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Solana

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Solana
Solana
Image: Solana logo via CoinGecko
founded2017 (whitepaper), mainnet beta March 16, 2020
foundersAnatoly Yakovenko, Raj Gokal
native tokenSOL
known forSub cent fees, fast blocks, the meme coin era, pump.fun

A high speed, low fee blockchain founded by Anatoly Yakovenko that became the home chain of meme coin trading and the trenches from 2023 onward.

Contents
  1. 1 Origins
  2. 2 Why the trenches live on Solana
  3. 3 From FTX collapse to meme coin capital
  4. 4 2026: winter and ambivalence
  5. 5 Cultural position
  6. 6 References

Solana is a proof of stake blockchain designed for high throughput and very low transaction costs. In the broader crypto industry it is discussed as an Ethereum competitor and a venue for payments and finance; in meme coin culture it is simply home. From late 2023 onward Solana hosted the overwhelming majority of new meme coin launches, the launchpads pump.fun and LetsBonk, and the trading culture known as the trenches.

Origins

Solana was conceived in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko, a former Qualcomm engineer, whose whitepaper introduced proof of history, a cryptographic clock that lets validators agree on the order of events without waiting on each other. Yakovenko cofounded Solana Labs with Raj Gokal, and the network's mainnet beta went live on March 16, 2020. The design goal was speed at minimal cost: thousands of transactions per second with fees of a fraction of a cent.

Why the trenches live on Solana

Those engineering choices, made years before pump.fun existed, are the reason meme coin culture settled on Solana. Trench trading involves thousands of tiny, latency sensitive trades in tokens that may only exist for minutes; on Ethereum mainnet, gas fees made that behavior ruinously expensive, while on Solana a failed gamble costs cents in fees. Cheap blockspace also made it economical to deploy tokens in industrial quantities, which platforms like pump.fun (launched January 2024) turned into a product. Traders describe the result as a casino where the table charges almost nothing per bet: the chain does not make the wagers safer, it makes placing them nearly free.

From FTX collapse to meme coin capital

Solana's meme coin era began at its lowest point. The November 2022 collapse of FTX, whose founder Sam Bankman Fried had been the ecosystem's most prominent backer, crashed SOL to roughly 8 dollars and drove projects off the chain. The revival is generally dated to December 2022, when the dog themed token BONK airdropped half its supply to Solana users and, as Bloomberg reported, rode the network's comeback while giving the community a rallying symbol. Through 2023 tokens like dogwifhat (WIF) made Solana the default venue for meme speculation, and the January 2024 launch of pump.fun completed the transformation: at the peak of the cycle Solana accounted for roughly 30 percent of all meme coin trading volume, and millions of tokens were created on the chain.

The frenzy peaked in January 2025 around the launch of Official Trump. Solana recorded all time high decentralized exchange volumes of 28.2 billion dollars and 39.2 billion dollars on January 19 and 20, its stablecoin supply doubled past 10 billion dollars in weeks, and SOL itself hit an all time high of 293.31 dollars on January 19, 2025. Analysts at Helius calculated that more than 10 percent of Solana's cumulative all time DEX volume occurred in the seven days around the TRUMP launch. Through 2025, meme coin activity and launchpad revenue remained the network's largest fee source even as Wall Street institutions and exchange traded funds arrived.

2026: winter and ambivalence

The relationship between Solana and the trenches soured in 2026. The February 2026 market crash and the exhaustion of the meme cycle (see 2026 memecoin winter) cut weekly DEX volume from 118.2 billion dollars to 44.5 billion dollars in three weeks, and by June average daily network fees had fallen roughly 84 percent from January levels. Cofounder Yakovenko publicly dismissed meme coins and NFTs as digital slop without intrinsic value, drawing backlash from the communities that had driven his network's usage. Yet the dependence persisted: Messari reported pump.fun generated 124.7 million dollars of revenue in the first quarter of 2026, about 30 percent of Solana application revenue, making the trenches, even in decline, the chain's biggest business.

Cultural position

Within meme coin culture, Solana occupies the position that a home city holds in a sports rivalry. Trenchers defend it against Ethereum ("too slow, too expensive"), against Base ("corporate"), and against newer chains, while simultaneously complaining about congestion, failed transactions and predatory order flow. The phrase "on Sol" needs no elaboration on crypto twitter; it is understood to mean the trenches themselves.

References

Category: Culture