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.
Dragonfly Capital partner Haseeb Qureshi passes on the Solana round, a decision that will look increasingly costly 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 (Zug), 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 cross-chain proposal flaw lets an attacker drain ~$6M from the Audius governance treasury.
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 compromised. The Slope mobile app was logging unencrypted seed phrases to a centralized Sentry telemetry server. Not a Solana protocol issue, but it badly damages 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 admin-key compromise drains liquidity from constant-product pools. Raydium reimburses users from its treasury; partial recovery.
Lending protocol exploited via plvGLP token oracle manipulation, a Mango-style replay.
On Christmas Day, Frank DeGods announces both flagship NFT collections will bridge off Solana: DeGods to Ethereum, y00ts to Polygon. Reports later allege DeGods asked the Foundation for $5M to stay and was refused; Polygon paid ~$3M to attract y00ts. Solana NFT volumes briefly collapse.
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.
Listings on Coinbase, Binance, OKX, Huobi, MEXC, Bybit, Gate.io land in the first week of January. BONK becomes the first sustained recovery narrative for the chain.
White-hat hackers, working with Jump Crypto and Oasis under a UK High Court order, counter-exploit the Wormhole attacker's Oasis vault, recovering ~$140–225M of the stolen ETH.
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 Saga phone at $1,000. Sales are slow at launch, 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.
10,000 xNFTs (executable NFTs) by Coral (Armani Ferrante and Tristan Yver), launched exclusively in Backpack wallet. Mint disrupted by bots and DDoS, restarts a day later. Reportedly drives $8M+ in mint revenue and revives Solana NFTs.
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.
State Compression / cNFTs ship, enabling Merkle-tree off-chain state. Helium mints ~900,000 hotspot NFTs for ~$7 total, a thousands-of-times cost reduction that defines "Only Possible On Solana."
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.
Aurory's DEX is exploited via a stake-mechanism flaw, a smaller incident in the otherwise quiet 2023.
Visa expands USDC settlement to Solana (with Worldpay and Nuvei), the first major payments-rail integration. Google Cloud announces a block-producing Solana validator the same month. SOL surges ~15%; the FTX overhang formally lifts.
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.
90M JTO airdropped to ~10,000 wallets: JitoSOL stakers, validators, MEV searchers. FDV briefly rivals Lido. Lower-tier recipients receive $9,800–$14,500. Solana DEX volumes hit a yearly high.
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.
SOL closes the year around $109.55, a +997% annual return, the year's best major-asset performance. 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.
Three English founders (Alon Cohen, Noah Tweedale, Dylan Kerler) launch Pump.fun. Anyone can deploy a memecoin in seconds with bonding-curve liquidity and 1% trading fees. By mid-2025 the platform facilitates 6M+ tokens. CCData later finds ~98.6% are scams or pump-and-dumps.
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 bug in the BPF Loader's LoadedPrograms cache causes a ~5-hour outage. As of May 2026 it remains the last officially confirmed major outage, a 27-month uptime streak and a dramatic reliability turnaround.
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 crowdfunds ~$700,000 for a "Sphere Wif Hat" Las Vegas Sphere advertisement. The campaign is ultimately abandoned and the funds remain dormant, an ongoing community embarrassment.
An anonymous developer mistakenly burns LP tokens and the entire $10M presale-airdrop allocation in a "mindless misclick" while attempting to revoke mint authority. The token still trades and surges 2,900%+; one trader reportedly turns $1.98M into $5M in twelve minutes. Refunds completed by mid-2025.
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 its KMNO token. Airdrop checker goes live April 4.
Bloomberg reports the FTX estate sold up to 30M locked SOL at $64 to Galaxy Trading and Pantera Capital, collectively raising ~$870M. Subsequent rounds priced at $95 and $102. Total: 41M SOL across three auctions.
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.
The Solana Labs validator-client team spins out as Anza, a dedicated core-protocol R&D company. The Labs client is renamed Agave. Solana Labs focuses on products; the Foundation handles ecosystem support.
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.
BONK partial defrost ships and FARTCOIN, an AI-agent narrative token in the Truth Terminal lineage, rises through the ranks of the supercycle pantheon.
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.
