Solana is a public blockchain — a shared ledger that anyone can read and that no single company controls. Thousands of computers (called validators) work together to agree on which transactions happened and in what order.
Why people talk about Solana
Two qualities draw attention: speed and low transaction fees. Where some blockchains process a handful of transactions per second with fees that spike during busy periods, Solana was designed to handle many more transactions at consistently lower cost. That design choice shapes everything from how games run on-chain to how people send tokens between wallets.
SOL: the network token
SOL is the native token of the Solana network. Validators stake SOL to help secure the chain, and users pay small amounts of SOL as transaction fees. SOL is not the same thing as “being on Solana” — applications, NFTs, and other tokens also live on the network, each with their own rules.
A brief history
Anatoly Yakovenko published the original Solana whitepaper in 2017, proposing a new way to timestamp transactions called Proof of History. The mainnet launched in 2020. Since then the network has gone through upgrades, outages, and recovery periods — all part of its public record.
How this differs from a bank
When you send money through a bank, the bank’s internal systems decide whether to approve it. On Solana, validators follow open rules encoded in software. Anyone can verify what happened by reading the blockchain. That transparency comes with responsibility: if you lose access to your wallet keys, no customer service desk can restore them.
What to learn next
Once you understand what Solana is at a high level, read about how transactions work and browse our wallet security path before creating a wallet with real funds.