Since the beginning of the year, Solana has been in the top 5 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, and the SOL rate has set a new record. This was facilitated by the memecoin boom in 2024. But what are the prospects for this cryptocurrency now?
Solana Network
According to Tokenterminal , the Solana network had an impressive number of active users at the beginning of 2025 — more than 97 million in 30 days. The high interest in the project was not without reason: at the end of 2024, memecoins were the main narrative in the cryptocurrency market. Most of them were launched on the Solana blockchain, including the TRUMP and MELANIA tokens, which appeared in January 2025 shortly before Donald Trump’s inauguration.
However, the Solana project itself was launched long before these events. The first block in the blockchain was generated back in 2020, and the Solana Foundation was founded at the same time. The founder of the project is developer Anatoly Yakovenko, who, by the way, named the cryptocurrency after the picturesque beach.
The key feature of the project was non-standard technical solutions, namely the Proof-of-History consensus algorithm, which is actually a variant of the Proof-of-Stake algorithm, but with the introduction of time stamps, which allowed increasing the network throughput. At the same time, the SHA-256 hashing algorithm is used, as in Bitcoin. Such a technical description of the project is presented in the White Paper of the cryptocurrency.
Unlike the same Ethereum, where the Solidity programming language is used to write smart contracts, Solana uses Rust. All the above-mentioned features of Solana allow achieving high (in comparison with “previous generation” cryptocurrencies) network throughput. Thus, the TPS (transactions per second) value in the network is 65,000, and the blockchain itself has long been considered one of the fastest in terms of TPS.
Solana Crashes
Stability issues are often a downside to scalable blockchains, and Solana is no exception. In its early years, the blockchain had a bad reputation for frequent outages, with the network particularly plagued by problems in 2021-2022. In 2021, there were two outages, with the second, which occurred between September 14 and 15, taking the blockchain offline for nearly 17.5 hours. In 2022, there were six outages, the largest of which lasted over 58 hours. Then there was one outage in 2023, and the most recent was on February 6, 2024, which lasted for 5 hours.
