The State of Solana in 2025: Throughput, Outages, and Real-World Usage

Phase 1: The Scalability Gambit (2020–2022)

Solana launched in 2020 around a simple pitch: if you want a blockchain that feels like the internet, you need aggressive parallelism and a different clock. Proof of History (PoH) plus a high-performance validator set gave Solana eye-catching throughput and fee metrics compared with Ethereum L1.

That early phase came with obvious trade-offs:

• Tight links to FTX/Alameda and a big run‑up to an all‑time high around $260 in 2021.
• A strong DeFi/NFT boom driven by protocols like Serum and early NFT markets.
• A painful run of outages in 2022 that made every serious team ask if they could depend on the chain in production.

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// Simplified Proof-of-History pseudocode
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fn generate_poH_sequence(transactions: Vec<Transaction>) -> Vec<Hash> {
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    let mut hashes = Vec::new();
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    let mut last_hash = INITIAL_HASH;
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    for tx in transactions {
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        last_hash = sha256(last_hash || tx.serialize());
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        hashes.push(last_hash);
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    }
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    hashes
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}

Phase 2: Cleaning Up After the Crash (2023–2024)

After the FTX collapse, a lot of people wrote Solana off. What actually happened was messier: activity dipped hard, then rebuilt around a smaller set of serious teams and a fresh meme‑coin wave that stress‑tested the network again.

Key shifts during this period:

• A more sober focus on core infra, client diversity, and tooling rather than just TVL rankings.
• Real payment and stablecoin experiments (for example, Visa exploring USDC settlement on Solana) that tested whether the chain could support “boring” throughput.
• Ongoing work on Firedancer, an independent validator client from Jump Crypto aimed at both performance and resilience.

Phase 3: 2025 – What We’re Seeing on the Ground

By 2025, Solana sits in an awkward but interesting spot:

• Throughput and fees are still its main draw for DeFi, NFT, and trading flows.
• Outages are less frequent, but every new meme season still makes infra teams sweat.
• Cloud providers and custodians increasingly support Solana nodes, making institutional participation simpler, even if regulatory questions around SOL itself remain.

1. Proof-of-History in plain language

Proof of History (PoH) is Solana’s way of giving the network a shared sense of time. Validators run a fast, verifiable clock so they don’t have to agree on ordering one transaction at a time. In practice, this means:

• Batches of transactions can be processed with sub‑second confirmation times.
• The network can keep blocks flowing even under heavy load, as long as hardware and networking keep up.

Compared with Ethereum’s base layer, which prioritizes decentralization and simple hardware at the cost of throughput, Solana deliberately leans into high-performance nodes and more complex networking. L2s on Ethereum close part of that gap, but they bring their own UX and bridging complexity.

2. Sealevel Runtime

Sealevel is Solana’s parallel smart contract engine. Instead of executing every contract call in a single line, it can run many non‑conflicting programs at once. That’s why high‑frequency trading bots and NFT mints gravitate to Solana: the runtime is designed to keep many lanes open at once.

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// Concurrent NFT mint using Solana's parallel threads
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async fn mint_nft(
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    ctx: Context<MintNFT>,
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    metadata_uri: String,
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) -> Result<()> {
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    let mint_account = &mut ctx.accounts.mint;
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    let payer = &ctx.accounts.payer;
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    // Parallel metadata upload
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    let metadata = upload_metadata(metadata_uri).await?;
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    // Atomic mint operation
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    mint_account.create(
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        payer.key(),
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        metadata,
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        ctx.accounts.system_program.to_account_info(),
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    )?;
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    Ok(())
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}

3. Token Extensions and enterprise features

More recently, Solana’s token extensions have added tools that matter to serious projects and institutions:

• Hooks that let issuers enforce custom rules (for example, blocklisted addresses or jurisdiction checks).
• Transfer controls and metadata that make it easier to line up with compliance requirements.
• Better primitives for handling fees, revenue sharing, and stablecoin behavior.

These changes are not as flashy as meme seasons, but they’re the sort of plumbing that decides whether real businesses can use the chain.

DeFi: fewer casinos, stronger hubs

On-chain metrics and public dashboards show Solana DeFi TVL recovering from the post‑FTX lows into the low single‑digit billions in 2025. The headline is not the exact number; it’s that liquidity and volume have re‑clustered around a tighter set of protocols that can actually handle peak load.

In practice:

• Aggregator/routers like Jupiter have become core liquidity venues for swaps and routing across many pools.
• Lending and structured‑product protocols compete on risk controls and UX, not just headline APYs.
• Stablecoins and liquid staking tokens are increasingly woven into Solana’s “base layer” of DeFi rather than being side‑experiments.

If you’re evaluating SOL exposure through the DeFi lens, you want to see: growing unique users on major DEXs and lenders, sustainable fee capture, and healthy on‑chain liquidity across market cycles, not just TVL spikes during narrative weeks.

NFTs and consumer flows

Solana’s NFT market never fully disappeared after 2022; it reshaped. Marketplaces and projects that survived did so by lowering mint costs, tightening communities, and experimenting with compressed NFTs to reduce storage overhead.

Today, the interesting metrics are:

• How many active wallets trade or interact with collections on a monthly basis.
• Whether NFT infra (compression, metadata, royalties) is used for more than pure speculation, identity, ticketing, gaming items.

If those numbers grow while average transaction fees stay trivial, Solana keeps a real edge for high‑frequency consumer apps that would be cost‑prohibitive on more expensive chains.

Institutional and infra rails

On the institutional side, the signals are quieter but important:

• Major custodians and prime brokers increasingly support SOL, making it easier for funds to hold and stake.
• Cloud providers and node‑as‑a‑service firms now offer managed Solana nodes, lowering the barrier for teams that don’t want to run bare‑metal infra.
• Payment and stablecoin experiments on Solana test whether businesses are comfortable routing real invoices and settlements through the network.

None of these guarantee price appreciation, but they all contribute to Solana behaving more like a piece of payments and trading infrastructure and less like a one‑cycle trade.

To keep your own view grounded, it helps to track a small set of ecosystem metrics over time rather than chasing every headline:

Those curves tell you more about Solana’s trajectory than any single narrative post.

1. Centralization and hardware

Solana’s design asks more of validators than many other chains. High‑performance hardware and bandwidth expectations can concentrate stake in the hands of well‑capitalized operators. Client and infra diversity work (like Firedancer) helps, but the core tension remains: keeping blocks fast without turning the network into a glorified data center club.

Questions to keep on your checklist:

• Is stake distribution improving across more independent operators over time?
• Are there credible paths to lighter‑weight participation without sacrificing performance?

2. Network stability under real load

Outages have become less common since the rough patches of 2022, but they haven’t disappeared. The pattern is familiar: intense bot activity or sudden meme flows reveal edge cases, the core team patches, and infra providers update.

From an investor or builder perspective, you care about:

• The trend in incident frequency and duration.
• How quickly patches ship and how transparent post‑mortems are.
• Whether new client work (like Firedancer) meaningfully reduces single points of failure.

3. Regulatory and market structure risk

Like other major assets, SOL sits under an evolving regulatory lens. At the same time, market structure (who can custody, stake, or offer derivatives on SOL) shapes how easily capital can enter or leave positions. Those questions don’t make or break the tech, but they do matter for how SOL trades and who can hold it at size.