Initially introduced by David Chaum around the 1980s, cryptocurrency aimed to create a peer-to-peer (P2P) payment system to bypass the layered process of traditional banks in providing financial services.
Through the P2P model, a user can directly send, receive, or remit money from one border to another cheaper and faster.
Today, one cryptocurrency that took the financial markets by storm is Solana (SOL). Dubbed the Ethereum killer, SOL uses a Proof-of-History system to improve the performance of early blockchain networks.
In this TRU Insight, we’ll take a closer look at Solana. Read on to explore its features and historical prices to determine whether this coin is a good investment for you.
Solana Price Today
SOL enjoys a positive outlook from investors by promising a blockchain network that’s said to be an Ethereum-killer. It utilizes proof-of-history to make P2P transactions much faster and cheaper.
The Solana Network and SOL (its native crypto coin) was initially introduced by Anatoly Yakovenko in 2018 through a whitepaper titled “Solana: A new architecture for a high-performance blockchain v08.13.”
Two years after the initial introduction, the blockchain was officially released. Its promising technology and potential to outperform ETH made the market introduction successful.
The SOL coin rallied over 12,000% a year after.
Refer to the table below for the SOL prices today.
| Market Capitalization | $73.67 billion |
| 52-week Range | $110.60 to $294.33 |
| Total Supply | 595.58 million |
| Circulating Supply | 508.7 million |
A Closer Look to Solana (SOL)
Solana ($SOL) is a native cryptocurrency of Solana Network. This blockchain platform utilizes proof-of-history (PoH) instead of proof-of-work (PoW) to facilitate a faster and cheaper decentralized application.
Anatoly Yakovento introduced this blockchain network to empower financial service providers with scalable and high-performing blockchain networks to facilitate decentralized financial (DeFi) services.
With its improved technology and innovative Proof-of-History (PoH), the Solana network can process up to 710,000 transactions per second through real-world throughput (TP) that typically ranges from 2,000 to 3,000 TPs.
Proof-of-History
At the core of the Solana network is the Proof-of-History (PoH), a mechanism used to improve the efficiency of earlier Proof-of-Work (PoW).
This proof of transaction undergoes the typical block creation and validation process – utilization of a hash function, encryption of unique, sequential codes, and the integration of the codes into the block into the blockchain. Each block in the blockchain is verified by nodes, which look at the consistency of the encrypted codes of all blocks in the blockchain.
However, the PoH mechanism made this process more power-efficient, faster, and cheaper.
Rust Language
The Mozilla Corporation developed Rust, a programming language that zeroes in performance, safety, and concurrency.
The Rust programming language makes the promise of high performance possible. This programming script allows the system to perform with high throughput and low latency to process, handle, and facilitate transactions faster, cheaper, and without extreme power usage.
High-Performing Validator Language
Solana positioned itself as a better blockchain network than the leading Ethereum.
As the network uses the high-throughput and low-latency Rust programming language, Solana can process up to 65,000 transactions per second. This improves the early blockchain network that uses a PoW mechanism, preventing congestion when validating P2P transactions.
SOL Welcomes the Year With a $294.33 All-time High
On January 13, 2025, the SOL market witnessed a flock of investors after a 37% increase for two days.
However, the investors’ positive outlook was short-lived as the ATH price started to dip after two days – kickstarting its bearish trend. There are two reasons for this immediate dip – the profit locking of investors and the introduction of $TRUMP (the coin, not the reelected U.S. president).
$TRUMP, now trading at a range of $11.1 to $75.36, caused havoc in the crypto market as it immediately entered the top 20 cryptocurrencies per market capitalization as the public anticipates Trump’s inauguration.
