Blog / Historical Archive

Solana 2021: Proof of History and the Ecosystem Breakout

How Sealevel and PoH scaled Solana.

Proof of History

Anatoly Yakovenko's 2017 whitepaper described Proof of History, a sequential SHA-256 hash chain that acts as a verifiable clock. Leaders produce blocks in 400 millisecond slots according to a known schedule, letting validators process transactions without waiting for global timestamp agreement.

Mainnet beta

Solana launched mainnet beta on March 16, 2020, starting at block 0. SOL traded near $1.50 in early 2021 and rose to about $260 on November 6, 2021, as Serum, Raydium, Magic Eden and the Degenerate Ape NFT collection drew users.

Throughput and fees

Solana aimed for thousands of transactions per second with a base fee of 5,000 lamports per signature, or 0.000005 SOL. Gulf Stream forwards transactions to upcoming leaders, and Sealevel executes non-overlapping transactions in parallel.

Outages

On September 14, 2021, a flood of bot transactions during the Grape IDO halted the network for about 17 hours, requiring a coordinated validator restart. Further outages followed in 2022, prompting QUIC networking, stake-weighted quality of service and local fee markets.

After FTX

SOL fell to about $8 in December 2022 because of FTX and Alameda exposure. The recovery through 2023 and 2024 was driven by memecoins, the Jito and Jupiter airdrops and the Firedancer validator client from Jump Crypto.

By the numbers

For Solana 2021, the reference figures are mainnet beta of March 2020, 2021 sol range of ~$1.50 to ~$260, block time of ~400ms, runtime of Sealevel. The comparison table below lines up metric, value — Mainnet beta: Mar 16, 2020; Slot time: ~400 ms; Base fee: 5,000 lamports/signature; 2021 ATH: ~$260 (Nov 6, 2021); Grape IDO outage: ~17 hours, Sep 2021.

Modeling Solana 2021 with the Solana Compute Unit Priority Fee Calculator

The Solana Compute Unit Priority Fee Calculator takes three inputs — Compute units, Micro-lamports/CU, SOL price ($). Fee = 5,000 lamports + CU × µLamports ÷ 1e6. With its default inputs (Compute units = 200000; Micro-lamports/CU = 10000; SOL price ($) = 150) it returns 0 $; swap in the figures from Solana 2021 above to reproduce the scenario yourself.

Modeling Solana 2021 with the Solana Validator MEV Staking Calculator

The Solana Validator MEV Staking Calculator takes three inputs — SOL staked, Base APY (%), MEV boost (%). Rewards = stake × (base + MEV). With its default inputs (SOL staked = 1000; Base APY (%) = 6.8; MEV boost (%) = 0.8) it returns 76 SOL; swap in the figures from Solana 2021 above to reproduce the scenario yourself.

Data Table

For educational and informational purposes only. Not financial, investment, tax or legal advice. Figures are approximate and historical; crypto assets are volatile and you may lose capital. Do your own research.