The history of Solana, from the Proof of History whitepaper to the present day.
A whitepaper conceived in a San Francisco café, a beach town namesake, and a five-person team coding through the bear market.
Anatoly Yakovenko publishes the PoH whitepaper, proposing a sequential SHA-256 hash chain as a verifiable cryptographic clock. Reportedly conceived late one night in a San Francisco café, drawing on his Qualcomm work on Time Division Multiple Access for cellular networks and on Stanford research into Verifiable Delay Functions. At the time Bitcoin handles ~7 TPS and Ethereum ~13–15.
Greg Fitzgerald, a former Qualcomm colleague, commits the first open-source implementation of the whitepaper. Originally named "Silk" within a project codenamed "Loom." Fitzgerald rewrites the codebase from C to Rust within roughly two weeks for performance and safety.
First public release demonstrates 10,000 transactions verified in half a second, a glimpse of what PoH-based ordering could enable.
First private SAFT round raises ~$3.17M at an average $0.04 per SOL. Backers include Multicoin Capital, Foundation Capital, CoinFund, Race Capital, Slow Ventures.
Stephen Akridge, also from Qualcomm, contributes the breakthrough idea of offloading signature verification to GPUs. Throughput jumps dramatically.
Second private SAFT round raises ~$12.6M at an average $0.20 per SOL.
The team incorporates Solana Labs Inc. in San Francisco. Five co-founders: Yakovenko, Fitzgerald, Akridge, Raj Gokal (COO, Omada Health/VC background), and Eric Williams (Chief Scientist, tokenomics). The "Loom" name is dropped to avoid confusion with Loom Network; Yakovenko proposes "Solana" in a Slack message, after Solana Beach, north of San Diego, where the team surfed.
A 50-node permissioned public testnet is published, supporting bursts of 250,000 transactions per second.
150 nodes on a gigabit network sustain ~200,000 TPS with bursts above 500,000, a serious technical claim during the depths of the bear market.
Final private SAFT round raises ~$5.7M at an average $0.225 per SOL. Cumulative private fundraising tops $20M.
Before co-founding Dragonfly Capital, Haseeb Qureshi passes on Solana's $0.04 seed round. He later calls it his worst investment mistake as SOL climbs from cents to triple digits.
The combined private SAFT rounds are publicly announced as a $20M+ Series A. Multicoin's Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain become Solana's most influential institutional voices through the bear market. Solana Labs operates on a skeleton crew of about 12 engineers.
Validators stress-test the network across three phases (performance, smart contract execution, and full validator+replicator), earning rewards in the lead-up to mainnet beta. The program identifies bugs and bootstraps the validator operator base.
The Solana Foundation is established in Geneva, Switzerland as the non-profit steward of the network, separating the for-profit Solana Labs from public-goods stewardship.
COVID hits, mainnet beta launches into the chaos, and an Alameda-backed DEX becomes the chain's first major dApp, with a hidden time bomb.
A pre-mainnet strategic round raises ~$2.3M at $0.25 per SOL.
Mainnet Beta launches into early-COVID market chaos. 500 million SOL minted in the genesis block. The network splits into Solana Labs (for-profit) and the Solana Foundation (non-profit).
A public Dutch auction on CoinList sells 8M SOL (1.6% of supply) to non-U.S. buyers at a clearing price of $0.22, raising $1.76M. Cumulative pre-launch fundraising reaches ~$25.55M.
Solana Labs transfers intellectual property and 167M SOL to the Solana Foundation.
After community concern over market-maker token loans, the Foundation permanently burns 11.36M SOL, reducing supply to 488.64M. The original loan and burn discrepancy will resurface in the 2022 class action.
Sam Bankman-Fried personally stress-tests the network and becomes Solana's most vocal backer. Solana Foundation, FTX, and Alameda co-launch Serum, a high-speed CLOB DEX, the chain's first major public-facing application. Critically, Serum's upgrade-authority private keys are held inside FTX, giving FTX effective control over the protocol that becomes the liquidity backbone of Solana DeFi. The flaw becomes catastrophic in November 2022.
Tether and Circle begin issuing USDT and USDC natively on Solana, laying the foundation for what will become the chain's dominant stablecoin franchise.
A 12,000% year. Phantom, Raydium, Jupiter, NFTs, $260, and the first Breakpoint, but also the first major outage.
Sam Bankman-Fried tweets the now-iconic line: "I'll buy as much SOL as you have, right now, at $3. Sell me all you want. Then go f*** off." It becomes legendary in Solana lore as SOL hits $260 within the year.
At epoch 150, the inflation schedule turns on at an initial 8% rate, disinflating 15% per year toward a 1.5% terminal.
Raydium launches as Solana's first major AMM, with Serum order-book integration. Founded by the pseudonymous "Alpha Ray" team with an algorithmic-market-making background. SBF is a major investor.
