Anna wants to send 10 dollars to her friend Boris. This page follows that money the whole way, and by the end you will know what Solana is and why anybody bothers with it. Nothing to buy, nothing to install, about six minutes.
Start with Anna, who has money in a bank. The bank does not keep her notes in a box with her name on it. What it keeps is a list, and one line on that list says how much is hers.
So when Anna pays Boris, no notes travel anywhere. The bank simply changes two lines, and hers gets smaller while his gets bigger. That is the whole of it.
That payment worked, and Anna never thought about it again. Then her cousin abroad needed money on a Sunday evening, and suddenly the list had opinions. It is one list with one owner, which means the bank makes all the rules about it.
It picks who may have a line at all, it sets the price of every change, and it shuts at night. Anna waited until Monday.
Usually not, since most of the world runs this way and it works fine. You only feel it on a Sunday, or on the day somebody says no to you and there is nowhere else to go.
So here is the question somebody asked years ago: what if the list were not kept by one bank at all? That is Solana. It is the same kind of list, except that it does not live in any one place.
Hundreds of computers hold it at the same time, each with its own copy, and they spend all day checking each other.
690690separate computers are keeping this list at this very moment. Your browser counted them just now, which is why the figure moves: it was 690 when this page was written, on 12 August 2026.separate computers were keeping this list when this file was made, on 12 August 2026. On the live page your own browser counts them again.
Which raises the obvious worry. If nobody owns the list, what stops one of those computers writing whatever it likes? No single computer can change the list on its own, because they all have to agree first.
Nobody asks permission to join, and nobody can rub out a line that is already written.
To take part, a computer has to lock some of its own money into the list first, where everyone can see it. That money is paid to nobody, and it comes back if the owner stops taking part. It sits there as a deposit, and the bigger the deposit, the more that computer's vote counts. So they are not equal at all.
The biggest one has about 4 votes in every 100, and the 18 biggest add up to a third of all the votes. Since a new line needs more than two thirds to agree, those 18 can block one between them.
The list is spread out, and it is spread out unevenly. Anyone who tells you only the first half of that is selling you something.
Fine, says Anna, but her cousin is still waiting. How long does this one take? Solana adds a page to the list about twice a second, which is quicker than you can blink.
Bitcoin was the first list of this kind, back in 2009, and it aims at one page every ten minutes. Watch the two of them running side by side.
The Solana bar runs at the real speed measured above, while the bank bar stands for one working day, squeezed into thirty seconds so you do not have to sit and wait for it.
0.41s0.41sis the gap between one page of the list and the next. This page timed it against the network a moment ago, so it drifts a little around the 0.41 seconds measured on 12 August 2026.is the gap between one page of the list and the next, timed over 200 pages in a row on 12 August 2026. On the live page it is timed again while you read.
Ten minutes is what Bitcoin aims at on average, but it is not a promise, and the real gaps wander a lot. Checked while this page was built, the last nine ran from six seconds to twenty-four minutes.
The bar above shows the true wait since Bitcoin wrote its last page, so if it sits on twenty minutes, that is simply Bitcoin taking its time and the page is fine.
The next thing Anna wants to know is the price. The network takes its fee in a coin of its own, called SOL. One send costs 0.000005 of that coin, which today is about four hundredths of one US cent.
One dollar pays for roughly 2,600 sends, and every dot below is one of them. Point at the picture if you want a closer look.
Worked out at the SOL price this page just read from Coinbase.
And that Sunday evening which started all this? There are no opening hours here, and no holidays either.
Three in the morning on a Sunday works exactly the same as Tuesday lunchtime.
537,366,386,816537,366,386,816lines written into this list since the very first day. It is going up while you read this one.lines written into this list since the very first day, counted on 12 August 2026. On the live page the number climbs while you read.
By now it sounds too good, so here is the other half, which is the half most explanations leave out.
Anna and Boris are made up, but the payments below are not. Each one landed on the real list seconds ago, sent by somebody you will never meet.
Press the button and the page opens the newest page of the list, then shows you the plain payments written on it.
On the live page a button opens the newest page of the list and shows the plain payments written on it, with a receipt in ordinary words. One example, read while this file was made: somebody sent 0.0100 SOL, about 77 cents, and it cost them 0.00038 of a dollar. The page it came from held 1,486 entries and had been written four seconds earlier.
Press the button to pull the newest payments from the network.
Every payment above went somewhere. In a bank you can see your own balance and nobody else's. Your neighbour's is hidden from you, and so is everybody else's. Here you can look inside the pocket the money landed in, and nobody can stop you.
Press the payments button first, then this follows one of them.
One last thing, and then Anna leaves you alone. Four questions, with nothing scored and nothing sent anywhere.