Solana Explained: How Solana Works and Why It’s Fast
Chances you’ve heard about Solana from the recent rise of Solana-based memecoins, NFTs, or its impressive transaction speeds in a search for Ethereum competitors.
Headlines miss the deeper story: Solana aims to be the blockchain that solves the impossible triple threat known as the blockchain trilemma: scalability, security, and decentralization. That’s no small claim. Whether you’re new to crypto, side-eyeing Ethereum gas fees, or wondering if Solana still matters after its setbacks, this guide is for you.
It walks you through how Solana works, why its hybrid consensus model is such a big deal, what the $SOL token is actually used for, and where people are really using Solana today, without the jargon or tribalism.
Key Takeaways
✅ Transactions are nearly instant and dirt cheap.
✅ Apps feel like Web2 and smooth enough for normies to use.
✅ Staking lets you earn real rewards while helping run the network.
🤔 Outages still happen, when Solana chokes, entire dApps freeze.
🤔 Fewer validators = fewer referees. Centralization tradeoffs make it less trustless than Ethereum.
What is Solana crypto in plain English?
Solana is a lightning-fast, low-cost blockchain that competes directly with Ethereum, primarily by offering the same functionality as Ethereum, but faster and more cost-effectively. It’s designed to host decentralized apps (dApps), smart contracts, NFTs, DeFi protocols, and any other project that needs a trustless backend.
Imagine Bitcoin as a steam locomotive: powerful but old-school.
Ethereum’s a commuter rail: more modern, feature-rich, but often bogged down during rush hour.
Solana is the bullet train: designed for speed from day one.
Transactions on Solana typically settle in under a second and cost a fraction of a cent. It’s so fast that traditional problems like block congestion, and their annoying cousins, insane gas fees, are nearly nonexistent.
The scalability is jaw-dropping in theory: up to 65,000 transactions per second, all without Layer 2 tricks.
Who built Solana?
Solana didn’t emerge from the usual crypto backchannel of cypherpunks and Ethereum forks. It started in a very different corner of the tech world: Qualcomm.
Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana’s creator, spent over a decade building distributed systems and compression algorithms at one of the most hardware-focused companies on the planet. His breakthrough came in 2017 with a deceptively simple question: what if a blockchain didn’t need to guess when things happened?
That question became Proof of History. Yakovenko published the whitepaper that year, and, with co-founder Raj Gokal, he began assembling a team that resembled a high-performance computing lab more than a crypto startup.
The Solana we know today launched its mainnet beta in March 2020, right at the edge of DeFi summer.
From the outset, Solana’s mission wasn’t just to make another chain. It was to build a blockchain that felt like the internet: fast, cheap, global, and frictionless. Ethereum was already dominant, but slow. Bitcoin was resilient, but inflexible.
Core Concept
Solana’s bet was that speed and composability could unlock entirely new categories of usage, and it raised plenty of venture capital to chase that bet.
Backed by multiple rounds of private and public token sales, Solana didn’t claim to be the most decentralized project from the outset.
Between 2018 and 2020, the team raised around $25 million across four major fundraising rounds. It started with a $3.17 million seed round in mid-2018, backed by early believers like Multicoin Capital and Foundation Capital, when Solana was still a white paper and a theory about time.
A year later, it raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Multicoin Capital with participation from prominent crypto funds such as Distributed Global and BlockTower.
The momentum peaked in June 2021 with a $314 million private token sale led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Polychain Capital, with participation from Multicoin, Alameda Research, CMS Holdings, Jump Trading, ParaFi, CoinFund, and more, cementing Solana as a top-tier contender in the Layer 1 race.
Who runs Solana today?
Solana is managed by two intertwined organizations: Solana Labs and the Solana Foundation. Solana Labs, a for-profit company, is responsible for much of the core engineering and protocol development. The Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit organization, handles grants, partnerships, and general ecosystem development.
Together, they’ve steered Solana through multiple waves of adoption, a handful of existential scares, and a post-crash rebirth.
Like most serious Layer 1 projects, Solana rose from the heavyweights. a16z, Polychain, and Multicoin Capital were early believers.
Alameda Research (yes, that Alameda) was also a major backer, which came back to haunt the ecosystem during the FTX collapse in late 2022. When FTX fell apart, Solana took a reputational hit by association, and $SOL’s price was impacted accordingly.
