nicspics · Solana · Crypto made simple

Solana's story, 2017 to today

From a 4 AM idea to Wall Street ETFs, with the setbacks included.

• Nov 2017 Anatoly Yakovenko publishes the Proof of History whitepaper (the month comes from Ledger Academy; the PDF itself is undated). He later recruited former Qualcomm colleagues (Acquired, Jul 19, 2021).
• The name comes from Solana Beach, where the co-founders lived and surfed (Cointelegraph, Nov 23, 2023).
• Jul 2019 $20M Series A led by Multicoin Capital (Solana Foundation).
• Mar 2020 A CoinList auction raises $1.76M, taking the total raised to about $25.6M (The Block via Yahoo).
• Mar 16, 2020 Mainnet Beta launches (Helius, Solana outages: complete history).
• Jun 9, 2021 A $314,159,265 private token sale led by a16z and Polychain (Solana Foundation).
• Aug 2021 Degenerate Ape Academy NFTs sell out in eight minutes with fees around $0.01. Forkast calls Solana a “so-called ‘Ethereum killer’” (Forkast).
• Nov 2021 SOL's high at the time: $259.96 (CoinGecko data cited by Decrypt). The later all-time high was $293.31 on Jan 19, 2025 (CoinGecko). Historical prices only.
• 2020–2024 Outages (chart below), each followed by fixes such as QUIC, stake-weighted QoS and fee markets (Helius, Solana outages: complete history).
• Nov 2022 FTX collapses. The Foundation says the network was not disrupted that week (Solana Foundation). SOL falls 41.2% from Nov 9 to about Nov 13 (Decrypt).
• Dec 25, 2022 BONK launches, airdropping 50% of its supply to the Solana community (Solana Compass).
• Dec 2023 The Saga phone sells out in the US, driven by its BONK allocation (Cointelegraph).
• Jan 2024 pump.fun launches (pump.fun: 18+ only, not available in the UK). On Jan 31, 2024, the JUP airdrop reaches nearly 1M eligible wallets (Decrypt).
• Feb 6, 2024 The last full outage, about 5 hours (Solana Foundation).
• Aug 4, 2025 The Seeker phone ships, with 150,000+ units sold (Solana Mobile, May 21, 2025).
• Oct 28, 2025 Bitwise BSOL becomes the first US spot SOL ETP (ETFs).
• Dec 12, 2025 Full Firedancer reaches mainnet (The Block).
• Oct 21, 2026 Alpenglow is set to go live on mainnet (Tech).

Not financial advice.