Solana

Solana was created by Anatoly Yakovenko, who wrote its whitepaper and led Solana Labs. Development no longer depends on one company. Anza, founded in 2024 by former Solana Labs engineers, maintains the main Agave validator client; Jump builds Firedancer, an independent client whose latest mainnet release came out on 15 September 2026; and Jito maintains a widely used Agave fork. The Solana Foundation runs a delegation programme that supports smaller validators. The weakness is client diversity: most stake still runs Agave-derived software, and fully independent Firedancer is a minority.

• Solana: A new architecture for a high performance blockchain (whitepaper)
• Former Solana Labs members form Anza developer shop (The Block)
• firedancer-io/firedancer releases
• anza-xyz/agave releases
• Solana Foundation Delegation Program

Solana Labs raised $314 million in June 2021 in a token sale led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain. Institutional access has since widened: the Bitwise Solana Staking ETF began trading in October 2025 and held about 8.05 million SOL on 30 June 2026, and US Solana ETFs took in about $1.34 billion of net inflows through August 2026. Forward Industries, which describes itself as the largest Solana treasury company, held about 7.55 million SOL at the end of June 2026, and Charles Schwab announced plans to add SOL to its crypto offering. One overhang remains: locked SOL sold by the FTX estate in 2024 at $64, drawing buyers such as Galaxy and Pantera, keeps unlocking monthly until 2028.

• Solana Labs raises $314M in token sale led by a16z, Polychain (CoinDesk)
• Bitwise Solana Staking ETF — Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026
• Solana ecosystem roundup: August 2026
• Forward Industries expands Solana treasury to over 7.5M SOL
• FTX estate's $7.5 billion sale of locked solana attracts strong interest (The Block)

SOL has no supply cap. Total supply was about 634.2 million SOL on 16 September 2026, with about 587.2 million circulating. Inflation was about 3.64% a year, all paid to validators and stakers, and daily burning of about 650 SOL is far below the roughly 60,000 SOL issued each day (CoinDesk, early August 2026), so supply keeps growing. About 69% of supply is staked, which means most holders offset dilution while non-stakers bear it. Validators approved SGP-0002 on 28 August 2026 to make inflation fall twice as fast (reaching 1.5% around 2029 instead of 2032), but it was not yet active, and a proposal to burn far more fees failed in the same vote.

• Solana supply (Solana Explorer)
• Solana RPC — getInflationRate
• Solana RPC — getVoteAccounts
• CoinDesk — A new Solana proposal would take daily SOL burns from $47,000 to $650,000
• CoinDesk — Solana vote to double disinflation passes by a hair in dramatic finish
• SGP-0002 double disinflation narrowly passes (Crowdfund Insider)

Usage is high. Solana set a record of 216 million non-vote transactions in one day in August 2026 and processed about 2,450 non-vote transactions per second on 16 September. About $15.4 billion of stablecoins circulate on it, the third most of any chain, and its DeFi deposits of about $5.7 billion are second only to Ethereum's (DefiLlama). DEX volume was about $78.5 billion over 30 days. A large part of that trading is memecoins, whose collapse in February 2026 cut weekly DEX volume by about 62% before a partial recovery. Stake is fairly concentrated: 691 vote accounts were registered on 16 September 2026 (677 of them active), and the 18 largest held more than one third of stake.

• Solana ecosystem roundup: August 2026
• Solana RPC — getRecentPerformanceSamples
• DefiLlama — stablecoins by chain
• DefiLlama — Solana
• DefiLlama — Solana DEX volume
• Pump.fun graduation collapse and Solana fees (DEXTools)
• Solana RPC — getVoteAccounts