Kreechures (Gen 0) and Solarians launch, both pre-Metaplex, with the community still debating which came first. The NFT vertical begins.
Phantom launches in beta. Will become the dominant Solana wallet (3M+ MAU) and one of the chain's most recognizable consumer brands.
Solana Labs raises $314.15M in a private token sale led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Polychain Capital, memed as "Pi-hundred million." One of the largest blockchain fundraises at the time, fueling a developer-ecosystem explosion.
Frakt launches as the earliest generative-art Solana NFT collection, distinct from the PFP format that will define the rest of the year.
Solanart launches as the first dedicated Solana NFT marketplace (3% fee, anonymous founders). Neodyme auditors discover an SPL Token Lending vulnerability the same month, patched before exploitation.
Phantom Wallet launches publicly. Over $1M is staked within 12 hours of the staking feature launching, proof of latent demand for native Solana UX.
Solana Monkey Business Gen 2 mints 5,000 pixelated monkeys at 2 SOL each. Becomes the first Solana NFT to sell for $2M, with a floor of 175 SOL by year-end. Holders form MonkeDAO, the first NFT-based DAO on Solana, running its own validator.
Mango Markets, Solana's flagship margin-trading protocol, raises $70M, presaging the DeFi vertical that will dominate the rest of the year (and that Eisenberg will exploit a year later).
DAA mints 10,000 apes at 6 SOL each, sold out in under 8 minutes. The first Solana NFT collection past $1M in volume. Widely credited with kickstarting the Solana NFT boom.
SOL hits a prior all-time high of around $216, five days before the network's first major outage will reset expectations.
Bots flood the Grape Protocol IDO on Raydium with ~400,000 TPS, overwhelming validator memory and crashing the network. Resolved with a coordinated validator restart. No funds lost, but the start of a difficult reliability era.
Founded by Jack Lu, Sidney Zhang, Zhuoxun Yin, and Zhuojie Zhou (alumni of Uber Eats, Coinbase, Facebook). Captures over 90% of Solana NFT trading volume within months thanks to a clean UX, flat 2% fee, rarity tools, and Launchpad.
Star Atlas, an ambitious Solana metaverse game, launches its tokens via Raydium's AcceleRaytor launchpad. Aurory follows shortly after.
Jupiter, the Solana DEX aggregator founded by pseudonymous duo Meow (who insists he is a cat) and Siong, launches and grows quickly to dominant routing position. Will become the chain's most-used DeFi protocol.
10,000 PFPs by Rohun "Frank" Vora. Rocky start, then becomes one of Solana's most valuable collections. Holders earn 10 $DUST per day for staking, pioneering an NFT yield model that defines the era.
The Galactic Gecko Space Garage team publicly accuses the Alpha Art marketplace of potential securities-law issues over royalty distribution, an early skirmish in what will become Solana's long-running royalty wars.
The first in-person Solana conference is held in Lisbon, Portugal. The community sees itself in person for the first time at the height of the bull run.
SOL hits an all-time high of $260.06, roughly a 12,000% annual gain from January's ~$1.50–$2.00 range. Market cap surpasses $74B; Solana enters the top-five cryptocurrencies.
A swarm of mid-tier Solana NFT collections rise alongside the headliners: Aurory, Thugbirdz, Bold Badgers, Galactic Geckos, Catalina Whale Mixer, Boryoku Dragonz, Shadowy Super Coder DAO, Taiyo Robotics. Notably, @0x_thug gives free Thugbirdz and refunds to OG supporters.
Wormhole, Mango, and the FTX catastrophe: the year Solana nearly didn't survive.
Solana Pay launches as a merchant SDK for direct on-chain payments, anticipating the stablecoin-rails narrative that will reshape the chain by 2025.
Six "degraded performance" episodes from high-compute and duplicate transactions. SOL drops 30% on Jan 22. The start of a year of reliability problems.
An attacker exploits a deprecated signature-verification function (load_instruction_at) using a spoofed sysvar account, minting 120,000 wETH on Solana with no backing. Jump Crypto makes users whole within ~24 hours after a $10M bounty offer is ignored.
Stablecoin protocol exploited via a collateral-validation flaw in unaudited code. The attacker leaves an on-chain message saying wallets under $100k will be returned and the rest "donated to charity."
A malicious governance proposal lets an attacker transfer 18.5M AUDIO from the Audius community treasury. The tokens were notionally worth about $6M, but heavy slippage yielded roughly $1.1M when they were sold.
Okay Bears mints, becoming the first Solana NFT to surpass Ethereum-based projects in daily trading volume. Branding: "We're all going to be okay." OpenSea adds Solana support the same month.
NFT minting bot spam (reportedly ~4M TPS) exhausts validator memory and starves vote transactions. v1.10 brings memory fixes and vote prioritization.
