Solana

Solana is a public proof-of-stake blockchain with smart contract support, designed for high-throughput decentralized applications. Its native token is SOL. Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal founded the project in 2018, and their San Francisco company, Solana Labs, launched the network in March 2020, with the first block produced on 16 March 2020. Yakovenko, a University of Illinois computer science graduate, spent more than a decade at Qualcomm working on wireless and distributed systems and later worked at Mesosphere and Dropbox. In 2017 he outlined proof of history, a timestamping method meant to let validators agree on transaction order faster. Development is shared between Solana Labs and the Solana Foundation.

The most widely reported financing came in June 2021, when Solana Labs sold $314 million of SOL tokens to a group of funds led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital, as reported by the Wall Street Journal and summarized on Wikipedia. Earlier private and public token sales are not detailed in the sources fetched for this profile, so they are not itemized here. The investors that list Solana in their portfolios include Polychain Capital, Slow Ventures, FTX Ventures, Abstract and AU21 Capital. Alameda Research, the trading firm founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, held SOL as its second-largest position, and FTX held roughly $982 million of SOL when it filed for bankruptcy.

SOL rose by nearly 12,000 percent in 2021 and the network's market capitalization topped $70 billion that November. The following period was harder: a roughly 17-hour outage in September 2021 and further outages in May, June and October 2022; a wallet hack in August 2022; a 40 percent one-day drop after the FTX collapse in November 2022; and a 2023 SEC complaint against Coinbase that named SOL as an alleged unregistered security, which the Solana Foundation disputed. Solana Labs said at the time of the FTX failure that it held no assets on FTX and had about 30 months of runway in fiat. SOL reached a new high of about $294 in January 2025 after the $TRUMP memecoin launched on the chain. In 2023 Solana Mobile, a Solana Labs subsidiary, began selling the Saga phone.

Solana illustrates how crypto venture returns can arrive through liquid tokens rather than an IPO or acquisition. Investors who bought SOL in private rounds could reach liquid markets within a few years of the 2020 launch, but the same structure exposed them to drawdowns of more than 90 percent from peak and to counterparty risk, as the FTX estate's large SOL position showed. There is no equity exit to measure; returns depend on when holders sold the token.