Understanding the Solana Blockchain

Solana is a Layer 1, open source blockchain built for high throughput and low cost. It launched as a mainnet beta on March 16, 2020. Solana Labs, founded in 2018 by Anatoly Yakovenko, Raj Gokal, and Greg Fitzgerald, built the original protocol from Yakovenko's 2017 Proof-of-History whitepaper, and the Solana Foundation helps support ecosystem development.

It is a single, integrated network. It does not run three separate chains and it does not use subnets. Those designs belong to other networks such as Avalanche.

Who this guide is for

Builders weighing a base layer.

If you are comparing where to deploy and you need fast confirmation, low fees, and parallel execution, this explains the core pieces so you can decide with clear trade-offs. Operators and researchers.

If you run validators, build explorers, or study throughput and fee design, you need the mechanics behind slots, fees, and client requirements. Users who rely on Solana apps.

If you trade, send payments, or play games on Solana, you benefit from knowing why transactions confirm quickly and what can still go wrong.

How Solana is built

One network, not three chains

Solana runs as one shared ledger that all validators replicate. Blocks are produced by a single leader at a time, scheduled ahead of time from stake distribution and the Proof-of-History clock. There is no X-Chain, P-Chain, or C-Chain on Solana, and there is no built-in subnet system. Applications share the same blockspace and pay the same fee market for the accounts they write to.

Proof-of-History and Tower BFT

Proof-of-History is a hash chain that acts as a clock. Each tick is the SHA-256 hash of the previous tick, looped about 12,500 times to create a verifiable delay. Sixty four ticks make one slot. Transactions reference this chain, so order and timing are verifiable without extra messages.

Tower BFT is the stake-weighted voting process that finalizes blocks. Validators vote, and each successive vote on a fork doubles its lockout. This time-based rule reduces message overhead from n squared to n compared to classic PBFT. Leaders are elected per slot from the stake-weighted schedule derived from the ledger itself.

The ideal slot time was 400 ms at launch. In August 2026 it was reduced to 350 ms as the first step toward 200 ms, reported by The Block and Decrypt. Allowed drift means real slots land between about 300 ms and 1 second. Users see confirmation in under a second, with full finality around 12 to 13 seconds.

Execution and propagation

Sealevel is the parallel runtime. It runs transactions at the same time when they touch different accounts. Transactions that write to the same account run sequentially. This is why careful account design helps throughput.

Turbine breaks blocks into small shreds and spreads them like BitTorrent. Leaders do not send full blocks to every validator directly.

Gulf Stream forwards transactions to upcoming leaders ahead of time, so there is no large global mempool waiting for inclusion.

Pipelining and Cloudbreak handle stage overlap for reading, executing, and writing. Cloudbreak is the horizontally scaled accounts database that lets the runtime fetch and update state quickly.

Accounts, programs, and fees

On Solana, every piece of state is an account. Programs are executable accounts with no internal state. Data lives in separate accounts owned by a program, and only the owner can modify that data. Rent is replaced by a rent-exempt reserve, and creating a new account requires funding it above that threshold.

Fees are paid in SOL:

Base fee is 5,000 lamports per signature, which is 0.000005 SOL. At 100 dollars per SOL that is 0.0005 dollars. Half is burned, half goes to the leader. This is documented at solana.com/docs/core/fees.
Prioritization fee is optional, set as a compute unit price in micro-lamports times the limit, divided by 1,000,000. Since SIMD-0096 it goes in full to the validator. The default price is zero, and wallets add a small fee during congestion. Even with a priority fee, typical costs stay under a cent, as shown on solana.com/learn.

Complex programs cost more compute units, up to 1.4 million per transaction, with a block limit that caps total work per slot.

Validators need real hardware. The current recommendation is about 12 cores, 24 threads at 2.8 GHz with SHA extensions, AVX2, and where possible AVX-512, plus 256 GB RAM and NVMe storage. A vote account needs 0.02685864 SOL for rent exemption, and validators pay up to about 1.1 SOL per day in vote costs. The network has more than 1,000 validators in the set, with about 680 to 1,100 counted as active in 2026 dashboards and a Nakamoto coefficient near 18 to 19.

