Solana

Solana is a Layer 1 blockchain designed to support decentralized applications at scale, targeting developers and users who need fast, low-cost transaction settlement without relying on secondary scaling layers or sharding. It positions itself as a single, unified ledger capable of handling thousands of transactions per second, addressing the throughput and cost limitations that have constrained older smart-contract platforms. The SOL token is the native asset of this network.

Solana combines Proof of Stake consensus with an innovation called Proof of History, which acts as a decentralized clock that timestamps transactions and reduces the coordination overhead between the network's 697 validators. This allows its Sealevel execution engine to process non-conflicting smart contracts in parallel across multiple CPU cores, contributing to a measured throughput of 4,018 transactions per second in a recent 10-minute sample. SOL is used to pay transaction fees, to stake with validators, and as collateral and currency across the applications built on the network.

Transaction fees paid by users generated 889,159 USD in the 24 hours and 18,931,428 USD over the trailing 30 days, which annualizes to approximately 230,332,374 USD. Of the 30-day fee total, validators and stakers retained 17,142,433 USD as supply-side revenue, while the protocol itself kept 1,788,995 USD, reflecting a take rate of roughly 9.45 percent over that period. Stakers currently earn a nominal yield of 5.23 percent, with a real yield of approximately 1.56 percent after accounting for the current annual issuance rate of 3.68 percent. Both fees and protocol revenue grew meaningfully over the last 30 days, at 58.47 percent and 55.26 percent respectively.