PENGU bridges the originally-Ethereum Pudgy Penguins collection to Solana, distributing tokens to holders of Pudgy Penguins, Lil Pudgys, and other assets, one of the largest airdrops in Solana history.
The @solana/web3.js npm package is briefly compromised through two malicious versions (1.95.6, 1.95.7), draining ~$150k before the supply-chain attack is contained.
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 ships ZK Compression, a zero-knowledge state-compression standard for accounts, complementing the cNFT Merkle-tree approach.
A cluster of mid-tier exploits hit retail-facing trading tools (Banana Gun, Thunder Terminal, DEXX, NoOnes), each costing mid-six- to seven-figure sums.
Real-estate derivatives protocol Parcl is hit by a front-end supply-chain exploit, small in dollar terms but a reminder that web2 surfaces remain the soft underbelly of the chain.
A sitting U.S. president, an Argentine "Cryptogate," the Alpenglow announcement, the PUMP ICO, and the ETFs.
President-elect Trump launches an official memecoin on Solana three days before inauguration. 200M circulating of 1B total. 80% held by Trump-linked entities (CIC Digital LLC, Fight Fight Fight LLC). Within hours, soars over 300% to a $75.35 ATH on Jan 19. First-week metrics: ~$10B market cap, ~$41B trading volume.
A $MELANIA token launches the same week. Some on-chain analyses (Bubblemaps, TRM Labs) suggest Hayden Davis "sniped" tokens. TRUMP price drops over 50% within minutes.
SOL hits a new all-time high of $294.85 (CoinGecko/CoinMarketCap), catalyzed by the TRUMP launch. Around 9M new daily Solana addresses are observed in the first week.
Jupiter distributes 700M JUP (~$616M) to ~2M wallets, the second annual airdrop and proof that Solana DEX leaders can make airdrop programs feel ritualized.
Burwick Law / Wolf Popper file a class action in S.D.N.Y. on behalf of a PNUT investor, ~$500M in alleged damages, multi-token claims that the platform sells unregistered securities.
At 7:01pm Argentina time on Feb 14, President Javier Milei tweets a Solana contract address for $LIBRA (deployed by Delaware-registered Kelsier Ventures, CEO Hayden Davis). Market cap peaks ~$4.5B before insiders extract ~$100M; estimated investor losses ~$251M. Milei deletes the tweet hours later. Davis later admits on Coffeezilla to "sniping" both LIBRA and MELANIA, claiming $113M profit.
SOL is down ~30% year-to-date amid LIBRA fallout and broader memecoin disillusionment.
Pump.fun ships its own AMM, replacing Raydium as the default liquidity destination for graduated tokens. Pump.fun's launchpad market share later declines from over 98% to ~57.5% by mid-May 2025 as competitors emerge.
Pump.fun's official X account is briefly compromised and used to promote a fake token before the team regains control.
11.2M SOL (~$2.06B) from the FTX estate unlocks, held primarily by Galaxy, Pantera, and Figure (purchased at $64/$95/$102).
SIMD-0228 (proposed by Multicoin's Tushar Jain and Anza's Max Resnick) would have replaced 4.7% fixed inflation with a market-driven 1.5% target. Fails with 61.39% (66.67% supermajority needed), the highest-turnout governance vote in Solana history. SIMD-0123 (block-reward redistribution to delegators) passes at 74.91%.
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 pioneer the "Digital Asset Treasury" model for Solana, together accumulating 4M+ SOL on their balance sheets, MicroStrategy-style.
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 vacates all three Mango Markets convictions on a Rule 29 motion, ruling the protocol "had no terms of service requiring repayment", a landmark "code is law" precedent for DeFi prosecution.
At Solana Accelerate NYC, Anza unveils Alpenglow, the largest consensus upgrade in Solana's history, and the work of Professor Roger Wattenhofer's lab at ETH Zurich. Replaces Tower BFT with Votor (one-or-two-round voting; 100–150ms finality) and Rotor (single-hop block propagation), formalized as SIMD-0326.
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 raises ~$1.3B ($600M public + $700M private) at a $4B FDV, among the largest token launches in Solana history. 25% to ICO, 24% community/airdrops, ~10% creator-revenue sharing.