A bug in durable-nonce processing produces inconsistent validator state, with on-chain clocks drifting ~30 minutes behind. Network offline ~4.5 hours.
Solana Mobile announces the Saga phone at the Breakpoint pre-event, alongside the Solana Mobile Stack (SMS). A public Solana bug bounty program launches with rewards up to $100k.
Magic Eden raises a $130M Series B at a $1.6B valuation, led by Paradigm and Sequoia ($157M total funding), the high-water mark for Solana NFT marketplaces. The same month, Mert Mumtaz founds Helius with Liam Vovk and Nick Pennie. Backpack (the Coral wallet) also debuts.
Solend's DAO controversially passes, and within hours reverses, an emergency proposal to take over a whale's account to prevent oracle manipulation. A turning point in DeFi governance norms.
Filed in N.D. Cal., alleging unregistered securities sales from March 24, 2020 onward and that Yakovenko lent a market maker more than 11.3M SOL in April 2020 without disclosure. Claims against Yakovenko and the Foundation are later voluntarily dismissed without prejudice in 2024.
Concentrated-liquidity protocol exploited via a fake tick-account + flash-loan attack. The attacker keeps 45,455 SOL (~$1.6M) as a "white-hat bounty" and returns the rest.
A flash-loan attack manipulates prices to drain the treasury. Protocol shuts down afterward.
~9,231 wallets are compromised, with roughly $4.1M stolen. The Slope mobile app had transmitted seed phrases to a centralized logging service. It was an application-wallet failure rather than a Solana protocol exploit, but badly damaged user confidence.
A developer accidentally runs `solana program close` on the mainnet program, permanently locking $661k USDC. Operational error, not hack.
Jump Crypto announces Firedancer, a from-scratch C/C++ validator client. The first concrete plan to break Solana's single-client dependency on the Labs implementation.
Frank DeGods' Dust Labs mints y00ts as the DeGods spinoff collection, a $7M raise that briefly extends the DeGods brand into a second wave before the Christmas migration upends both.
A hot-spare validator produces duplicate blocks; a fork-choice bug halts consensus. Patched and restarted.
Avraham Eisenberg manipulates the MNGO oracle by ~2,300% via cross-market trades, draining $114–116M. He returns $67M after DAO negotiation, keeps $47M as a "bug bounty," and publicly calls it a "highly profitable trading strategy" using the protocol "as designed." Solana DeFi TVL drops below $1B for the first time since July 2021.
Solana replaces UDP with QUIC for the leader's transaction-ingest pipeline, adding flow control and acknowledgments. A direct response to the spam-driven outages of Sep 2021 and May 2022.
CoinDesk publishes Alameda's leaked balance sheet, showing positions heavily concentrated in FTT and SOL. The opening shot of the FTX collapse.
Solend Stable, Coin98, and Kamino isolated pools are drained via Saber/Switchboard oracle manipulation and spam, a smaller knock-on from the Mango playbook.
Binance announces it will liquidate its FTT holdings, igniting the bank run on FTX.
FTX files Chapter 11. SOL crashes from ~$32 to a December low of $8.13. "Sam Coins" collectively crash: SRM down 55%, RAY/FIDA/MAPS averaging 40%. FTX held ~$982M in SOL. Serum is effectively killed when FTX is discovered to hold its upgrade keys; protocols sever Serum dependencies within hours. Many predict Solana won't survive.
Breakpoint 2022 in Lisbon (with overlapping Amsterdam events) becomes a sombre processing of the unfolding FTX disaster. Builders publicly recommit.
The community forks Serum into OpenBook, community-governed and FTX-key-free, within weeks of the bankruptcy. Yakovenko praises the speed of the response.
Squads ships account-abstracted multisig, bringing programmatic control to treasuries and DAOs at a moment when trust is the scarcest resource on the chain.
Vitalik Buterin tweets that he "genuinely hope[s] the Solana community gets its fair chance to thrive." Sentiment ticks up.
An attacker compromises the owner authority for Raydium liquidity pools and withdraws about $4.4M. Raydium later proposes compensating affected liquidity providers from its treasury.
On Christmas Day, Frank DeGods announces both flagship NFT collections will bridge off Solana: DeGods to Ethereum and y00ts to Polygon. Dust Labs later confirms that Polygon supplied a $3M grant to support the y00ts move.
BONK airdrops 50% of its 100T supply to ~297,000 Solana wallets: 21% to NFT holders, 15% to OpenBook traders, plus 5T to 194 specific developer wallets. Designed to boost morale during the ecosystem's darkest hour. SOL rallies 34% in 48 hours. The first sustained recovery narrative.
Avraham Eisenberg is arrested in Puerto Rico after the Mango exploit. Convictions follow in April 2024, and are vacated in 2025.
