What is Solana? Solana’s technical principles, Solana’s ecological advantages, Solana’s token mechanism

Anatoly 2025-10-14 12:55 25468人围观 SOL

What is Solana Solana is a high-performance Layer-1 blockchain designed to enable global-scale decentralized applications (dApps) through extremely high transaction throughput and low transaction fees. Its vision is to build a blockchain infrastructure co

What is Solana

Solana is a high-performance Layer-1 blockchain designed to enable global-scale decentralized applications (dApps) with extremely high transaction throughput and low transaction fees. Its vision is to build a blockchain infrastructure that is comparable to centralized systems and supports high-frequency transactions, games and Web3 applications. Since its launch in 2020, the Solana ecosystem has rapidly expanded, covering fields such as DeFi, NFT, and DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure network), and has well-known projects such as Magic Eden and Serum. Solana is supported by top investment institutions such as a16z and Multicoin Capital, and its market recognition continues to increase.

Solana’s technical principles

Solana's high performance comes from its unique consensus mechanism that combines Proof of History (PoH) and Proof of Stake (PoS), supplemented by the Sealevel parallel execution engine and Cloudbreak data structure, which is significantly different from Ethereum's traditional PoS architecture.

PoH provides a verifiable time sequence for transactions by generating encrypted timestamps, allowing nodes to efficiently sequence transactions before packaging blocks. It theoretically supports up to 65,000 TPS (transactions per second), and can stably reach 3,000-4,000 TPS in an actual production environment, far exceeding the performance of the Ethereum main network. The Sealevel engine allows non-conflicting transactions to be executed in parallel, greatly improving efficiency by optimizing state access, while the Cloudbreak data structure stores account data in partitions, reducing the memory and computing overhead of nodes when updating status.

Compared with Ethereum, Solana's architecture focuses more on efficient state management rather than being completely "stateless". Ethereum relies on the global state tree (State Trie) to store all account and contract data. Each transaction updates the state tree, resulting in state expansion (the state size will exceed 1TB in 2025) and high gas fees (up to more than 10 US dollars when the network is congested). Solana's account model and partitioned storage allow nodes to load only relevant account data, with transaction fees as low as $0.00064, making it particularly suitable for high-frequency applications such as NFT minting and DeFi transactions. However, Solana's high performance relies on high-end hardware, and the number of verification nodes peaked at thousands. As of August 25, the number of verification nodes was only 1,000+. However, there are about 12,000–15,000 active nodes on the Ethereum consensus client (Beacon Chain), and the number of validators (validators slots) reaches more than 1 million.

Solana plans to launch Firedancer, an optimized verification client developed by Jump Crypto, in 2025. It is expected to increase TPS to 1 million, further consolidating its performance advantage. In addition, Solana is enhancing the Solana Program Library (SPL) to support more complex smart contract functions and narrow the development flexibility gap with Ethereum. Solana is also exploring compressed NFT and state compression technologies to further reduce storage costs and improve the efficiency of DePIN and Web3 applications.

Solana’s ecological advantages

The Solana ecosystem has outstanding performance in the fields of DeFi, NFT and DePIN. As of 2025, Solana supports hundreds of projects, including decentralized exchange Serum, NFT marketplace Magic Eden, and automated market maker Raydium. Its transaction fees as low as around $0.0006 and sub-second confirmation times make it the platform of choice for NFT minting and gaming applications. DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure network) is the highlight of the Solana ecosystem. Projects such as Helium provide a decentralized wireless network through Solana, covering the Internet of Things and 5G. In 2025, the Helium network has connected more than 500,000 hotspot devices, significantly promoting the tokenization of real-world assets. The Solana Foundation further accelerates ecological expansion through developer funding and hackathons.

Solana Seeker mobile phone: Solana Labs launched Solana Seeker in August 2025, a Web3 smartphone with a built-in encryption wallet. It integrates the Phantom wallet and supports DeFi, NFT and payment functions. The goal is to attract mainstream users into the blockchain ecosystem. Since August 4, 2025, Seeker mobile phones have begun shipping, and the first batch of products has been distributed to more than 50 countries/regions and is in the stage of actual introduction to the market. Data shows that Solana Mobile's Seeker mobile phone currently has more than 150,000 global pre-orders and is expected to generate approximately $67.5 million in revenue for the company. Compared with the previous generation Saga, the pre-order volume of the Seeker mobile phone is more than 7.5 times that of the Saga mobile phone sales (approximately 20,000 units), showing significant growth and market popularity.

U.S. stock treasury holdings and ETFs: Solana’s SOL token is highly recognized by U.S. listed companies, and some companies have begun to include it in treasury assets, similar to the trend of Ethereum treasury, including Upexi, DeFi Development Corp, SOL Strategies and many other companies. In addition, the SEC is promoting the amendment application of SOL ETF, and the first round of fast-track review is in progress. Currently, multiple asset management institutions including Grayscale, Bitwise, VanEck, 21Shares, Invesco Galaxy, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, etc. have submitted or updated the S-1/19b-4 registration documents for Solana Spot ETF, indicating that it is getting closer to the approval stage.

Solana’s Token Mechanism

Solana's initial issuance is 500 million SOL, and the current circulation is about 540 million. The total amount is about 608 million. It adopts a year-by-year inflation model: the initial annual inflation rate is 8%, and will decrease by about 15% every year thereafter, and will eventually converge to a long-term flat rate of 1.5%. As of the end of 2025, approximately 66–67% of SOL has been staked in the network to ensure security and consensus, with annual staking rewards of approximately 5–6%.

As a native token, SOL not only bears transaction fees, pledge rewards and governance functions, but is also used to drive smart contract execution. Its low fees and high throughput capabilities make its cost of use in high-frequency DeFi/NFT applications significantly lower than that of Ethereum. Solana’s network is performing strongly in terms of user activity: as of August 25, there were approximately 2.52 million daily active wallets. The current market price of SOL is about US$200, and the market value is about US$106.8 billion. Although it has increased significantly from the end of 2023, it is still far behind Ethereum (market value exceeds US$280 billion).

Summarize

Solana will become a strong competitor of Ethereum in 2025 with its high-performance, low-cost technical architecture. Its consensus mechanism combining PoH and PoS, Sealevel parallel processing and the upcoming Firedancer upgrade give Solana superior transaction speed and scalability, far exceeding the Ethereum mainnet. The rapid expansion of the Solana ecosystem in the fields of DeFi, NFT and DePIN, as well as the innovation of the Solana Seeker mobile phone, have further consolidated its market position. The increase in U.S. stock treasury holdings and potential SOL ETF approval show institutional recognition of its long-term potential. Although Ethereum still has advantages in decentralization and ecological maturity, Solana's breakthroughs in performance and user experience make it one of the ideal choices for Web3 applications. In the future, the competition between Solana and Ethereum will promote further innovation in blockchain technology, and developers and investors need to weigh the advantages of the two based on specific needs.