Governance on Solana isn’t quite what some token-maximalists expect. No Snapshot voting or on-chain DAO system is steering the protocol. Instead, development decisions are made off-chain, led by core developers and discussed across GitHub, Discord, and Foundation channels. Validator consensus, not token-weighted polls, coordinate upgrades. That’s not a bug, but a design choice.
It means Solana can move quickly and iterate without gridlock, but it also places more trust in the engineering team and less in token-holder democracy.
The Foundation controls large portions of the treasury, held in multisig wallets with oversight.
There are concerns surrounding centralization, particularly in terms of governance and validator diversity, but the network is undeniably shipping.
How does the Solana blockchain work under the hood?
Most blockchains fight over who gets to write the next block. Solana flips the question: what if you already knew the order things happened?
That’s where Proof of History (PoH) comes in.
What is Proof of History, and how is it different?
Proof of History is not a consensus mechanism on its own, it’s a cryptographic timestamping system. Essentially, it establishes a verifiable clock for all events that occur on the network. This allows nodes to agree on the order without needing to communicate with each other constantly (unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum).
In a relay race, Solana adds a GPS timestamp to every baton pass. There’s no debate about who ran first; you can literally see it.
This “time engineering” lets other parts of the network do less guessing and more processing. The result is less overhead, higher throughput, and minimal latency.
What’s Solana’s actual consensus mechanism, then?
While Proof of History gets all the buzz, it doesn’t decide which blocks make the cut. That job goes to Tower BFT, a consensus algorithm built on a modified version of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT).
Think of PoH as the timekeeper, and Tower BFT as the referee deciding what counts.
Validators use the PoH timestamps to vote on blocks asynchronously. Since they already agree on when things happened, they don’t need to pass around as many messages to reach consensus. That reduces latency and bandwidth, allowing Solana to finalize blocks much faster than Ethereum or Bitcoin.
Solana also employs Turbine (its block propagation protocol), Gulf Stream (transaction forwarding), and Sealevel (a parallel smart contract runtime), all designed to squeeze every drop of performance out of its network.
In short, Solana isn’t just fast because of one trick, it’s an entire high-performance computing stack masquerading as a blockchain.
Why is Solana so cheap to use?
Let’s talk economics.
Solana’s average transaction fee is usually under $0.0025. That’s not a typo, it’s less than a quarter of a cent. Most blockchains are designed to minimize trust and maximize decentralization, often at the expense of performance.
Solana took the opposite route: what happens if you optimize for performance from day one, and worry about decentralization later?
That approach led to the now-famous sub-second block times, 65,000 theoretical transactions per second, and an experience where the word “gas” barely enters the conversation.
Solana doesn’t need rollups or sharding to scale. It’s a single-layer chain that can handle a flood of activity without slowing down or charging users an arm and a leg. Of course, that kind of performance doesn’t come free.
Validators need serious hardware, multi-core CPUs, fast SSDs, high bandwidth connections. Running a node on Solana is more like running a high-frequency trading bot than spinning up a Raspberry Pi, which has raised eyebrows about centralization risks.
But the tradeoff is a chain that feels fast, cheap, and seamless, arguably the most “normal internet-like” experience in crypto today.
How do validators and tokens fit into Solana’s model?
Validators in Solana process blocks and validate transactions. They don’t mine like in Bitcoin, they stake $SOL tokens. Staking helps secure the network and gives validators skin in the game.
Users can delegate their $SOL to validators, kind of like giving your votes to someone who knows the playbook.
Think of validators like referees. They’re not scoring points themselves, but without them, the whole game falls apart. And yes, they get paid for every verified block through token rewards and transaction fees.
How fast and scalable is Solana, really?
Numbers vary, but raw lab tests claim that Solana can hit up to 65,000 transactions per second (TPS). Block finality comes in under a second. In comparison, Ethereum (pre-upgrade) does about 15 TPS. Even with Layer 2s and scaling efforts, Ethereum’s still a slower ride.
Solana’s TPS consistency has faltered with network hiccups, but its basic architecture remains built for speed.
Is Solana easy for developers to build on?
Yes, but it’s not entry-level. Solana’s core programs are written in Rust, a high-performance language that’s more complex than Solidity (used by Ethereum).
It can feel like building a Formula One car, you need better tools and more knowledge, but you’ll have a faster machine.