Saga, Helium, Visa, Google Cloud, Mad Lads, Jito: proof-of-life for an ecosystem that was supposed to be done.
BONK gains more than 300% in its first eight days as early exchange listings and Solana DEX demand turn the Christmas airdrop into the chain's first sustained recovery narrative.
Oasis says it executed a counter-exploit under a UK High Court order and returned about $140M in assets associated with the Wormhole attacker to a court-authorized third party.
A single validator broadcasts a malformed oversized block, overwhelming Turbine block propagation. Resolved with a coordinated restart and Turbine fixes. Remains the longest single Solana outage on record.
Solana Mobile launches the $1,000 Saga for preorder customers on April 13 and opens public orders on May 8. Sales are slow at first, but the device is about to become legendary for very different reasons.
Helium Network (950k+ nodes) completes its migration from its own L1 to Solana, after HIP-70 passes with 81% approval. The defining DePIN win and a vote of confidence in cNFT-era Solana.
Coral launches 10,000 Mad Lads as xNFTs (executable NFTs) exclusively through Backpack. A bot-driven attack forces the public mint to move back one day; the collection sells out and helps revive Solana NFT activity.
The SEC sues Coinbase and names SOL among 13 tokens it alleges are unregistered securities. SOL drops nearly 30%. Robinhood delists. The Solana Foundation publicly denies. Robinhood relists in November 2024.
Compressed NFTs go live using Merkle-tree state compression. Days later, Helium migrates nearly one million hotspot records as cNFTs, demonstrating a several-orders-of-magnitude cost reduction.
After slow initial sales, Solana Mobile cuts the Saga price from $1,000 to $599, four months before the BONK airdrop will turn it into a collector's item.
Solana Pay integrates with Shopify, opening a clear merchant on-ramp for stablecoin commerce on Solana.
A vulnerability in the on-chain order-book contract is exploited. One of the few hacks in an otherwise quiet 2023.
A race-condition flaw in Aurory's off-chain marketplace lets an attacker inflate a SyncSpace balance and withdraw about 600,000 AURY. Aurory disables SyncSpace while it patches the service.
Visa expands its live USDC settlement pilots to Solana with merchant acquirers Worldpay and Nuvei, becoming one of the first major payments companies to use the chain directly for settlement.
Sam Bankman-Fried's criminal trial begins in S.D.N.Y., a year after the FTX collapse.
Breakpoint 2023 in Amsterdam draws ~3,000 attendees. Jupiter's Meow announces the upcoming JUP airdrop on stage; Firedancer's Frankendancer hybrid is demonstrated.
Sam Bankman-Fried is found guilty on all seven counts. Same day, Render Network completes its migration from Ethereum to Solana via Wormhole.
Render Network, a decentralized GPU rendering protocol, completes its migration from Ethereum to Solana, bringing significant volume and developer activity. Later renames to RENDER.
A Shiba Inu in a pink knitted hat, based on a 2019 Reddit photo of a real dog named Achi, launches anonymously and quickly grows into one of Solana's largest memecoins. Slogan: "the hat stays on."
Pyth Network airdrops 600M PYTH governance tokens to stimulate participation in the real-time oracle network.
Jito allocates 90M JTO to past JitoSOL users, validators and MEV searchers, with 45M immediately claimable at launch. The airdrop becomes another proof point for Solana's recovery.
The 30M-BONK airdrop bundled with each Saga (originally ~$10) crosses $937 in value, exceeding the phone's price. U.S. inventory sells out Dec 15; eBay resale prices reach $5,000+. Solana Mobile reveals only ~20,000 units were ever produced.
CoinGecko records SOL climbing from about $10 to $101.33 during 2023, a 917.3% return and one of the year's strongest major-asset performances. Solana is officially back.
Pump.fun, BONK, WIF, FARTCOIN, GOAT. Memecoins eat the chain. The last major outage falls, and Solana surpasses Ethereum on DEX volume.
Alon Cohen, Noah Tweedale and Dylan Kerler launch Pump.fun. The no-code launchpad lets anyone deploy a token into a bonding curve in seconds, turning memecoin creation into one of Solana's dominant activities.
Jupiter's LFG launchpad runs the mockJUP test airdrop as a dry run for the JUP launch nine days later.
WEN, Jupiter's LFG Launchpad validation drop, kicks off the 2024 distribution wave that follows Jito and precedes Jupiter's own airdrop nine days later.
1B JUP (~$700M), the first of four planned rounds totaling 40% of 10B supply, distributed to ~1M wallets. Solana's largest airdrop to date. First-round FDV ~$7B. The network maintains 100% uptime under load.
A legacy-loader bug triggers an infinite recompile loop in the LoadedPrograms cache and causes a 4-hour-46-minute outage. As of July 2026 it remains the last major outage, a roughly 29-month uptime streak.
