Solana

SOL is the native token of a high-throughput settlement network built for many small transactions rather than few expensive ones. It pays fees, it is staked to secure the chain, and it is the unit in which validator rewards are denominated. The design choice that defines it is running a single fast chain instead of pushing activity to secondary layers.

That choice produces a distinctive fee market. Base fees are tiny by design, so ordinary usage generates little revenue; when demand spikes, users pay priority fees to get ahead in the queue, and those spikes are where the economics live. A network that is busy in transaction counts can still be modest in fee terms.

There is no supply cap. Issuance started high and declines on a schedule toward a long-run floor, with a portion of fees burned. The result is an asset whose dilution is knowable years ahead and whose demand side has to run fast enough to absorb it.

The largest visible use is trading infrastructure: decentralised exchanges, market-making, and the wave of token launches that made the network's reputation in both directions. High throughput and low fees make strategies viable that would be uneconomic elsewhere, which concentrates a particular kind of activity here.

Payments and consumer applications are the second cluster, helped by the same cost structure - stablecoin transfers, point-of-sale experiments and reward programmes where a fee of a fraction of a cent is the difference between viable and not.

Staking is the third. Holders delegate to validators and receive a share of issuance; because inflation is meaningful, not staking is an active decision to be diluted. That pushes the staked share of supply structurally higher than on chains with lower issuance.