Solana is a blockchain platform for hosting decentralized, scalable applications. Solana, which was founded in 2017, is an open-source project currently run by the Solana Foundation in Geneva, while the blockchain was built by San Francisco-based Solana Labs.1 Solana is much faster in terms of the number of transactions it can process and has significantly lower transaction fees than rival blockchains such as Ethereum.

The cryptocurrency that runs on the Solana blockchain, also known as Solana (SOLUSD) and trading under the ticker symbol SOL, has risen nearly 12,000 percent in 2021,2 and has a market capitalization of more than $66 billion, making it the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by this metric.