Darkfarms launches BOME, a memecoin whose stated thesis is "archive internet memes on-chain." Raises millions overnight in presale and briefly becomes one of the supercycle's flagship narratives.
The WIF community raises roughly $700,000 for a proposed Las Vegas Sphere advertisement. The ad never materializes; organizers abandon the campaign and announce contributor refunds in March 2025.
An anonymous developer accidentally burns the liquidity-provider tokens and the presale allocation while trying to revoke mint authority. About $10M of presale funds cannot be returned as planned, yet the token still begins trading and becomes a major spectacle.
Sam Bankman-Fried is sentenced to 25 years in federal prison. The book closes on the chain's most consequential and damaging early backer.
WIF reaches an all-time high of $4.83–$4.85, briefly worth ~$4.7B. Hits $1B market cap in 81 days, the second-fastest in crypto history at the time.
Lending and liquidity protocol Kamino launches KMNO through its genesis event, distributing 7.5% of supply to existing users.
The FTX estate sells roughly 25–30M locked SOL at about $64 per token to buyers including Galaxy Trading and Pantera Capital. The steep discount reflects a multi-year vesting schedule rather than immediately tradable SOL.
Coinbase lists dogwifhat perpetual futures, a memecoin reaching mainstream derivatives infrastructure inside three months of its first $1B FDV.
Avraham Eisenberg is convicted in federal court on commodities fraud, manipulation, and wire-fraud charges over the Mango Markets exploit. Convictions are vacated in 2025; he's now serving time on unrelated CSAM charges.
Tensor, Solana's power-user NFT marketplace, launches its TNSR token, briefly taking the #1 spot among Solana NFT marketplaces by volume.
MYRO, a memecoin named after Solana co-founder Raj Gokal's dog, joins the supercycle pantheon.
Drift Protocol, a perp-futures DEX founded by Tristan Frizza and Cindy Leow, distributes its DRIFT token. Airdrop checker opens May 16.
Frank DeGods publicly admits the migration was "a fear-driven mistake" and reopens an optional bridge back to Solana for both DeGods and y00ts holders.
A pre-official "DJT/TrumpCoin" launches associated with fraud claims, foreshadowing the legitimate TRUMP launch seven months later.
PayPal launches its PYUSD stablecoin on Solana. Combined with Visa's 2023 USDC integration, Solana is now serious payments infrastructure with stablecoins from PayPal, Circle, Société Générale-FORGE, and more.
Pump.fun surpasses $50M in cumulative revenue six months after launch, confirmation that the bonding-curve casino has become Solana's most profitable application.
Former Solana Labs executives and core engineers launch Anza as a dedicated protocol R&D company. On March 2, the team forks the Labs validator repository into Agave, beginning the transition of the network's majority client.
At Breakpoint Singapore, Frankendancer, a hybrid Firedancer/Agave client (Firedancer's networking + Agave's consensus), goes live on Solana mainnet. Jump Crypto's stepping stone toward full client diversity.
A memecoin inspired by Thailand's viral pygmy hippo joins the late-2024 wave of animal-mascot memecoins.
Goatseus Maximus launches on Pump.fun, created by a follower of Truth Terminal, the Claude-Opus-based AI agent run by NZ researcher Andy Ayrey, seeded by a $50,000 BTC grant from Marc Andreessen. Within weeks GOAT exceeds $700M market cap; Truth Terminal's wallet receives 1.93M GOAT and becomes the "first AI millionaire."
A memecoin inspired by the viral death of a NY-state pet squirrel reaches a $1B market cap in 11 days, the fastest memecoin to do so. Boosted by Elon Musk references on X.
A memecoin based on the viral cartoon-dog "chill guy" image joins the late-2024 cohort.
Robinhood relists SOL after the June 2023 SEC-suit-driven delisting. Coinbase lists WIF the same week.
An anonymous developer turns a fart-joke conversation associated with Truth Terminal into FARTCOIN. The unaffiliated token breaks into the late-2024 AI-memecoin wave.
Pump.fun temporarily disables livestreaming after problematic content: degrading on-air stunts and a faked suicide attempt. UK FCA issues a warning in December, leading to UK geo-blocking.
Cumulative pump.fun revenue passes $340M, and crosses ~$400M by December, making it the chain's revenue leader.
SOL touches $263, a new all-time high heading into year-end and a clear signal that the 2023 recovery has fully matured into a new bull cycle.
Magic Eden launches the ME token with 12.5% of total supply allocated to the airdrop, one of the larger NFT-related airdrops on Solana.
Pudgy Penguins launches PENGU as a Solana token and distributes it to holders of Pudgy Penguins, Lil Pudgys and other eligible assets. The Ethereum NFT collection itself does not migrate.
