What is Solana?

Solmate Team — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:54:04 +0000

Since launching in 2020, Solana has grown into one of the most active blockchain ecosystems by developer count, daily transaction volume, and total value locked in DeFi.

Most blockchains force you to pick between speed, cost, and decentralization. Bitcoin is secure and decentralized but caps out at about seven transactions per second. Ethereum added programmability with smart contracts but still hits congestion and gas fee spikes that make simple token swaps cost more than the tokens themselves. Solana was engineered from scratch to deliver high throughput natively, without depending on Layer 2 rollups or sharding to get the job done.

The technical foundation is a mechanism called Proof of History (PoH). PoH generates a cryptographic timestamp for every transaction before it enters consensus, which lets validators agree on ordering without waiting through sequential communication rounds. That single design choice is the main reason Solana can produce blocks roughly every 400 milliseconds. Pair that
with Sealevel, a parallel transaction execution engine that processes non-overlapping transactions simultaneously, and you get the kind of throughput most other chains cannot match.

How the network operates

Solana runs on proof-of-stake consensus. Validators secure the network by locking up SOL (the native token) as collateral rather than burning electricity on mining hardware. Block production rotates among validators based on how much SOL is staked with them, and honest participation earns rewards. As of early 2026, the network has roughly 1,000 voting validators spread across the globe, with additional non-voting RPC nodes serving data to applications.

Fees on Solana average a fraction of a cent. You pay in SOL, and the cost stays low because the network’s architecture absorbs high transaction volumes without the auction-style fee markets that push Ethereum gas prices into double digits. That cost structure makes Solana viable for use cases that would bleed money on pricier chains: micropayments, high-frequency DeFi, on-chain order books, and real-time gaming.

Not all validators look the same under the hood, though. Some run on cloud infrastructure through AWS or Google Cloud, while others operate dedicated bare metal servers in physical data centers. That distinction matters more than most people realize, because it affects performance, uptime, and the network’s resilience when a single cloud provider goes down. Solmate runs bare metal validators because physical infrastructure delivers lower latency, better reliability, and zero dependence on any one cloud provider.

What SOL does

SOL is the native token. It pays transaction fees, secures the network through staking, and participates in on-chain governance. If you hold SOL, you can delegate it to a validator and earn staking rewards, which come from a mix of newly minted SOL (inflation) and transaction fees. Annual staking yield fluctuates with the total amount staked and network activity, but it generally lands around 6%.

SOL also functions as the base currency across Solana’s DeFi ecosystem. Lending protocols, decentralized exchanges, and liquid staking platforms all denominate positions in it, and the token’s price reflects both how quickly the network is being adopted and where the broader crypto market is headed.

Frequently asked questions

How fast is Solana?

Blocks come roughly every 400 milliseconds, and the network handles several thousand
transactions per second under normal conditions. Theoretical throughput is higher, and upgrades like Firedancer are designed to close the gap between theory and practice.

How much does a Solana transaction cost?

Usually less than a cent. Fees are paid in SOL and stay low because the architecture avoids the congestion-driven fee auctions you see on Ethereum.

Is Solana decentralized?

Roughly 1,000 voting validators run by independent operators around the world, plus additional RPC nodes. The Nakamoto Coefficient, which measures how many validators would need to collude to compromise the network, sits around 20. That puts Solana in the same range as most major proof-of-stake chains.

What is the difference between Solana and Ethereum?

Both support smart contracts, but they make different tradeoffs. Ethereum leans on its Layer 2 scaling roadmap and has the larger DeFi ecosystem by total value locked. Solana prioritizes base-layer speed and sub-cent fees, which makes it better suited for high-frequency applications like on-chain order books, payments, and real-time data feeds.

What is SOL used for?

Paying transaction fees, staking to secure the network, and serving as the base asset across Solana’s DeFi protocols.

What are bare metal validators

Solmate Team — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:10:00 +0000

A bare metal validator is a blockchain validator that runs on a dedicated physical server. The operator leases or owns the machine outright and has full control over how it is configured, from the BIOS firmware and CPU core assignments to how storage drives are formatted and how network traffic is routed. Nobody else runs workloads on the machine, so all of its resources go toward running the validator.

The “bare metal” part of the name refers to the hardware itself. There is no virtualization layer, no hypervisor, and no shared hosting environment sitting between the validator software and the physical components of the server. The software talks directly to the CPU, the memory, and the storage. That means the operator can tune performance in ways that cloud setups don’t allow.

Bare metal validators are typically housed in colocation data centers where the operator selects the facility, negotiates power and cooling, and manages the physical security relationship directly. The server hardware is purpose-built for the workload it runs, which on high-throughput blockchains like Solana means high clock-speed CPUs, fast NVMe storage, and low-latency network connectivity. The operator decides where the machine lives, what it runs, and how it connects to the rest of the network.

Bare metal vs Cloud

Most internet services run on cloud platforms with providers renting out slices of shared physical servers to many customers at once. The customer never touches the actual machine, and the provider handles maintenance, networking, and hardware allocation behind the scenes. Cloud environments share resources across tenants, so when another customer on the same physical server spikes their CPU or storage usage, it can cause latency jitter for everyone else on that machine. This is commonly called the “noisy neighbor” problem, and container orchestration layers used in cloud environments can add another 10 to 50 milliseconds of latency on top of that.

Bare metal is the opposite arrangement. There is no resource contention from other tenants, and the operator controls CPU core allocation, storage behavior, and network prioritization directly.

Solana validators process transactions, organize them into blocks, and vote on whether those blocks are valid, with a new block arriving roughly every 400 milliseconds. On a chain with 15-second block times, those extra milliseconds from cloud are rounding errors, but on Solana they eat into a real percentage of the window a validator has to receive, process, and vote on a block. Missed windows mean missed votes, fewer rewards, and a rising skip rate. Bare metal gets rid of that problem.

Why bare metal is becoming the standard for Solana validators

Major staking operators that have migrated from cloud to bare metal have reported skip rates below 0.1%, well under network averages, and higher staking rewards to go with it. The gains are consistent across different operators and regions, showcasing the boost that bare metal operations have over cloud competitors.

Solana’s validator network currently spans roughly 800 active validators across more than 40 countries, and the two largest hosting providers by staked SOL are both bare metal operators. Major cloud platforms account for less than 10% of total stake combined. The migration toward dedicated hardware has been accelerating since 2024, as performance and cost metrics continue favoring these dedicated operations.

People who hold SOL can delegate their tokens to a validator they trust, which increases that validator’s voting weight and its share of rewards. Since a validator’s skip rate, uptime, and commission rate are all publicly visible on-chain, delegators tend to move their stake toward more reliable operators. Better hardware means better performance, better performance means more delegation, and more delegation means more revenue. As bare metal operations continue to be the most performative form of validator, more validators will opt for bare metal.