Solana (SOL) is an open source project implementing a new, high-performance, permissionless blockchain with significantly low transaction fees. Solana is the fastest blockchain in the world and the fastest growing ecosystem in crypto, with over 400 projects spanning DeFi, NFTs, Web3 and more.

Solana can accommodate 65 000 transactions per second. The Solana Foundation is based in Geneva, Switzerland and maintains the open source project. A SOL is the name of Solana's native token, which can be passed to nodes in a Solana cluster in exchange for running an on-chain program or validating its output. The system may perform micropayments of fractional SOLs, which are called lamports. They are named in honour of Solana's biggest technical influence, Leslie Lamport. A lamport has a value of 0.000000001 SOL. A cluster is a set of computers that work together and can be viewed from the outside as a single system. A Solana cluster is a set of independently owned computers working together (and sometimes against each other) to verify the output of untrusted, user-submitted programs.

A Solana cluster can be utilized any time a user wants to preserve an immutable record of events in time or programmatic interpretations of those events. One use is to track which of the computers did meaningful work to keep the cluster running. Another use might be to track the possession of real-world assets. In each case, the cluster produces a record of events called the ledger. It will be preserved for the lifetime of the cluster. As long as someone somewhere in the world maintains a copy of the ledger, the output of its programs (which may contain a record of who possesses what) will forever be reproducible, independent of the organization that launched it. Hence, Solana accommodates a high-performance blockchain protocol and underpins a burgeoning body of DeFi technologies and DApps.