Solana (SOL)
Solana ranks #5 of 484 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #7: 2 of the 6 assets ahead of it are not native coins but tokens or claims. A token is issued on a host blockchain rather than running its own; a claim stands for an asset already counted. Of the 2 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, all are claims on other assets.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | A+ · 76/100 · provisional, A to A+ |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #5 |
| Rank counting claims | #7 |
| Market capitalisation | $48.7B |
| Price | $82.46 |
| Circulating supply | 591,148,961 SOL |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | Tower BFT + Proof of History |
| Network purpose | Smart-contract platform |
| Ledger type | Multi-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | Presale |
| Regulatory class | Commodity |
Market figures from the 10 November 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
CoinSpectrum Grade (Source)
A+ — 76 out of 100, provisional (from 10 of 10 sections, 10 November 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 74 to 78 (A to A+).
| Section and criteria | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Consensus | 9.1 | average of 2 criteria |
| By leader (its largest chain's market cap) (Source) | 9.1 | Proof of stake: 9.1 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap |
| By family (all its chains' market cap) (Source) | 9.1 | Proof of stake: 9.1 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains |
| Supply | 7.7 | the supply scale times 0.9, and a point for a fixed cap that holds |
| Supply (21 million scores 10) | 8.6 | no fixed maximum; 591 million in circulation |
| Distribution | 6.4 | average of 3 parts |
| Holder concentration (Source) | – | Not yet measured |
| Active addresses | – | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 2.1 | 79.5% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. 500M SOL were created in the genesis block (16 Mar 2020) and fully allocated (seed, founding, validator and strategic sales, CoinList auction, team, foundation, community reserve), against a total supply of 628,949,550 SOL (CoinMarketCap via Kalkine, 22 Jun 2026); the foundation's May 2020 removal of 11.36M SOL is ignored, as the whole genesis allocation counts. source |
| Fundraising (share sold) (Source) | 7 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 30.1% of supply sold. Genesis sales in 2018-2020: seed 81.16M, founding 64.6M, validator 25.9M and strategic 9.4M SOL, plus the 8M SOL CoinList auction (Mar 2020) = 189.06M SOL. Against 628.95M total supply (CoinMarketCap, Jun 2026) = 30.1%; using the later ~632.5M CMC figure it is 29.9%. Later FTX-estate sales of locked SOL are third-party sales and are excluded. Private seed, founding, validator and strategic sales (Fidelity breakdown: 81.2M, 64.6M, 25.9M and 9.4M SOL), plus a public CoinList Dutch auction of 8M SOL to non-US buyers on 24 Mar 2020 at $0.22, which raised $1.76M. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. Solana's protocol inflation (disinflationary schedule since Feb 2021) is paid entirely to validators and the stakers delegated to them; there is no foundation, treasury or developer share. Half of base fees are burned, which is not a cut. source |
| Decentralisation | 9.1 | average of 4 parts |
| Governance (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: Native SOL has no freeze or blacklist authority; past outages were failures followed by coordinated validator restarts, not a halt power held by any party. source |
| No central team (Source) | 10 | No central team: The Agave client is developed by Anza and the Firedancer client by Jump Crypto; protocol changes go through the public SIMD process. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 7 | Gated by stake: any holder with enough stake can validate: access bought with coins |
| Nodes (Source) | 9.4 | 659 active validators or block producers (source: Bitwise) |
| Security | 8.9 | 7.1 of 8 points source |
| Pool diversity (Largest pool 50% 0 to 20% 10, largest three 90% 0 to 50% 10; 2 points) | 10 | largest 3.91%, largest three 10.6% |
| Network activity (Transactions a day, 250 0, 500,000 or more 10; 2 points) | 10 | about 114,456,390 transactions a day |
| Hashrate (Own work 5, its power 1 kW 0 to 10 GW 5; 1 point) | 1 | not mined: another consensus, 1 |
| Clients (Separate code and teams 10, separate code or teams 9, a fork by the same team or a stale second 8; one client: a new version within 12 months 7, 24 months 6, none in 24 months 5, none in 48 months 3; a second in development +0.5, a second seen running +1, 8 at most with one client; chain ended 0; 1 point) | 10 | Agave (Rust, Anza, v4, Nov 2026) and Firedancer (C, separate code by Jump Crypto, v26.10, Nov 2026) |
| Open source (Node software) | ✓ | |
| No 51% attack (Nor a deep reorganisation, five years) | ✓ | |
| Scalability | 7.3 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0.0006 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 121, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 10 | about 13,000 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 0 | a block every 0.4 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (24 MB or more 10: the ten busiest networks' median demand, 16.4 MB, and half again for growth) | 10 | 31.6 MB limit (converted from its gas, compute, mass or count limit), 47300 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 6.7 | 2 of 3 passed |
