Recapping Solana’s Most Iconic Moments on its 5th Birthday

Solana has been through a lot over the last five years. Resilient, performant, and tenacious, the network epitomizes the crypto industry’s relentless desire to innovate and accelerate. 

Despite its good name being dragged through the mud more times than we can count, Solana has risen to face and overcome every challenge it’s ever faced. 

Where other chains have celebrated 15 minutes of fame and stagnated, Solana has evolved through every meta-shift, offering a home to everyone from DeFi savants and NFT collectors to infrastructure builders and consumer applications.

Looking back on five years of inspirational successes and empowering hardships, here are some of Solana’s most iconic moments.

The Birth of Solana: Block 0

Everyone knows the story by now. After two coffees and a beer, Software Engineer Anatoly Yakovenko cooked up a novel hybrid consensus mechanism that catapulted blockchain scalability to new heights. 

Teaming up with Qualcomm colleagues Greg Fitzgerald and Stephen Akridge, Yakovenko wrote the codebase for Loom, an upcoming Layer-1 blockchain. Amidst controversy surrounding a similarly named protocol on Ethereum, Loom was rebranded to Solana, named after the coastal town where Yakovenko, Fitzgerald, and Ackridge surfed during their Qualcomm days.

Fast forward a few years, and Solana is rapidly approaching its genesis block. In the intervening time, co-founder Raj Gokal joined the fold, and Solana attracted millions in VC funding from top firms like Multicoin Capital.

On March 16, 2020, the Solana blockchain officially went live, birthing a Layer-1 blockchain that would grow to process over 408B transactions and support almost $1T in onchain trading volume in native assets.

In its first few years, Solana suffered a series of liveness failures. Detractors used Solana’s outages as ammunition to try and destroy the network’s image, painting Solana as a centralized VC chain with an “off switch”. 

However, Solana’s early struggles turned out to be necessary growing pains, helping the chain scale to unrivaled heights in the crypto industry. Despite processing significantly more transactions than any other blockchain, Solana hasn’t suffered any liveness failures in over one year.

NFT Mania

While 2020 was an otherwise quiet year, Solana’s first real adoption season was kickstarted by its rampant NFT market. The 2021 NFT boom may have begun on Ethereum, but high gas fees and slow transactions pushed NFT traders and collectors to try their luck in new ecosystems. 

This led to what was arguably Solana’s first big influx of users. Towards the end of 2021 and the bulk of 2022, Solana was largely considered an NFT chain, with DeFi taking a back seat. Viral games like StepN brought retail users in their millions to the network.

Solana’s original blue chip NFT collections were formed, while a series of failed projects and historic rug pulls helped galvanize and unite a die-hard community. 

Collections like Okay Bears and Trippin’ Ape Tribe briefly surpassed Ethereum’s NFT trading volume, hinting at a potential flippening within NFT culture.

While some ‘OG projects’ like Boryoku Dragons and Catalina Whales have faded to obscurity, collections like Solana Monke Business and Degenerate Ape Academy remain an integral part of the ecosystem’s onchain identity.

The Post-FTX Rebuild

November 2022 was undeniably the darkest period of Solana’s history. As if a bear market punctuated by the Luna collapse and the 3AC implosion wasn’t bad enough, the FTX scandal rocked the Solana community to its very core.

One of Solana’s biggest supporters, the FTX Exchange, led by now-imprisoned Sam Bankman-Fried, filed for bankruptcy after misappropriating over $8B in customer deposits. 

In the resulting fallout, $SOL crashed to $8, with much of the industry prematurely dancing on Solana’s grave. Solana’s haters claimed that only 75 developers remained within the ecosystem, which would never recover from the reputational damage caused by the FTX collapse.

However, against all odds, Solana endured. In the fires of the biggest crypto scandal in history, Solana’s devout community of builders and users doubled down on the ecosystem. While critics insisted “Solana is dead”, emerging teams like Kamino and Tensor, both of which launched earlier that year, stepped up and established themselves as pillars of a rapidly evolving ecosystem.

The Solana community was eager to move on from FTX and sever all remaining ties to the defunct exchange. Amidst the rebuild, a small group of Solana OGs teamed up to reward remaining Solana users, giving birth to $BONK.

Looking back, $BONK may have been the great turning point for Solana. Within a matter of days, $BONK went from a cute Christmas day airdrop to a viral sensation worth millions, kickstarting a memecoin economy on Solana in a way that no other coin had ever achieved.

Activity across Solana exploded, with the number of active wallets on the network tripling in a matter of months. $BONK proved Solana’s ability to support onchain trading at an unprecedented scale, which inevitably led to Solana’s future DeFi dominance.

Solana Hits Escape Velocity

Since 2023, Solana has trended upward in every meaningful metric. User activity surged across the network as millions of users poured into the onchain world. 

Household names like Visa expressed their support and belief in the network’s future, while PayPal deployed its stablecoin, $PYUSD on Solana. 

The first Solana Mobile device, Solana Saga, sold out due to overwhelming demand, while the follow-up device, Solana Seeker, has already sold over 140,000 units in presale.

Solana’s infectious builder energy has spread throughout the blockchain industry, attracting developers from all sectors. According to Electric Capital, Solana was the leading blockchain for new developers in 2024, supplanting Ethereum for the first time in 8 years.

Driven by a flourishing memecoin economy and pump.fun’s viral success, Solana eclipsed all other blockchains to become the home of onchain trading. Usurping Ethereum’s long-standing reign, Solana has now led DEX trading volume across all chains for 5 consecutive months. Additionally, Solana’s onchain apps generated 219% more revenue than Ethereum’s in Q4 2024.

Solana has become the first port of call for any newcomer entering the crypto space. In January 2025, President Donald Trump chose to launch the world’s first-ever presidential memecoin on Solana, which hit an all-time high market cap of $14B.

Where to Next for Solana?

After rising like a phoenix from the ashes, Solana is primed to soar higher than ever before. Despite uncertain market conditions, 2025 is shaping up to be another sensational year for the ecosystem.

Firstly, Solana’s upcoming validator client, Firedancer, is expected to enhance the network’s security and scalability to unprecedented levels. Early Firedancer tests and demos suggest the new client could push Solana’s transaction throughout put to 1M TPS, making crypto’s fastest Layer-1 blockchain even faster, while making the network more resilient and decentralized. 

Yakovenko has suggested that Firedancer’s successful launch and stable operation will mark the end of Solana’s “beta” phase.

Beyond its technological improvements, Solana is making progress in TradFi circles around the world. Institutional funds like trillion-dollar asset manager Franklin Templeton have filed for spot $SOL ETFs, demonstrating Solana’s maturation as an asset.

But demand for Solana isn’t limited to onchain traders and TradFi giants; even the U.S. Government is after a piece of the pie. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump announced that $SOL would be included in the U.S. Government’s “Strategic Crypto Reserve”.

Ultimately, Solana has a lot to be proud of on its fifth birthday. The network has witnessed euphoric highs and devastating lows over the years, but the ecosystem has shown unyielding grit and resolve, thriving in the face of all challenges.

It sounds like a cliche, but this really is just the beginning. 

Happy Birthday, Solana.

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