A blockchain built for speed — transactions that cost a fraction of a cent and settle in under a second.
Solana was created in 2017 by former Qualcomm engineer Anatoly Yakovenko, with its native token SOL launching in 2020. Its distinguishing feature is throughput: where older blockchains can bottleneck under load, Solana was designed to process thousands of transactions per second at a typical cost of a fraction of a cent each.
That combination of speed and near-zero fees is exactly why it became the default network for high-frequency memecoin trading — creating and trading a token on Solana is cheap and fast enough to do casually, which is also part of why it’s attracted such a high volume of low-quality, speculative tokens.
Worth being precise here: Yakovenko’s original Solana whitepaper is a technical document, not a peer-reviewed paper — it was never submitted to academic review. Independent academic scrutiny of its core innovation, “Proof of History,” does exist, though, and is worth reading if you want a more critical take than Solana’s own materials give you.
Source: Shoup, V. (2022), “Proof of History: What Is It Good For?”