What Is Solana? A Plain-Language Guide to One of Crypto's Busiest Networks

Sending money the old way is slow and expensive. A bank wire can take a day and carry a real fee. Moving a few dollars across a border can cost more than the dollars are worth. Solana is one of the newer systems built to fix that, and a lot of digital money is already moving across it.

Solana is a public payment and record-keeping network. Think of it as a shared online ledger that no single company owns, running on thousands of computers around the world. Its promise is simple: move money and record the transaction in under a second, for a fraction of a cent.

This is a plain-language guide to what Solana is, how it works, what people use it for, and where the catch is.

How it moves money so fast

Networks like this rely on independent computers, run by people and companies all over the world, to check and record every transaction. The usual bottleneck is getting all those computers to agree on what happened, and in what order. That agreement takes time.

Solana speeds it up with a few design choices, to put it plainly:

• It puts every transaction in order first, using a kind of built-in tamper-proof clock, so the computers don't have to stop and argue about the sequence.¹
• The computers that run the network each lock up a sum of Solana's own currency as a security deposit. If one tries to cheat, it loses the deposit. That keeps them honest, and it lets the network treat a payment as final, meaning it cannot be undone, in about four-tenths of a second.¹
• It can also handle many payments at the same time, instead of one after another, as long as they don't touch the same account. Doing things side by side, rather than in a single line, is a big part of why it's fast.¹

How fast and how cheap, really

Solana is often advertised at up to 65,000 payments per second. That is a lab figure, a theoretical ceiling. In real use it has run closer to 1,000 to 1,300 payments per second, still far more than older networks handle.²

The cost is the more striking part. A transaction on Solana usually costs well under a penny, often a tiny fraction of one.³ At that price it finally makes sense to send small amounts of money, something that isn't practical on networks where a single transfer can cost several dollars.

What people actually use it for

The clearest sign of what Solana is good for is the money already on it. Most of it sits in stablecoins, which are digital dollars: crypto tokens designed to be worth exactly one US dollar, so their value doesn't bounce around.

There are now more than 13 billion dollars worth of stablecoins on Solana, and about three-quarters of that is USDC, the largest regulated one. Early in 2026, Solana moved more stablecoins than any other network, and at the end of 2025 it passed Ethereum, the largest network of its kind, in USDC transfers.⁴ Put simply, a large share of dollar payments in crypto now runs across Solana.

The catch

Speed has a price. The Solana network has gone down before, with stretches where the network experienced congestion or stopped for a while. The number of independent computers running it also dropped to around 906 by 2026, down from a 2023 peak of roughly 2,560.⁵ Fewer operators is the main reason critics argue the network is more concentrated, and less independent, than it should be.

It is also still changing. New software called Firedancer, built by the trading firm Jump Crypto, went live at the end of 2025 and by mid-2026 was running on about a quarter of those computers. It is meant to make the network faster and harder to knock offline. Rather than take its promises on faith, it is worth watching whether it delivers.⁶

Where Interstice Digital fits

For a company that has to follow the rules, the reason a network like Solana matters isn't the technology. It is that real money is moving on it. And when money moves across a fast public network, the checks that keep it clean have to move with it.

That is what Interstice Digital builds. The Cross-Chain Swap Engine lets organizations and individuals move between Canton, Ethereum, Robinhood Chain and USDC, without sacrificing compliance. We never touch your assets. Every swap settles directly between counterparties, so both legs go through together or neither does, and no one is left exposed if the other backs out. And before any swap, counterparties are screened on both sides, verified at the individual, business and wallet level. Speed is nice. Knowing exactly who you are dealing with, and being able to prove it later, is what lets serious players use these networks at all.

FAQ

Is Solana faster than Ethereum?

For raw speed and cost, yes: Solana is built to handle more payments for less. But the two are built for different things, so it depends what you are measuring. What is on the record is that Solana passed Ethereum in digital-dollar (USDC) transfers at the end of 2025.⁴

What is SOL?

SOL is Solana's own currency. The computers that run the network lock it up as a security deposit, and it is used to pay the small fee on each transaction. This guide does not cover it as an investment.

Why do digital dollars run on Solana?

Because it is cheap and fast. Low fees and near-instant payment make small, frequent transfers practical, and that has made Solana a leading home for USDC and other digital dollars.

The bottom line

Solana is a bet that a public network can be fast and cheap enough for everyday payments, and by the amount of digital dollars moving across it, the bet is working. It makes real trade-offs, on reliability and on how concentrated it is, that are worth watching as it upgrades. For anyone moving dollars this way, the hard question is the same on any fast network: who is on the other side, and can you prove the payment was clean?

About Interstice Digital

Interstice Digital is a U.S.-based digital asset infrastructure company building trading and settlement solutions for compliance-minded individuals and organizations. Interstice Digital is a wholly owned subsidiary of Everyrealm Inc., backed by a16z Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Lightspeed, Galaxy, Brevan Howard, and Liberty City Ventures.

Disclaimer

Interstice Digital publishes this content for informational purposes only. While we work closely with the Canton ecosystem, this post reflects our current understanding based on publicly available sources and may not reflect the most recent developments. Nothing in this post constitutes investment advice, a solicitation, or a recommendation to buy or sell any asset including Canton Coin.

Footnotes

¹ Solana's design (transaction ordering, the security-deposit model, roughly 400ms to final, side-by-side processing): Gate Learn; Ledger Academy.

² Payments per second (65,000 theoretical; ~1,000-1,300 in practice): Gate Learn.

³ Transaction fees (under one cent): Gate Learn; Ledger Academy.

⁴ Digital-dollar supply (>$13B), USDC share (~75%), Solana first by transfer volume, USDC volume passing Ethereum (end of 2025): coinlaw.io; Spark.

⁵ Operator counts (~906 in 2026; ~2,560 peak in 2023): coinlaw.io.

⁶ Firedancer (live end of 2025, ~25% of operators by mid-2026, stated goals): coinlaw.io; DEXTools.