent. That produces new issuance of roughly 22.85 million SOL a year, or around $2.37 billion at the October 23 price. This money is not a loss but the payment for the network's security; it goes in full to the validators and their delegators. For you as a holder it still means that leaving your SOL idle dilutes your share, because the quantity rises every year.

74.1 percent in staking: locked capital and what it buys

On October 23, 2026, 437,024,130 SOL were locked as collateral. That is 74.1 percent of the circulating supply and 68.7 percent of total supply, one of the highest ratios among the large networks. The higher it sits, the more expensive an attack becomes, because an attacker would have to assemble a correspondingly large amount of capital. At the same time that share is unavailable for trading, which can amplify price moves. We track the ratio over time in a separate analysis.

656 validators, blocking minority at 18: how decentralised Solana is

The network counted 656 active validators plus 20 delinquent ones. In the current epoch, 643 of them were assigned time windows. What matters, though, is less the number of machines than the distribution of voting weight. Here is our own count: the largest single validator held 3.92 percent, the ten largest together 24.5 percent. Reaching one third of the voting weight takes just 18 validators; that figure is the Nakamoto coefficient. For half it takes 40.

One third is the critical threshold because from there finality can no longer be reached. How close that sits to reality was shown on August 12, 2026: an outage at the provider TeraSwitch took 90 validators holding 28.83 percent of staked SOL off the network for 33 minutes. Blocks kept coming, but only a good four and a half percentage points were missing to the threshold. The problem was not the number of operators but that many of them sat with the same data centre provider.

The last full outage dates from February 2024

Solana had a poor reputation for stability in its early years. The last complete halt so far came on February 6, 2024 and lasted 4 hours and 46 minutes; the cause was an infinite loop in a program function. The Solana Foundation's post-mortem describes the sequence in detail. Since then the network has produced without a complete interruption, so for roughly two and a half years. That record comes with a caveat: the figure is the Foundation's own, and users notice outages at individual exchanges, wallets or data providers even while the blockchain keeps running.

Robustness is also helped by the fact that there is now more than one validator client. Alongside the established Agave, Firedancer runs as a complete rewrite by Jump Crypto in C and C++ that shares no code with the original. The point is simple: a bug in one program no longer takes down the whole network. How large Firedancer's share of the voting weight is exactly, the available sources put differently; the ranges run from a few to a good twenty percent.

Buying Solana in Germany: trading venues and custody

You can get SOL in Germany at every larger crypto exchange, at some brokers and neobanks, and through savings plans. Since MiCA the same licensing requirement applies across the EU: a provider needs authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider, and supervision in Germany falls to BaFin. Before a first purchase it is worth checking whether your provider actually holds that licence, because without it, it may not serve retail clients here. Which routes exist and what they cost is set out in our overview on buying Solana.

With custody you have two options. If the SOL stay on the exchange you carry its default risk but get by without managing keys yourself. If you move them to a wallet of your own, the responsibility is yours, and losing the recovery words means losing the tokens. Staking is possible either way: more conveniently through the exchange, with a free choice of validator in your own wallet.

Tax on SOL: the one-year holding period and the €1,000 threshold

For private investors in Germany, SOL counts as another asset under section 23 of the Income Tax Act. If you sell more than one year after buying, the gain stays tax-free, with no upper limit. If you sell earlier, the gain counts as a private disposal; if all such gains in a year together stay below €1,000, nothing is due. Once that threshold is exceeded, the full amount is taxable at your personal rate, not just the excess.

Staking follows its own calculation. The rewards themselves are other income under section 22 no. 3 of the Income Tax Act, valued at the market price on the day they arrive, with a threshold of €256 a year. Staking does not extend the holding period of your original SOL under current law. A reform is in progress and its status is contested; we track the latest state in our article on the crypto holding period, and the general rules in the crypto tax overview. Because every single staking credit has its own receipt date, clean record-keeping pays off from the start.

Solana: 22.85 million new SOL a year is the price of the speed

Solana buys speed with two things: with continuous new issuance and with a voting weight that reaches one third at 18 operators. Both are verifiable numbers rather than opinions, and both belong in the calculation before you build a position. Three steps are concrete:

1. Check the trading venue: compare which providers hold an EU licence in the overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Do the staking maths: set the offered yield against new issuance of 3.59 percent before locking tokens; the terms are in the comparison of staking providers.
3. Secure the records: note the purchase date and every staking credit from the start, most easily with one of the crypto tax tools.

Total loss is possible with any cryptocurrency, even with a network of this size.

(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.)