$SOL Solana (SOL) is one of the most popular and promising cryptocurrencies in the crypto ecosystem, especially due to its extremely high transaction speed and its focus on scalability without sacrificing decentralization. Here is a complete summary:

What is Solana (SOL)?

Solana is a layer 1 blockchain designed to support decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts with a high processing capacity and very low costs.

• Speed: Processes more than 65,000 transactions per second (tps) under optimal conditions.

• Low cost: Minimal transaction fees (less than $0.01).

• Programming language: Uses Rust, which attracts many developers.

• Proof of History: A unique mechanism that timestamps transactions to order them without needing to validate them one by one.

What is the SOL token used for?

• Transaction fees: To pay fees on the network.

• Staking: Holders can delegate SOL to validators to secure the network and earn rewards.

• Governance: Solana is moving towards on-chain governance with participation through SOL.

Key advantages

• Extreme speed and efficiency

• Growing ecosystem: NFTs, DeFi, gaming, payments, and more.

• Institutional adoption: FTX significantly boosted it (although it was a hard hit after its fall), but Solana survived and strengthened.

• Solana Saga smartphones: Proprietary hardware initiatives.

Disadvantages or criticisms

• Relative decentralization: Some criticize that it has fewer nodes than Ethereum, for example.

• History of outages: It has experienced network disruptions in the past (although it has improved significantly since 2023).

• Fierce competition: Ethereum, Avalanche, Sui, Aptos, among others.