What Solana is used for

Trading and DeFi. On-chain order books and AMMs benefit from quick confirmation. Jupiter, Raydium, and Orca are examples that handle high swap volumes.
Payments and stablecoins. Stablecoin supply on Solana averaged 15 to 16 billion dollars in mid-2026. Solana Pay and USDC settlement by networks like Visa show payment use. Low fees help remittances and merchant checkout.
NFTs, gaming, and consumer apps. Low mint and transfer fees keep costs at a few cents. Magic Eden is a common NFT entry point. Games use Solana when frequent player actions would be too costly elsewhere.
Enterprise pilots and tokenized assets. Tokenized funds and issuance experiments have run on Solana, often with off-chain custodians. Adoption here is early and depends on compliance and custody outside the chain.

The design target is up to 65,000 transactions per second. Observed non-vote throughput in 2026 is usually 1,500 to 4,000 per second, with bursts near 7,600, and more than 100 billion transactions processed to date.

Pros and cons

Where Solana stands out

Cost stays flat for simple actions. A plain SOL transfer costs the base 5,000 lamports, so one dollar covers about 4,000 transfers.
Parallel execution keeps hot accounts from blocking unrelated ones. Turnaround stays fast even during spikes that would grow fees elsewhere.
Rust and Anchor give strong compile-time checks and a mature toolchain since 2020.

Where it has limits

High hardware needs raise operating cost and push stake toward data centers. Reports from 2025 to 2026 noted about 24 percent of stake on one hosting provider, which increases correlated failure risk.
Outages have affected trust. After several halts from 2021 to 2023, the network stopped for about five hours on February 6, 2024 due to a LoadedPrograms cache bug that caused a loop and required a restart. On August 12, 2026, about 28.83 percent of stake was delinquent for about 33 minutes after a TeraSwitch routing change propagated through Amsterdam from Miami. It stayed below the 33.34 percent threshold, so blocks kept finalizing, but it showed provider concentration risk.
The account model and compute limits have a learning curve. Developers must manage account creation, ownership, and compute budgets.
Prioritization fees add complexity. Picking the right price and limit matters for contested accounts.

How to get started

**Create a wallet.

Phantom or Solflare are common. Back up the seed phrase offline. Start with a small amount to learn the flow.

**Add a little SOL.

Fees are always in SOL, even for SPL token moves. Keep a dollar or two to cover many transactions. Verify the full address before sending.

**Make a first transfer and inspect it.

Send between your own addresses and view the fee split on Solana Explorer or Solscan.

**Stake if you want.

Most wallets let you stake to validators. Compare commission, skip rate, and concentration. Unstaking follows epoch boundaries, about two days per epoch.

**Build on devnet first.

Install Rust, the Solana CLI, and Anchor. Use the quickstart at solana.com/docs/intro. Test on devnet with airdropped SOL before using mainnet.

FAQ

Is Solana an EVM chain?

No. Solana does not run the Ethereum Virtual Machine natively, and it does not host Solidity programs directly. Some bridges and translation layers exist, but core programs are written in Rust or C and use the Solana Virtual Machine.

Does Solana have subnets?

No. Solana does not have Avalanche-style subnets with separate validator sets. Extensions use programs and accounts on the same shared ledger, or they build separate networks that interact with Solana through bridges.

How does consensus work then?

A small random validator sample with repeated voting is how Avalanche reaches consensus. Solana uses Tower BFT voting tied to the Proof-of-History clock, with stake-weighted votes and doubling lockouts.

What caused past outages?

Past halts were tied to overload and software bugs, with the February 2024 case tied to the LoadedPrograms cache. Recent work includes local fee markets for hot accounts and a second validator client, Firedancer, which reached mainnet in late 2025. Recurrence is still possible.What do I need to write a Solana program? Rust is the main language, plus C where needed. Anchor covers account handling, instruction routing, and client IDL generation. Experience with ownership, lifetimes, and the Solana account model helps.