Fortunately, the ecosystem is improving. Newer development kits and frameworks (like Anchor) make things easier, and Solana Labs is rolling out tools to support mobile and web development.
Want proof of the tech in action? Look at Magic Eden, the NFT marketplace that made waves by offering slick UX without the gas headaches, or Phantom Wallet, a Solana-native experience that’s arguably more consumer-friendly than Metamask.
Solana vs Ethereum, what are the real differences?
In short, Solana has faster block times, cheaper transactions, and higher capacity. Ethereum tries to offset its limits with rollups and sidechains (Layer 2s), but Solana is built for speed right out of the box.
Ethereum is catching up through upgrades and scaling layers like Arbitrum, but the core design remains more cautious, which also helps maintain stability.
Here’s the tradeoff. Ethereum is more decentralized. Validators are spread globally, and anyone can run a node. Solana achieves performance partly by requiring beefier hardware and fewer validators.
It’s not exactly a dictatorship, but it is a smaller table with louder voices.
Ethereum’s older, with better documentation and more battle-tested tooling. Think of it as the Stanford of blockchains. Solana’s more like a hacker school: intense, experimental, but getting better every semester.
But Solana’s smart: it’s building mobile support, better SDKs, and more dev-friendly tools to attract the next wave.
What is the Solana token ($SOL) used for?
Core Concept
$SOL is the bloodline of the Solana network. It’s used for paying transaction fees, staking for network security, and interacting with dApps.
Using Solana without $SOL is like trying to ride a rollercoaster without a ticket. You can’t pay gas fees or vote on protocol matters if you’re not holding $SOL. It’s also used in DeFi protocols as collateral and liquidity across the Solana ecosystem.
$SOL is stakeable, and even if you’re not running a node, you can delegate your $SOL to a validator. In return, you earn a percentage of the network’s block rewards while helping to secure the infrastructure.
Is SOL inflationary or deflationary?
Currently, SOL is inflationary. The network emits new SOL tokens to fund staking rewards, but it also burns a portion of fees with every transaction.
This means the net inflation rate moves dynamically. High usage leads to more $SOL burning, which can offset inflation over time. However, it’s a balancing act, much like printing more train tickets and then shredding a few on every ride.
Solana’s Recent History
We’re not here to sell hype. But facts are useful.
Let’s skip the hype and stick to what matters. Solana took a reputational beating when FTX, a popular cryptocurrency exchange, imploded. The infamous event dragged down everything in its orbit, and Solana was sitting right in the blast radius. Add in a streak of high-profile network outages, and by late 2022, it seemed as if the project was close to being written off as a cautionary tale.
But here’s the part that didn’t make headlines: the tech held. The engineers didn’t leave. Projects like Helium, Audius, and Magic Eden didn’t bail.
As of 2025, they’re still here, scaling on-chain and shipping faster than many of their Ethereum-based peers.
Final Thoughts: What Does Solana Mean for You?
In closing, we implore you to continue exploring your understanding of how blockchains like Solana work, as well as the philosophical tradeoffs made.
In Solana’s case, where Bitcoin prioritized immutability and Ethereum focused on programmability, Solana bet on speed and on offering the kind of performance layer that might one day support consumer-grade applications at scale.
Whether that gamble ultimately pays off remains to be seen. However, from an architectural standpoint, it has already had an impact. Proof of History, though not a consensus mechanism itself, reframed how blockchains could think about time, transforming it from a side effect of block production into a first-class feature. That alone was a meaningful innovation.
For users, Solana represents a glimpse into a smoother crypto experience: faster transactions, almost no fees, and applications that feel more like products than prototypes. That makes it an inviting entry point, particularly for those exploring NFTs, DeFi, or on-chain games.
However, the very optimizations that make it feel seamless, parallel execution, high-performance validators, and tightly coordinated infrastructure, also introduce trade-offs, particularly around decentralization and resilience.
None of this is unusual. Every blockchain, in one way or another, is a tradeoff engine. What’s notable about Solana is how aggressively it leaned into one side of that spectrum. And in doing so, it’s sparked real discussion about what users actually want from their blockchains, and how much complexity they’re willing to accept under the hood.
Solana isn’t finished. It’s still evolving, still proving itself. But whatever comes next, it will have shaped the conversation around blockchain scalability in a way few projects ever do.
If you’d like to keep exploring a few more nuanced pieces of the Solana puzzle, keep reading.