A mainnet stress test reaches 100,000 sustained TPS, a credible production-grade demonstration of the throughput PoH was always supposed to enable.
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.
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.
Validators approve Alpenglow with 98.27% in favor (1.05% against, 0.36% abstain) and 52% of total stake voting, the most lopsided major governance vote in Solana history. Yakovenko, who originally invented Proof of History, signs off on its replacement.
The SEC approves generic listing standards for spot crypto/commodity ETFs, slashing review time from ~240 days to ~75 and clearing the runway for the U.S. Solana spot ETFs that follow weeks later.
Hong Kong's ChinaAMC launches the world's first spot Solana ETF, twelve days ahead of the U.S. debut.
Bitwise BSOL launches on NYSE, the first U.S. spot Solana ETF. 100% of holdings staked through Helius. 0.20% expense ratio (waived first 3 months / first $1B AUM). Garners $69M day-one volume; Bloomberg calls it the strongest ETF debut of 2025 across any asset class.
Grayscale converts GSOL to a spot Solana ETF the day after BSOL's NYSE debut.
A 6 Tbps DDoS attack on the Solana ecosystem, the fourth-largest in history, is absorbed with "zero impact" per published incident reports. The reliability turnaround is now a sustained property, not a single event.
VSOL, FSOL, and TSOL all launch. By Nov 21, U.S. spot Solana ETFs log 19 consecutive days of inflows totaling ~$476M, even as SOL falls from $186 to ~$130.
House Judiciary Democrats (Rep. Jamie Raskin) release a 200-page report alleging Trump's crypto policies "were used to benefit Trump and his family," adding billions to his net worth via "schemes…entangled with foreign governments, corporate allies, and criminal actors." Trump-affiliated entities still control 80% of TRUMP supply with three-year unlock schedule.
Breakpoint at Etihad Arena draws 7,000+ attendees from 100+ countries. Headline announcements: full Firedancer live on mainnet after ~100 days of testing; Phantom integrating Kalshi prediction markets for 20M users; Visa flips USDC settlement for U.S. banks; Coinbase native Solana DEX trading; Foundation announces a permissionless XRP Ledger bridge.
SOL closes the year around $125–138, down ~56% from the January peak but still ranking the chain firmly in the top 10 by market cap. Solana TVL stabilizes near $8.7B.
Sub-second finality on the horizon, institutional flows, and a story still being written.
Jupiter launches JupUSD, a yield-bearing stablecoin backed by BlackRock's BUIDL Fund. Solana's largest DEX aggregator becomes a stablecoin issuer.
The final Jupuary snapshot closes, the last airdrop in the program. 400M JUP allocated, with 300M reserved for the Jupnet omnichain liquidity network.
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.
Alpenglow ships to mainnet, delivering deterministic sub-second finality and eliminating voting fees. U.S. Solana ETF cumulative inflows pass $900M by early March.
Frankendancer/Firedancer adoption climbs to ~21% of total stake. The single-client era, and the systemic risk that defined Solana's outage history, is formally over.
The Solana Mobile Seeker airdrop ships its SKR token to phone holders in Q1 2026, carrying forward the Saga / BONK airdrop model that made the original phone famous.
A compromised deployer key (no timelock), linked to a North Korean hacker group, drains ~$295M from Drift. The team proposes a recovery-token framework using protocol revenue, a $127.5M Tether commitment, and $20M from partners.
Western Union launches USDPT, a dollar-backed stablecoin on Solana (Anchorage Digital Bank issuance) for 24/7 agent settlement. J.P. Morgan and Anchorage announce a Solana stablecoin reserves partnership.
Phone records leaked in April 2026 show Milei spoke twice with Mauricio Novelli, minutes before and after the LIBRA launch tweet, escalating the still-open Argentine federal investigation.
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."
Circle mints $750M USDC on Solana in a single issuance, lifting cumulative 2025 USDC issuance on Solana past $2.85B. Stablecoin supply on Solana hits record highs.
SOL trades at ~$87–$90 with a market cap around $50B, ranking #6–8 by market cap. ~1,300 validators, ~21% on Frankendancer/Firedancer, and a 27-month uptime streak since the last major outage. TVL ~$8.7B. Five active U.S. spot ETFs. The story continues.
And the next chapter is being written.