What is Solana? The blockchain behind SOL: no supply cap, 589 million tokens in circulation

Solana is a public blockchain that runs programs, tokens and payments without a bank or a company sitting in between. SOL is the token of that network: you pay the fees with it, and the machines that write the blocks post it as security. Technically Solana belongs to the group of layer-1 blockchains, the networks that settle their transactions themselves rather than building on another network. The mainnet launched in March 2020. Since then the network has processed 563.3 billion transactions by its own count.