Launched in 2020 by former Qualcomm engineer Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana (SOL) is a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain engineered to host decentralized applications with the speed and low cost of the traditional web. Its key innovation is Proof-of-History (PoH), a cryptographic clock that timestamps events before they are processed, allowing the network to parallelize transactions and achieve blazing-fast throughput without the need for sharding. The native token, SOL, is used to pay for transaction fees, stake with validators to secure the network via Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS), and participate in governance. In a major push for reliability and decentralization, the network has begun deploying Firedancer, a new independent validator client developed by Jump Crypto designed to eliminate bottlenecks and potentially scale the network to over one million transactions per second.