| Fast payments (Safe to accept within seconds · Whitepaper abstract, §1, §2 and §11) | ✓ | Blocks are optimistically confirmed by two-thirds of stake within about a second; no optimistically confirmed block has been rolled back, though rooted finality takes roughly 13 s on the Tower BFT path. |
| Pruned nodes (Old history dropped, every rule checked · Whitepaper §7) | ✓ | Agave validators boot from a recent snapshot and cap the stored ledger with --limit-ledger-size; full history lives in external archives. |
| Light clients (Payments verified from headers · Whitepaper §8) | ✗ | No light-client protocol on mainnet; wallets trust RPC servers. |
| Privacy | 2.3 | 2.3 of 10: whitepaper privacy 2.3 of 7, extra features 0 of 3 source |
| Protocol level privacy (Keys not tied to an identity · Whitepaper §10) | 10 | Anyone can create keys and receive and send coins; the protocol carries no identity check. |
| UTXO ledger (Separate outputs, change to a new address · Whitepaper §2, §9) | 0 | An account ledger: one running balance for each address, so the remainder stays at the sending address and its payments share one public history. |
| HD addresses (A new address for each payment, unlinked · Whitepaper §10) | 0 | Ed25519 keys under SLIP-0010 allow hardened derivation only: each new address needs the private seed, and no public key derives them |
| Hidden amounts (Amounts confidential) | 0 | Solana confidential transfers are a Token-2022 extension for SPL tokens; native SOL transfers cannot hide amounts. |
| Hidden parties (Sender and receiver hidden) | 0 | Confidential transfers leave sender and receiver accounts visible. |
| Network privacy (Origin hidden by default) | 0 | Transactions are forwarded straight to leaders over QUIC; no Dandelion or built-in Tor. |
| Programmability | 8.9 | 8 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance (At protocol level) | 2 | SPL tokens through the on-chain Token and Token-2022 programs, open to any account. |
| Smart contracts (General-purpose) | 2 | On-chain programs (sBPF) deployable by any account, running DEXs, lending and games on mainnet. |
| Multisig and time locks (Without a third party) | ✓ | Through programs: Squads multisig with a configurable time lock on approved transactions. |
| Atomic swaps (With other chains) | ✓ | Garden's Solana HTLC program (SHA-256 secret hash, slot-based expiry and refund) used for cross-chain swaps. |
| Native DEX (Trades the coin itself, not a claim) | ✓ | Traded as itself, not as a wrapped token or a claim: THORChain; Chainflip; its own chain's DEXes (Solana, DefiLlama). |
| Cross-chain messaging (Verified by the chain itself) | ✗ | No protocol messaging; Wormhole and other bridges are third-party guardian or relayer networks. |
| NFTs (Carried by the chain's rules) | ✓ | NFTs are SPL Token program mints with supply 1, zero decimals and no mint authority, described by the Token Metadata or Core programs. |
| Demand | 8.7 | average of 7 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 47 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 9.8 | $1,120,224,108 traded in 24 hours; #5 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $793,087,476) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 7 | 1.3% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (±2% of the price ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 7.2 | $68,905,827 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.14% of its market cap, median of the last 15 days; a lower bound: the books returned by 2 of them stop short of 2% |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 10 | $49B, at the top of the scale |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 7.2 | futures, options and margin positions 7.9% of its market cap |
| Wallet support (wallets that hold it, 10 or more: 10) | 10 | 19 wallets in the site's wallet directory |
| Record | 7.7 | average of 3 criteria |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 6 | 6 full years since 2020-04-10, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, fixes, vulnerabilities) | 8 | 3 positive, 0 negative, 1 not yet researched source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 4,972 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/anza-xyz/agave); Agave (reference validator) v4.3.2, released 2026-10-21; v4.4 in release candidate. |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | Agave patches, Apr-May 2025: fixed the ZK ElGamal proof bug; Agave 3.0.14, Jan 2026: fixed vote-processing vulnerabilities. |
| Shipped a scaling upgrade in two years, +1 | ✓ | Block compute limit raised to 60M CU (Jul 2025) and to 100M CU (SIMD-0286, 29 Jul 2026). |
| Not yet researched | ||
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years | – | |
| Conduct (origin, claims, halts) | 9 | 2 positive, 5 negative source |
| Positive record | ||
| Launched with a stated purpose, not as a joke | ✓ | |
| No claims by its founders that contradict its own design | ✓ | |
| Negative record | ||
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2022-05-01 | ✗ | Mainnet stopped producing blocks for about 7 hours under NFT-mint bot spam; validators coordinated a restart. status.solana.com cointelegraph.com |
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2022-06-01 | ✗ | About 4.5-hour halt from a durable-nonce transaction bug; validators restarted the cluster with durable nonces disabled. status.solana.com fortune.com |
