Solana settles in under half a second for a fraction of a cent, secured by stake rather than by burning electricity. SolMine is the mining layer built on top of it.
00Live from mainnet
Not a mock-up. These are read from Solana mainnet every few seconds: the block being made, the epoch turning over, the traffic it carries.
Each square is a slot. A leader produces the newest one, the network votes on it, and after 32 more it is final and cannot be undone.
Every epoch the network settles stake and rewards and draws up the next leader schedule.
Transactions per second, minute by minute over the last half hour.
Measured over the last five minutes. The orb beats once per block.
Every transaction processed since mainnet launched in March 2020, counting up at the current rate.
Drag to pick an amount. The Solana fee is the same whether you send one dollar or ten thousand.
Solana: the base fee for one signature (5,000 lamports) at the current SOL rate, before optional priority fees. Card: a typical 2.9% + 30¢ online rate. Wire: a typical $35 outgoing fee.
01The gap
A card payment takes days to settle. A wire takes longer. A Solana block closes in the time it takes to blink — and closes for everyone at once.
Bars are drawn on a logarithmic scale. Settlement windows for traditional rails are typical published ranges and vary by provider, corridor and cut-off time.
02Proof of history
Most networks are slow because every node has to agree on what time it is before it can agree on anything else. Solana removes that conversation.
Each slot is hashed from the slot before it. You cannot skip ahead and you cannot fake the order, because producing link nine hundred requires actually having produced the eight hundred and ninety-nine before it.
The chain of hashes is therefore a verifiable record that time elapsed. Validators can agree on sequence without negotiating it — and that is where the four hundred milliseconds comes from.
Simplified. Proof of history orders events; proof of stake still decides which fork is canonical.
Each digest can only exist after the one above it. The sequence is the proof.
03Throughput
Solana is designed to process transactions in parallel rather than one at a time. When the ceiling is this high, throughput stops shaping what you are allowed to build.
Illustrative — each cell is one slot of capacity
65,000
Theoretical throughput
Protocol design ceiling, not sustained mainnet load.
400ms
Per block
Faster than the roughly half-second it takes to blink.
The design ceiling is not a promise of sustained mainnet throughput, which varies with network conditions.
04Cost
When a transaction costs a fraction of a cent, the fee stops being a design constraint. Micro-payments, frequent settlement and on-chain bookkeeping all become ordinary.
$0.00025
Typical transaction fee
Each dot is one transaction
One card payment
~$0.30 + 2.9%
One Solana transaction
$0.00025
Solana fees rise with priority fees during congestion. Card pricing is a typical published rate and varies by processor, region and merchant category.
05Decentralisation
Solana is run by independent validators spread across the world. There is no head office, no master server, and no one party that can halt it.
Validators are selected by the stake delegated to them, not by who owns the most hardware. Anyone can run one, and the ledger they agree on is the same ledger your wallet reads.
Validator counts move constantly. The figure shown is a conservative floor, not a live reading.
06Consensus
Solana secures itself through stake, not through electricity.
Proof of work
Security bought with electricity. Machines race to guess, and the losers' work is discarded.
Proof of stake
Security bought with capital at risk. Validators are chosen by stake weight, so there is no race to lose.
There are no mining rigs and no hash race. Validators are chosen by stake weight, so securing the network costs roughly what running a datacentre node costs — orders of magnitude below a proof-of-work chain.
Dials are illustrative of the difference in kind between the two consensus mechanisms, not a measured ratio. Per-transaction energy figures vary widely by methodology.
07Track record
Solana mainnet beta goes live with proof of history sequencing its ledger.
Exchanges, wallets and the first wave of consumer applications ship on-chain.
Fee markets and QUIC transport land, reshaping how the network handles congestion.
Independent validator client work begins, reducing single-implementation risk.
Stablecoin settlement and token extensions push real payment volume on-chain.
Sub-second settlement at negligible cost becomes something products can simply assume.
08In practice
Throughput and fees only matter because of what they permit. These are the categories that could not exist on a chain that settles in minutes.
Stablecoin transfers that settle in under a second for a fraction of a cent.
Order books and automated markets that need block times a human cannot perceive.
Physical infrastructure networks coordinating hardware through on-chain incentives.
Products where the chain is an implementation detail rather than the interface.
09Where we fit
Settlement, ordering and security are the network’s problem, and it solves them in under half a second for a fraction of a cent.
SolMine turns that capability into something you can hold: a wallet, a balance, a daily rhythm, and a record you can audit.
Your wallet is your account. There is no password to lose and nothing for us to leak, because the credential never leaves your device.
10Architecture
The most important layer in this stack is the one we have no control over — and that is exactly the point.
Solana mainnet
Ordering, settlement and security. The part we do not own.
Wallet signature
Your key proves who you are. No password is ever created.
The ledger
Every credit and debit recorded, append-only, reconcilable.
Your dashboard
Balances, activity and settlement, in one place.
11Security
There is no password on a member account, so there is none to phish, reuse, leak or reset.
Your key never leaves your wallet. We only ever see a signature, which proves control without revealing anything.
Signing in means signing a message that names this site and expires. It costs nothing and triggers no transaction.
What you pay in lands in platform wallets SolMine holds, kept apart from the wallets payouts are sent from. Their keys live in an isolated signing service, never in the website, and every payout is limited and recorded.
The trade-off is real and worth stating plainly: if you lose access to your wallet, nobody — including us — can restore your account, because we never hold its key. What you pay in is different: it sits in platform wallets SolMine holds, and is paid back out to the wallet you sign in with.
12Questions
Joining SolMine requires an invitation from an existing member.
Get startedNetwork figures: Solana documentation — docs.solana.com · Solana Foundation network statistics