Chances you’ve heard about Solana from the recent rise of Solana-based memecoins, NFTs, or its impressive transaction speeds in a search for Ethereum competitors.
Headlines miss the deeper story: Solana aims to be the blockchain that solves the impossible triple threat known as the blockchain trilemma: scalability, security, and decentralization. That’s no small claim. Whether you’re new to crypto, side-eyeing Ethereum gas fees, or wondering if Solana still matters after its setbacks, this guide is for you.
It walks you through how Solana works, why its hybrid consensus model is such a big deal, what the $SOL token is actually used for, and where people are really using Solana today, without the jargon or tribalism.
Key Takeaways
✅ Transactions are nearly instant and dirt cheap.
✅ Apps feel like Web2 and smooth enough for normies to use.
✅ Staking lets you earn real rewards while helping run the network.
🤔 Outages still happen, when Solana chokes, entire dApps freeze.
🤔 Fewer validators = fewer referees. Centralization tradeoffs make it less trustless than Ethereum.
What is Solana crypto in plain English?
Solana is a lightning-fast, low-cost blockchain that competes directly with Ethereum, primarily by offering the same functionality as Ethereum, but faster and more cost-effectively. It’s designed to host decentralized apps (dApps), smart contracts, NFTs, DeFi protocols, and any other project that needs a trustless backend.
Imagine Bitcoin as a steam locomotive: powerful but old-school.
Ethereum’s a commuter rail: more modern, feature-rich, but often bogged down during rush hour.
Solana is the bullet train: designed for speed from day one.
Transactions on Solana typically settle in under a second and cost a fraction of a cent. It’s so fast that traditional problems like block congestion, and their annoying cousins, insane gas fees, are nearly nonexistent.
The scalability is jaw-dropping in theory: up to 65,000 transactions per second, all without Layer 2 tricks.
Who built Solana?
Solana didn’t emerge from the usual crypto backchannel of cypherpunks and Ethereum forks. It started in a very different corner of the tech world: Qualcomm.
Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana’s creator, spent over a decade building distributed systems and compression algorithms at one of the most hardware-focused companies on the planet. His breakthrough came in 2017 with a deceptively simple question: what if a blockchain didn’t need to guess when things happened?
That question became Proof of History. Yakovenko published the whitepaper that year, and, with co-founder Raj Gokal, he began assembling a team that resembled a high-performance computing lab more than a crypto startup.
The Solana we know today launched its mainnet beta in March 2020, right at the edge of DeFi summer.
From the outset, Solana’s mission wasn’t just to make another chain. It was to build a blockchain that felt like the internet: fast, cheap, global, and frictionless. Ethereum was already dominant, but slow. Bitcoin was resilient, but inflexible.
Core Concept
Solana’s bet was that speed and composability could unlock entirely new categories of usage, and it raised plenty of venture capital to chase that bet.
Backed by multiple rounds of private and public token sales, Solana didn’t claim to be the most decentralized project from the outset.
Between 2018 and 2020, the team raised around $25 million across four major fundraising rounds. It started with a $3.17 million seed round in mid-2018, backed by early believers like Multicoin Capital and Foundation Capital, when Solana was still a white paper and a theory about time.
A year later, it raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Multicoin Capital with participation from prominent crypto funds such as Distributed Global and BlockTower.
The momentum peaked in June 2021 with a $314 million private token sale led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Polychain Capital, with participation from Multicoin, Alameda Research, CMS Holdings, Jump Trading, ParaFi, CoinFund, and more, cementing Solana as a top-tier contender in the Layer 1 race.
Who runs Solana today?
Solana is managed by two intertwined organizations: Solana Labs and the Solana Foundation. Solana Labs, a for-profit company, is responsible for much of the core engineering and protocol development. The Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit organization, handles grants, partnerships, and general ecosystem development.
Together, they’ve steered Solana through multiple waves of adoption, a handful of existential scares, and a post-crash rebirth.
Like most serious Layer 1 projects, Solana rose from the heavyweights. a16z, Polychain, and Multicoin Capital were early believers.
Alameda Research (yes, that Alameda) was also a major backer, which came back to haunt the ecosystem during the FTX collapse in late 2022. When FTX fell apart, Solana took a reputational hit by association, and $SOL’s price was impacted accordingly.