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2022-09-30 | ✗ | About 8-hour halt after a validator's primary and hot-spare nodes ran at once and produced duplicate blocks, which a fork-choice bug could not resolve; validators coordinated a restart. status.solana.com theblock.co |
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2023-02-25 | ✗ | Roughly 19-hour degradation (vote-only from 05:46 UTC on 25 Feb) as block finalization slowed during the 1.13-to-1.14 upgrade; validators restarted on downgraded v1.13.6. status.solana.com cointelegraph.com |
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2024-02-06 | ✗ | Block production stopped for about 5 hours (09:53-14:57 UTC) from a JIT-cache bug; validators restarted on v1.17.20. status.solana.com solanacompass.com |
Ten sections, weighted equally, each 0 to 10: consensus (the two ladders), supply (the supply scale and a fixed cap that holds), distribution (premine, fundraising, developer share, holders), decentralisation (governance, no central team, who can mint, nodes), security, scalability, privacy, programmability (what the scripting layer can do beyond the whitepaper's payment system), demand, and record (age, development, conduct). They are built from the criteria in the second table: privacy, scalability, security and decentralisation are the Cryptocurrency Standards among them, as follows: privacy (the whitepaper's three checks a base of 7 of 10, three extra features up to 3 more), scalability (four measures and three features), security (pool diversity, network activity, hashrate, clients and two checks) and decentralisation (governance, no central team, who can mint, nodes, holders, premine, fundraising and developer share); programmability (token issuance, smart contracts and five checks) follows them, and supply and demand are two: the supply, scored against 21 million, and demand, the average of seven measures of the market and the wallets. Provisional: parts marked — are not yet measured and are left out of the average. A rating of structure and market depth, not a price forecast or investment advice. How the grade is built · Highest-graded cryptocurrencies.
Proof of Stake coins
Ethereum ETHA+
BNB BNBA
TRON TRXA
Hyperliquid HYPEB
Cardano ADAA
NEAR Protocol NEARA
Avalanche AVAXAAll Proof of Stake chains →Proof of Work coins
Bitcoin BTCA+
Zcash ZECA+
Dogecoin DOGEA+
Monero XMRA+
Bitcoin Cash BCHA++
Litecoin LTCA+
Ethereum Classic ETCAAll Proof of Work chains →Supply
591,148,961 SOL are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
Launch and allocation
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 79.5% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 30.1% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Nodes or validators | 659 |
| Fundraising | Private or venture funding |
500M SOL were created in the genesis block (16 Mar 2020) and fully allocated (seed, founding, validator and strategic sales, CoinList auction, team, foundation, community reserve), against a total supply of 628,949,550 SOL (CoinMarketCap via Kalkine, 22 Jun 2026); the foundation's May 2020 removal of 11.36M SOL is ignored, as the whole genesis allocation counts.
Private seed, founding, validator and strategic sales (Fidelity breakdown: 81.2M, 64.6M, 25.9M and 9.4M SOL), plus a public CoinList Dutch auction of 8M SOL to non-US buyers on 24 Mar 2020 at $0.22, which raised $1.76M.
Genesis sales in 2018-2020: seed 81.16M, founding 64.6M, validator 25.9M and strategic 9.4M SOL, plus the 8M SOL CoinList auction (Mar 2020) = 189.06M SOL. Against 628.95M total supply (CoinMarketCap, Jun 2026) = 30.1%; using the later ~632.5M CMC figure it is 29.9%. Later FTX-estate sales of locked SOL are third-party sales and are excluded.
Solana's protocol inflation (disinflationary schedule since Feb 2021) is paid entirely to validators and the stakers delegated to them; there is no foundation, treasury or developer share. Half of base fees are burned, which is not a cut.
Sources: coincodex.com · tokenomist.ai · coinmarketcap.com · solana.com · solana.com · docs.anza.xyz. Researched 2026-10-24, medium confidence.
What a regulator has said
Officially a digital commodity (SEC-CFTC, Mar 2026) AND contested — its securities status was alleged or widely disputed. Both classifications apply. Context: pre-issued via Solana Labs/Foundation sales (no mining).
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
How CoinSpectrum ranks Solana
Solana is #5 among cryptocurrencies and #7 in the market ranking, which lists wrapped coins, staked derivatives, stablecoins and tokens alongside them. CoinSpectrum counts an asset once, and counts only cryptocurrencies: assets with their own blockchain and their own consensus. A wrapped coin, a staked derivative or a stablecoin is a claim on something already counted; a token, memecoin or otherwise, runs on another chain's blocks. All of them are listed, each in its own section, and none is added to the total. The 2 places between Solana's two ranks are held by claims and tokens, not by other networks. The methodology sets out the rule and the counting rule argues for it.
The price above is the median of the exchanges the site reads live, checked every minute and cross-checked against a market snapshot (how market data is gathered). The grade is scored on published criteria, each with its source (the method). The site is independent, nothing on it is a paid placement, and its statements are signed (about CoinSpectrum, the manifesto).
See the 31 wrapped and staked claims on Solana →
Wallets that hold Solana
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