What Is Solana? The Network, the Fee and the Coin
Solana is a public blockchain where validators who hold staked SOL take turns adding blocks, each turn a slot of about 400 milliseconds. SOL is its native coin: every transaction pays a base fee of 5,000 lamports per signature, and one lamport is a billionth of a SOL.
Most of what is written about Solana is about the price of its coin. This page starts with what the network is and how it charges for its work, from Solana’s own documentation, and then sets out what six years of the coin’s daily prices actually show. Nothing here predicts where the price goes next.
How it works
A blockchain is a shared ledger that many computers keep in agreement. On Solana those computers are validators, which Solana’s terminology page defines as full participants that produce new blocks. At any moment one validator is the leader, the one appending entries to the ledger.
Leadership rotates in slots. A slot is the period in which one leader takes in transactions and produces a block, and Solana’s transactions page puts the average slot at around 400 milliseconds. An epoch is the run of slots for which a leader schedule holds.
Stake decides who leads most often. Holders can delegate SOL to a validator, and Solana’s staking page says “the more stake delegated to a validator, the more often this validator is chosen to write new transactions to the ledger.” That is what makes it a proof-of-stake network: influence comes from staked coins rather than from computing work, as on Bitcoin.
Proof of history is Solana’s clock. The docs define it as a chain of proofs that some data existed before each proof and that a precise amount of time passed in between. It gives the ledger a record of the order in which events happened.
What a transaction contains
A transaction is one or more instructions signed together. The docs describe it as executed atomically, “with only two possible outcomes: success or failure.” If any instruction fails, none of them take effect, though the fee is still charged.
Each one carries a recent blockhash, valid for 150 slots. At about 400 milliseconds a slot, that is roughly 60 seconds, after which a transaction that has not landed is rejected rather than processed late. A standard transaction may be at most 1,232 bytes.
Programs run on the network, as on Ethereum. Solana’s docs call them onchain programs: executable code that interprets the instructions inside each transaction. Accounts hold either data or a program, and an account storing data must keep a minimum balance of SOL, called rent exemption, in proportion to the data it holds.
The fee, in lamports
Every fee is priced in lamports. A lamport is 0.000000001 SOL, so one SOL is a billion lamports.
The base fee is 5,000 lamports for each signature. Solana’s fees page says it is split 50% burned and 50% to the validator that processed it. Burned lamports leave the supply for good.
A priority fee is optional and goes 100% to the validator. It is the compute unit price, in micro-lamports, times the compute unit limit, divided by 1,000,000 and rounded up. The docs set a default limit of 200,000 compute units per instruction and a maximum of 1,400,000 per transaction.
A worked example
Take a simple payment signed by one wallet, with no priority fee. The base fee is 5,000 lamports, which is 5,000 times 0.000000001, or 0.000005 SOL.
At SOL’s closing price of $117.01 on 24 Sep 2026, that is 0.000005 times $117.01, about $0.000585. Of the 5,000 lamports, 2,500 are burned and 2,500 go to the validator.
Now add a priority fee with a compute unit price of 1,000 micro-lamports and the default limit of 200,000 compute units. That is 1,000 times 200,000, divided by 1,000,000: 200 lamports. The total becomes 5,200 lamports, or 0.0000052 SOL, about $0.000608 at the same price.
The point is that the fee is fixed in SOL, not in dollars. Solana’s own overview page quotes a typical cost of $0.00025; at the same 5,000 lamports, that figure implies a SOL price of $50. When SOL’s price doubles, so does the dollar cost of the same transaction.
The original data
The data: every daily close of SOL in US dollars that Yahoo Finance holds, 2,359 days from 10 Apr 2020 to 24 Sep 2026, downloaded on 25 Sep 2026 and published as a CSV of SOL’s daily closes. Crypto trades every day, so every calendar day counts.
The year-end closes run $1.51 (2020), $170.30 (2021), $9.96 (2022), $101.51 (2023), $189.26 (2024) and $124.48 (2025). The last close in the file is $117.01. The highest close was $261.87 on 18 Jan 2025.
The deepest fall ran from a close of $258.93 on 6 Nov 2021 to $9.65 on 29 Dec 2022: 96.3%. The worst single day was 9 Nov 2022, down 42.3%, during the week the FTX exchange collapsed. From that low, the close had climbed to $117.01 by 24 Sep 2026, about 12 times the December 2022 level and still well under the record.
How the daily swings changed
Of the 2,358 day-to-day changes in the file, 206 were moves of 10% or more, 138 up and 68 down. They were not spread evenly. There were 56 such days in the part of 2020 the file covers, 70 in 2021, 32 in 2022, 20 in 2023, 10 in 2024, 12 in 2025 and 6 so far in 2026.
Calmer is still not calm. Even in 2025 the gap between the year’s highest and lowest close was a factor of 2.48, and the last close sat 55.3% below the record.
In the 24,971-video search study, 9 titles name Solana or SOL, from 8 channels, at a median of 33,233 views. Six of the nine are about trading on Solana: memecoins, trading bots or arbitrage. One is a developer course from Solana’s own channel. Bitcoin, by comparison, appears in 333 titles.
When it fails
Reading network speed as a reason for the price fails. The slot time, the fee and the validator count describe software. None of them set what a buyer pays for SOL, and the coin fell 96.3% while the network kept producing blocks.
Treating a fee as permanently tiny fails when the price moves. The fee is set in lamports, so its dollar cost rises with the coin. A priority fee also rises whenever users compete to be included in a busy slot.
Staking is not a deposit account. The staking page describes delegation as “shared-risk shared-reward,” and validators take a commission from rewards. It also says slashing, losing staked tokens for a validator’s misbehavior, is not implemented today but could be in the future.
A recent run of quieter years fails as a forecast. Big-move days fell from 70 in 2021 to 12 in 2025, but the 42.3% day came in 2022, after the calmer-looking start to that year. Across the whole file the median day-to-day change was 3.01%, against 0.57% for the S&P 500 over its trading days from 10 Apr 2020 to 18 Sep 2026.
And the price file fails as a complete history. Yahoo’s series starts on 10 Apr 2020, so it does not show SOL’s earliest trading, and a single data vendor’s closing time is a convention in a market that never closes.
Related
How trading crypto is different covers the market structure SOL trades in, with no close and no consolidated tape. Ethereum is the network Solana is most often compared with, and it also charges fees in its own coin. And Bitcoin shows the other design, where computing work rather than stake decides who adds the next block.
Separate the network from the coin before reading anything about either. A fast, cheap network is a statement about software; the price of SOL is a statement about what buyers will pay for it, and one does not follow from the other.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.