Solana is a highly functional open source project that banks on blockchain technology’s permissionless nature to provide decentralized finance (DeFi) solutions. While the idea and initial work on the project began in 2017, Solana was officially launched in March 2020 by the Solana Foundation with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Solana protocol is designed to facilitate decentralized app (DApp) creation. It aims to improve scalability by introducing a proof-of-history (PoH) consensus combined with the underlying proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus of the blockchain.

Solana’s hybrid protocol allows for significantly decreased validation times for both transaction and smart contract execution. With lightning-fast processing times, Solana has attracted a lot of institutional interest as well. The combination of two consensus mechanisms makes Solana a unique phenomenon in the blockchain industry.

It has a circulating supply of 345,241,425 SOL coins and the max. supply is not available.

SOL tokens can be purchased on most exchanges. One can choose to trade Solana is on Binance, Coinbase, Huobi Global, Kucoin, FTX, and many more.