A spear-phishing attack compromises an npm publisher and inserts private-key-stealing code into @solana/web3.js versions 1.95.6 and 1.95.7. The malicious releases are deprecated within hours; the Solana protocol itself is unaffected.
Major upgrade to the SPL token program: confidential transfers, transfer hooks, interest-bearing tokens, permanent delegation, metadata pointers. Foundational enabler for institutional products and tokenized RWAs.
Light Protocol and Helius bring ZK Compression to mainnet-beta, extending state compression from cNFTs to tokens and program-derived accounts while preserving Solana ledger security.
A DNS hijack redirects Parcl's web front end to a malicious site. The protocol contracts are not breached, but the incident is another reminder that web2 surfaces remain a soft underbelly for on-chain products.
A sitting U.S. president, an Argentine "Cryptogate," the Alpenglow announcement, the PUMP ICO, and the ETFs.
President-elect Trump announces an official Solana memecoin three days before inauguration. 200M of the 1B supply is initially circulating, while 80% is allocated to Trump-linked CIC Digital and Fight Fight Fight. The token surges above $70 before reversing.
Melania Trump launches the official MELANIA token two days after TRUMP, and the earlier coin falls sharply as liquidity and attention rotate. Later Bubblemaps analysis links wallet clusters around MELANIA and LIBRA to Hayden Davis and Kelsier Ventures; that connection is an on-chain attribution claim, not a judicial finding.
SOL reaches a new all-time high near $293 as activity around the TRUMP launch pushes demand and on-chain volume to extremes.
Jupiter opens its second annual Jupuary program after the DAO sets aside 700M JUP: 500M for the initial user-and-staker claim and 200M for later growth incentives called Carrots. The recurring distribution turns Jupuary into a recognizable Jupiter community ritual.
Burwick Law and Wolf Popper file a proposed class action in S.D.N.Y. on behalf of a PNUT purchaser, alleging that Pump.fun facilitated sales of unregistered securities. The complaint seeks rescission and damages and says the platform had generated nearly $500M in fees—not $500M of adjudicated investor losses.
On Feb 14, President Javier Milei posts the Solana contract address for $LIBRA, a token promoted as supporting Argentine enterprise and linked to Hayden Davis and Kelsier Ventures. The price collapses within hours and Milei deletes the post. On-chain analysts estimate that a small group of wallets extracted roughly $100M, triggering criminal complaints, civil litigation, and the political scandal dubbed "Cryptogate."
Pump.fun's official X account is briefly compromised and used to promote a fake token before the team regains control.
Approximately 11.2M SOL tied to the FTX estate's prior private auctions reaches its scheduled vesting unlock. Buyers across the earlier sale rounds included Galaxy Digital, Pantera Capital, and Figure Markets; the unlock releases already-sold tokens rather than creating a new estate market sale.
SIMD-0228, proposed by Multicoin's Tushar Jain and Anza's Max Resnick, would replace the fixed inflation schedule with a market-based curve tied to staking participation. It receives 61.39% support but misses the 66.67% threshold. SIMD-0123, which directs priority-fee rewards through validators for distribution to delegators, passes with 74.91%.
Pump.fun ships its own AMM and makes PumpSwap the default liquidity destination for tokens that complete the launchpad bonding curve, replacing the prior Raydium migration flow.
The Argentine Chamber of Deputies approves a formal investigation into the LIBRA / Cryptogate scandal, raising the regulatory stakes for Milei.
SOL bottoms near $105 amid Trump tariff turmoil, a ~64% drawdown from January's ATH but still well above the 2022 lows.
DeFi Development Corp (formerly Janover) and Upexi adopt Solana-focused digital-asset treasury strategies, using public-company balance sheets and capital raises to accumulate and stake SOL.
Canada launches four spot Solana ETFs on the Toronto Stock Exchange, six months ahead of U.S. approval, paving the way institutionally.
Pump.fun launches a Creator Revenue Sharing program allocating 50% of PumpSwap revenue back to token creators.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian grants Avraham Eisenberg's Rule 29 motion and vacates the three Mango Markets convictions, finding the trial evidence insufficient and venue improper for the commodities counts.
At Solana Accelerate NYC, Anza unveils Alpenglow, a consensus redesign led by Roger Wattenhofer's research team. The full design pairs Votor voting with Rotor block dissemination and targets roughly 150ms finality; the later SIMD-0326 proposal covers Votor only and initially keeps Turbine.
Reports emerge of pump.fun's planned $1B token sale at a ~$4B valuation, despite co-founder Alon Cohen's earlier denials.
SSK launches as the first U.S. Solana staking fund, operating under the Investment Company Act of 1940, ahead of the spot-ETF approval in October.
