Solana blockchain, or as it is called in the blockchain media -- Ethereum Killer.

"Solana is the fastest blockchain in the world and the fastest-growing ecosystem in crypto, with over 400 projects spanning DeFi, NFTs, Web3, and more." This is taken from the Solana website and indeed sounds promising. But let's not simply take this information at face value. In this blogpost we will see if the Solana blockchain has the potential to live up to its promises, as its developing ecosystem becomes host to many projects in the crypto industry.

The Founding of Solana

Solana was founded in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko, former BREW developer Greg Fitzgerald, and Doctor of Particle Physics, Eric Williams. Yakovenko worked at Qualcomm, a leading mobile processor for smartphones, prior to founding Solana, and had experience with compressed algorithms while working as a software engineer at Dropbox.

Together with Anatoly Yakovenko, Eric Williams, and Solana CTO Greg Fitzgerald, they have been able to solve deep-rooted problems in the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains thanks to their original Proof-of-History (PoH) blockchain synchronization algorithm. Later, developers from leading technology companies in the market such as Apple, Qualcomm, Intel, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Dropbox, and others joined the project.

In 2018, Yakovenko and Fitzgerald founded the company now known as Solana Labs and published the official White Paper of the Solana blockchain.

What is The Solana Foundation?

The project actively attracted venture capital investments, and from April 2018 to July 2019 it managed to raise $20 million as part of several private sales of the utility token SOL. In the third quarter of 2020, the public testnet of the project was launched, which was named Tour de SOL.

In June, the project created the Solana Foundation, a fund dedicated to the development of the ecosystem, funding initiatives to develop the Solana community, and decentralized technologies based on it. From Solana Labs, the fund received 167 million SOL tokens and intellectual property rights for the project.

Thanks to successful strategic decisions to popularize the blockchain platform, the Solana community numbers over 100 thousand on Telegram, and more than 400 projects have been launched on its blockchain, most of which belong to the DeFi and NFT sectors (112 and 120 projects respectively).

Top Features Solana Has Implemented on Blockchain

The ever-growing popularity of the Solana blockchain is driven by high transaction throughput, low network fees, and the company's rapidly growing ecosystem. All this became possible thanks to 8 innovative features presented by Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana in 2019:

  • Proof of History
  • Tower BFT
  • Turbine
  • Gulf Stream
  • Sealevel
  • Pipelining
  • Cloudbreak
  • Archivers

Archivers is a distributed ledger store. Storing data on a high-performance network requires centralization. In Solana, data storage is not done by validators, but by a network of nodes called archivers.

Cloudbreak is a horizontally scaled accounts database. It optimizes concurrent reads and writes to solid-state drives.

Pipelining is a Transaction Processing Unit (TPU) used to streamline the validation process.

Sealevel is a virtual machine that processes transactions in parallel that scale horizontally across GPUs and SSDs. Most other blockchains are single-threaded. Solana supports concurrent transaction execution.

Gulf Stream is a protocol for transferring transactions without using a mempool, thanks to the advanced definition of validators.

Turbine is a transaction transfer protocol that solves the blockchain scalability trilemma.

Tower BFT is an implementation of the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) algorithm. To achieve consensus, Tower BFT uses PoH as a clock.

And finally, the unique and most important element -- the Proof of History protocol. One of the problems with existing blockchains is node synchronization. To solve the problem of time synchronization, Solana invented a decentralized clock that allows you to create a chronological record that confirms that an event happened at a certain point in time.

Why Solana is the best blockchain for DeFi projects

Despite the fact that the Solana blockchain is in test mode, several large DeFi projects are operating on it: $440 million on AMM Raydium, Serum DEX at $279 million and aggregator Solfarm at $115 million. The total amount of locked funds on the Solana blockchain is $917 million.

Thanks to the Solana Foundation, thousands of developers and hundreds of DeFi projects have been attracted. The Solana network has all the components for a decentralized ecosystem: decentralized exchanges (Raydium, Saber), lending protocols (Solend), IDO sites (Solstarter), NFT marketplaces (Solsea, Solanart, Metaplex), and noncustodial wallets (Phantom, Solflare, Sollet, Solong, MathWallet).

An important component for the development of new projects is the low fees in the Solana network, which serve only to prevent spam and amount to an average of $0.00025, in contrast to Ethereum, where transaction fees are an important part of miners' income.

One of the first projects to migrate was the Audius music streaming platform, which in October 2020 began a transition from Ethereum to Solana. At the end of 2020, Audius was followed by the Kin Ecosystem. Later, in March 2021, integration with Solana was announced by Civic.

Conclusion

Solana's successes clearly show that this ecosystem is one that the blockchain and crypto industry has been waiting for. Theoretically, Solana is capable of processing more than 5 billion transactions per day, which in the future will allow it to form the basis of global payment systems.

Despite the fact that Solana is still in beta and working out kinks in the architecture, users and developers are increasingly choosing the combination of high performance, fast transactions, and low fees that Solana provides.

Solana in 2026: What Has Changed

Since this article was first published in late 2021, Solana has undergone a dramatic arc of adversity and resurgence. The collapse of FTX in November 2022 -- one of Solana's most prominent backers -- sent SOL's price plummeting and led many observers to write off the ecosystem. Yet the network's fundamentals held: developers kept building, and by mid-2023 on-chain activity was climbing again. Solana officially exited its long-running beta label, and the mainnet now operates as a fully production-grade network.

The ecosystem has expanded from the roughly 400 projects cited above to thousands of active protocols and applications. Total value locked, which stood at $917 million when this article was written, has grown into the multi-billions, making Solana one of the top DeFi chains alongside Ethereum. New entrants span payments, real-world assets (RWA), decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN), and AI-adjacent protocols, far beyond the DeFi and NFT categories that dominated in 2021.

On the infrastructure side, Jump Crypto's Firedancer validator client -- a ground-up C implementation of the Solana validator -- launched to dramatically improve network throughput and resilience by introducing true client diversity. Solana also pioneered state compression, reducing the cost of minting NFTs to fractions of a cent and enabling use cases like loyalty programs and on-chain credentials at scale. The Saga mobile phone line, while a niche product, signaled Solana's ambition to own the mobile-crypto stack from hardware to dApp store.

Transaction fees remain among the lowest in the industry, and average block times sit well under one second. The combination of battle-tested infrastructure, a deep developer community, and continued innovation in areas like parallelized execution make Solana a serious long-term contender -- no longer just a promising beta, but a proven production blockchain.