Governance on Solana isn’t quite what some token-maximalists expect. No Snapshot voting or on-chain DAO system is steering the protocol. Instead, development decisions are made off-chain, led by core developers and discussed across GitHub, Discord, and Foundation channels. Validator consensus, not token-weighted polls, coordinate upgrades. That’s not a bug, but a design choice.
It means Solana can move quickly and iterate without gridlock, but it also places more trust in the engineering team and less in token-holder democracy.
The Foundation controls large portions of the treasury, held in multisig wallets with oversight.
There are concerns surrounding centralization, particularly in terms of governance and validator diversity, but the network is undeniably shipping.
How does the Solana blockchain work under the hood?
Most blockchains fight over who gets to write the next block. Solana flips the question: what if you already knew the order things happened?
That’s where Proof of History (PoH) comes in.
What is Proof of History, and how is it different?
Proof of History is not a consensus mechanism on its own, it’s a cryptographic timestamping system. Essentially, it establishes a verifiable clock for all events that occur on the network. This allows nodes to agree on the order without needing to communicate with each other constantly (unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum).
In a relay race, Solana adds a GPS timestamp to every baton pass. There’s no debate about who ran first; you can literally see it.
This “time engineering” lets other parts of the network do less guessing and more processing. The result is less overhead, higher throughput, and minimal latency.
What’s Solana’s actual consensus mechanism, then?
While Proof of History gets all the buzz, it doesn’t decide which blocks make the cut. That job goes to Tower BFT, a consensus algorithm built on a modified version of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT).
Think of PoH as the timekeeper, and Tower BFT as the referee deciding what counts.
Validators use the PoH timestamps to vote on blocks asynchronously. Since they already agree on when things happened, they don’t need to pass around as many messages to reach consensus. That reduces latency and bandwidth, allowing Solana to finalize blocks much faster than Ethereum or Bitcoin.
Solana also employs Turbine (its block propagation protocol), Gulf Stream (transaction forwarding), and Sealevel (a parallel smart contract runtime), all designed to squeeze every drop of performance out of its network.
In short, Solana isn’t just fast because of one trick, it’s an entire high-performance computing stack masquerading as a blockchain.
Why is Solana so cheap to use?
Let’s talk economics.
Solana’s average transaction fee is usually under $0.0025. That’s not a typo, it’s less than a quarter of a cent. Most blockchains are designed to minimize trust and maximize decentralization, often at the expense of performance.
Solana took the opposite route: what happens if you optimize for performance from day one, and worry about decentralization later?
That approach led to the now-famous sub-second block times, 65,000 theoretical transactions per second, and an experience where the word “gas” barely enters the conversation.
Solana doesn’t need rollups or sharding to scale. It’s a single-layer chain that can handle a flood of activity without slowing down or charging users an arm and a leg. Of course, that kind of performance doesn’t come free.
Validators need serious hardware, multi-core CPUs, fast SSDs, high bandwidth connections. Running a node on Solana is more like running a high-frequency trading bot than spinning up a Raspberry Pi, which has raised eyebrows about centralization risks.
But the tradeoff is a chain that feels fast, cheap, and seamless, arguably the most “normal internet-like” experience in crypto today.
How do validators and tokens fit into Solana’s model?
Validators in Solana process blocks and validate transactions. They don’t mine like in Bitcoin, they stake $SOL tokens. Staking helps secure the network and gives validators skin in the game.
Users can delegate their $SOL to validators, kind of like giving your votes to someone who knows the playbook.
Think of validators like referees. They’re not scoring points themselves, but without them, the whole game falls apart. And yes, they get paid for every verified block through token rewards and transaction fees.
How fast and scalable is Solana, really?
Numbers vary, but raw lab tests claim that Solana can hit up to 65,000 transactions per second (TPS). Block finality comes in under a second. In comparison, Ethereum (pre-upgrade) does about 15 TPS. Even with Layer 2s and scaling efforts, Ethereum’s still a slower ride.
Solana’s TPS consistency has faltered with network hiccups, but its basic architecture remains built for speed.
Is Solana easy for developers to build on?
Yes, but it’s not entry-level. Solana’s core programs are written in Rust, a high-performance language that’s more complex than Solidity (used by Ethereum).
It can feel like building a Formula One car, you need better tools and more knowledge, but you’ll have a faster machine.