Pump.fun sells 18% of PUMP privately for $720M, then cuts the announced public allocation from 15% to 12.5% and sells that tranche for $500M at $0.004 per token. The roughly $1.22B sale prices PUMP at a $4B fully diluted valuation; the public tranche sells out in minutes.
Successor to the Saga phone begins shipping at $499 (vs. Saga's $1,000), with 150,000+ pre-orders before launch. Carries forward the Saga's airdrop ecosystem.
A permissionless stress test briefly pushes mainnet above 100,000 non-vote TPS using mostly lightweight no-op calls. It demonstrates burst capacity, not sustained organic application throughput.
Validators approve the Votor portion of Alpenglow with 98.27% in favor and about 52% of total stake participating. The vote authorizes the consensus direction; it does not itself activate Alpenglow on mainnet.
Galaxy Digital tokenizes its Class A common stock on Solana via Superstate's Opening Bell platform, one of the first U.S.-listed equities on a public chain.
The SEC approves generic listing standards for qualifying commodity-based ETPs, including products holding crypto assets. Eligible products can list without a separate Rule 19b-4 approval, replacing the old case-by-case review path and clearing the runway for the U.S. Solana products that follow.
ChinaAMC launches Hong Kong's first—and Asia's first—spot Solana ETF on HKEX, following Canada's April listings and one day before Bitwise's U.S. debut.
Bitwise launches BSOL on NYSE Arca, the first U.S. exchange-traded product to hold spot SOL under the 1933 Act while incorporating staking. Helius is the staking provider and the stated expense ratio is 0.20%.
Grayscale converts GSOL to a spot Solana ETF the day after BSOL's NYSE debut.
VanEck's VSOL begins public trading on Nov 17. Fidelity's FSOL and 21Shares' TSOL follow on Nov 18, with 21Shares announcing TSOL on Nov 19, turning the Bitwise and Grayscale launches into a broader U.S. product category.
Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee, led by ranking member Jamie Raskin, release "Trump, Crypto, and a New Age of Corruption." The report alleges that the administration's crypto policy benefited Trump-family ventures, including World Liberty Financial and the TRUMP memecoin; these are the committee minority's findings, not a bipartisan committee conclusion.
Breakpoint at Etihad Arena marks the first mainnet release of Jump Crypto's independent Firedancer validator client. Adoption remains early—Frankendancer is still the practical hybrid path—but Solana now has a second independently built client on mainnet. Other announcements span Phantom/Kalshi prediction markets, Visa USDC settlement, Coinbase DEX access, and an XRP Ledger bridge initiative.
Yakovenko and infrastructure operators report a sustained DDoS campaign peaking near 6 Tbps. Public network metrics show no outage or material degradation, although the traffic figure and "no impact" assessment come from ecosystem reports rather than an independent incident postmortem.
SOL closes 2025 near $125, down roughly 57% from January's high but still firmly among the largest cryptoassets by market capitalization.
A brutal drawdown meets internet capital markets: sub-second finality approaches while stocks, stablecoins, and mobile apps move onchain.
Jupiter launches JupUSD, a yield-bearing stablecoin backed by BlackRock's BUIDL Fund. Solana's largest DEX aggregator becomes a stablecoin issuer.
Solana Mobile opens claims for nearly 2B SKR, 20% of supply: 1.819B to 100,908 Seeker users after anti-sybil filtering and 141M to 188 dApp developers. Holders can stake to Guardian nodes that secure devices and curate the dApp Store.
Jupiter closes the activity and staking snapshot for its planned final Jupuary. The announced 700M JUP program sets aside 200M for the initial distribution—175M for fee-paying users and 25M for stakers—plus a 200M long-term bonus pool and 300M for Jupnet incentives.
Jupiter DAO voters choose the Net-Zero Emissions option, canceling the scheduled 2026 Jupuary and formally postponing it indefinitely. All 700M JUP returns to the Community Cold Multisig; the snapshot is preserved, but only a future DAO vote can authorize a distribution.
CEO Jack Lu announces Magic Eden will shut down its Bitcoin Ordinals, Ethereum, and EVM operations to refocus on Solana plus a new gaming/gambling platform called Dicey, a dramatic reversal of the multi-chain expansion that had made ME the #1 NFT marketplace globally by monthly volume in March 2024.
The hybrid Frankendancer client reaches roughly 21% of total stake, while the fully independent Firedancer client has a much smaller but growing footprint. Solana has moved beyond a one-codebase network, though client diversity is still an adoption process rather than a finished state.
Forensic reporting on Mauricio Novelli's seized phone shows at least five calls with Milei around the LIBRA launch, including contacts in the minutes before the promotional post. The records cast doubt on Milei's claim that the post was incidental while Argentina's federal investigation remains open.
A months-long social-engineering operation attributed by investigators to a DPRK-linked group compromises Drift's privileged signing process and drains roughly $285M; verified user losses later reach ~$295M. Tether proposes up to $127.5M and partners another $20M toward recovery and a USDT-centered relaunch.
