About Solana
Solana is a proof-of-stake blockchain built for high transaction throughput, using a timestamping method it calls proof of history to order transactions. Its native token, SOL, pays network fees and is staked by validators securing the chain.
Who decided Solana’s issuance
Solana’s inflation schedule was approved by an on-chain vote of its validators. The documentation records that the community of validators voted to enable staking rewards and the inflation that funds them. The schedule began at 8 per cent a year, falls by 15 per cent of its own value each year, and settles at a long-run 1.5 per cent. Those settings are themselves governable, so the schedule can be changed again by the route that set it.
How the new SOL, the network’s own token, reaches a holder runs through two steps. A validator earns one vote credit each time it votes on a block that is ultimately kept. At the end of each epoch, the period Solana measures rewards over, those credits are tallied and weighted by the stake behind each validator, and that decides the validator’s share of what is issued. The share then passes to its delegators, the holders who assigned stake to it, in proportion to what they assigned. Stake does not earn on its own: a validator that stops voting earns nothing, however much is delegated to it.
The design has stopped outright more than once, and Solana publishes a report each time. In September 2021 bots flooded the network with transactions during a token launch, overflowing validator memory and crashing them. The network was offline for 17 hours, and restarting it needed 80 per cent of active stake to agree. A halt in 2022 came from bots competing for a fixed-price mint. The third had nothing to do with traffic: in February 2024 a fault in the way compiled programs were cached sent validators into continuous recompilation, halting block finalisation from 09:53 to 14:55 UTC.
Longer read: Who sets Solana's issuance schedule, and what the network's design costs it. How Solana's inflation rate was decided, where the newly issued tokens go, what that issuance is paying validators to run, and the documented record of the halts that design has produced.
See more prices on the crypto in AUD hub, and how this figure is struck on the methodology page.