Fortunately, the ecosystem is improving. Newer development kits and frameworks (like Anchor) make things easier, and Solana Labs is rolling out tools to support mobile and web development.
Want proof of the tech in action? Look at Magic Eden, the NFT marketplace that made waves by offering slick UX without the gas headaches, or Phantom Wallet, a Solana-native experience that’s arguably more consumer-friendly than Metamask.
Solana vs Ethereum, what are the real differences?
In short, Solana has faster block times, cheaper transactions, and higher capacity. Ethereum tries to offset its limits with rollups and sidechains (Layer 2s), but Solana is built for speed right out of the box.
Ethereum is catching up through upgrades and scaling layers like Arbitrum, but the core design remains more cautious, which also helps maintain stability.
Here’s the tradeoff. Ethereum is more decentralized. Validators are spread globally, and anyone can run a node. Solana achieves performance partly by requiring beefier hardware and fewer validators.
It’s not exactly a dictatorship, but it is a smaller table with louder voices.
Ethereum’s older, with better documentation and more battle-tested tooling. Think of it as the Stanford of blockchains. Solana’s more like a hacker school: intense, experimental, but getting better every semester.
But Solana’s smart: it’s building mobile support, better SDKs, and more dev-friendly tools to attract the next wave.
What is the Solana token ($SOL) used for?
Core Concept
$SOL is the bloodline of the Solana network. It’s used for paying transaction fees, staking for network security, and interacting with dApps.
Using Solana without $SOL is like trying to ride a rollercoaster without a ticket. You can’t pay gas fees or vote on protocol matters if you’re not holding $SOL. It’s also used in DeFi protocols as collateral and liquidity across the Solana ecosystem.
$SOL is stakeable, and even if you’re not running a node, you can delegate your $SOL to a validator. In return, you earn a percentage of the network’s block rewards while helping to secure the infrastructure.
Is SOL inflationary or deflationary?
Currently, SOL is inflationary. The network emits new SOL tokens to fund staking rewards, but it also burns a portion of fees with every transaction.
This means the net inflation rate moves dynamically. High usage leads to more $SOL burning, which can offset inflation over time. However, it’s a balancing act, much like printing more train tickets and then shredding a few on every ride.
Solana’s Recent History
We’re not here to sell hype. But facts are useful.
Let’s skip the hype and stick to what matters. Solana took a reputational beating when FTX, a popular cryptocurrency exchange, imploded. The infamous event dragged down everything in its orbit, and Solana was sitting right in the blast radius. Add in a streak of high-profile network outages, and by late 2022, it seemed as if the project was close to being written off as a cautionary tale.
But here’s the part that didn’t make headlines: the tech held. The engineers didn’t leave. Projects like Helium, Audius, and Magic Eden didn’t bail.
As of 2025, they’re still here, scaling on-chain and shipping faster than many of their Ethereum-based peers.
Final Thoughts: What Does Solana Mean for You?
In closing, we implore you to continue exploring your understanding of how blockchains like Solana work, as well as the philosophical tradeoffs made.
In Solana’s case, where Bitcoin prioritized immutability and Ethereum focused on programmability, Solana bet on speed and on offering the kind of performance layer that might one day support consumer-grade applications at scale.
Whether that gamble ultimately pays off remains to be seen. However, from an architectural standpoint, it has already had an impact. Proof of History, though not a consensus mechanism itself, reframed how blockchains could think about time, transforming it from a side effect of block production into a first-class feature. That alone was a meaningful innovation.
For users, Solana represents a glimpse into a smoother crypto experience: faster transactions, almost no fees, and applications that feel more like products than prototypes. That makes it an inviting entry point, particularly for those exploring NFTs, DeFi, or on-chain games.
However, the very optimizations that make it feel seamless, parallel execution, high-performance validators, and tightly coordinated infrastructure, also introduce trade-offs, particularly around decentralization and resilience.
None of this is unusual. Every blockchain, in one way or another, is a tradeoff engine. What’s notable about Solana is how aggressively it leaned into one side of that spectrum. And in doing so, it’s sparked real discussion about what users actually want from their blockchains, and how much complexity they’re willing to accept under the hood.
Solana isn’t finished. It’s still evolving, still proving itself. But whatever comes next, it will have shaped the conversation around blockchain scalability in a way few projects ever do.
If you’d like to keep exploring a few more nuanced pieces of the Solana puzzle, keep reading.