The 175-year-old payments company launches its dollar stablecoin on Solana, issued by federally chartered Anchorage Digital Bank and backed 1:1 by dollar reserves. USDPT is designed for near-instant, 24/7 treasury and agent settlement across Western Union's global network, with consumer rollout planned in 40+ countries.
At Consensus Miami, Yakovenko states Alpenglow could go live "as early as next quarter." Lily Liu describes Solana as the payment rails for both human and "AI machine economy."
SOL trades at ~$87–$90 with a market cap around $50B, ranking #6–8 by market cap. The network has roughly 1,300 validators, Frankendancer represents about 21% of stake, and the no-major-outage streak reaches 27 months. TVL is about $8.7B. Five U.S. 1933 Act spot products trade alongside the earlier SSK staking ETF.
Anza switches a community test cluster to Alpenglow, letting external validator operators test the largest consensus change in Solana history. The target is roughly 150ms finality; mainnet has not shipped yet, with Votor activation staged for Q3.
Anza replaces the code underneath the existing SPL Token program with a Pinocchio-based, zero-copy rewrite. Existing program IDs and clients keep working, while token instructions use about 96% less compute and free an estimated 12–13% of block space without raising block limits.
Solana's measured real-world-asset value passes $2.8B and tokenized-stock holders cross 200,000. The chain accounts for 97% of cumulative onchain tokenized-equity spot volume; stablecoin supply reaches $16.4B, perps set a $64.6B monthly record, and U.S. spot SOL ETFs end May near $1.13B AUM after $115.3M of net inflows and no outflow days.
Backpack introduces a unified securities platform where eligible users can hold real U.S. stock and ETF entitlements under traditional brokerage infrastructure, then convert them 1:1 into self-custodied tokenized securities on Solana and redeem them back. Sunrise supplies the canonical onchain listing path.
Mastercard expands settlement to intraday, weekend, and holiday windows and adds regulated-stablecoin settlement with Solana among the supported networks, linking always-on rails to a payments network spanning 3.7B cards and 210+ countries and territories.
SOL prints an intraday low near $60.13 and closes around $62.20, roughly 80% below the January 2025 all-time high. The washout corrects the remembered ~$64 level: some venues traded in the mid-$60s later in June, but the month's deepest print came earlier.
On the day SpaceX lists on Nasdaq in the largest IPO on record, Backpack Securities issues tokenized $SPCX and Sunrise brings it to Solana as an issuer-designated canonical mint. It trades across 51 Solana markets within 24 hours, passes $50M in first-day volume and $100M within four days, while remaining convertible back into a traditional security entitlement.
A billion-token memecoin named for trader Ansem is minted June 16. Bitquery traces 65% to a wallet Arkham labels "ansemconzimp" and about 35% to the PumpSwap pool before public trading opens June 22; the label is attribution evidence, not independent proof of control. After Ansem publicly embraces the coin on June 27, it runs from a ~$340K low to a $126.4M peak valuation in roughly 48 hours, turning a "fair launch" story into a supply-concentration controversy.
Solana's measured RWA value crosses $3B for the first time. Cumulative tokenized-stock volume passes $10B, up roughly 180% in one month, and daily volume sets a $683M record. Sunrise listings expand beyond $SPCX to Micron, SanDisk, the DRAM ETF, PAXG, and other issuer-designated assets.
Solana Governance Proposals give validators and delegators a formal, stake-weighted way to signal protocol direction. A validator with 100,000 delegated SOL can open an SGP; it needs 15% of active stake to reach a ballot and a two-thirds supermajority to pass, while delegators can override their validator's vote.
Six months after its first listing, Sunrise reports more than $3.5B of Solana volume across 14M trades and roughly 221,000 wallets. Its Wormhole NTT model gives outside assets one issuer-controlled canonical Solana mint, so wallets, Jupiter routes, market makers, and DeFi protocols can coordinate around the same address from day one.
Solana Mobile starts four two-week rounds of Seeker Season 2 quests and badges, running through August 30 as the dApp Store passes 1,000 apps. Round 1 ends July 15; 25M SKR is allocated to participants and opens for on-device claiming through Seed Vault Wallet on July 17.
SOL trades around $75–$77 with a market cap near $44B, ranking #7, after rebounding from June's ~$60 low but remaining roughly 74% below its all-time high. DefiLlama measures about $4.9B in DeFi TVL and $14.3B in stablecoins. Tokenized-stock volume has crossed $10B, the Seeker dApp Store holds 1,000+ apps, and the network's no-major-outage streak reaches roughly 29 months. Alpenglow mainnet preparation has begun, but Votor is not activated yet; the current plan targets the mainnet switch in Q3.
And the next chapter is being written.