How to Trade Solana (SOL)

Anatoly Yakovenko, a former Qualcomm engineer, published the whitepaper introducing Proof of History (PoH), a new mechanism that uses a cryptographic clock to order transactions without waiting for consensus from every node, dramatically increasing speed.

Solana Labs was founded in San Francisco by co-founders from Qualcomm and Dropbox. It raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Multicoin Capital during one of the harshest crypto winters.

Solana mainnet beta launched on March 16, 2020. Shortly after, Sam Bankman-Fried stress-tested the network and invested on the same day. FTX’s Serum DEX also launched on Solana.

2021 was Solana’s golden year. Market cap soared from hundreds of millions to $74 billion in November. SOL hit an ATH of $259 as the NFT and DeFi ecosystem exploded.

The FTX collapse hit Solana hardest because FTX was a major supporter. SOL fell from over $200 to $12.28. However, the community forked Serum into OpenBook within 5 days, demonstrating the ecosystem’s resilience.

The Solana Spot ETF was approved in October 2025, opening the door for institutional investors. Solana has now processed over 400 billion transactions cumulatively.