Solana has two all-time highs, and they have almost nothing in common. The first, near $260 in November 2021, was driven by NFT and DeFi activity. The second, around $294 in January 2025, was drivenSolana has two all-time highs, and they have almost nothing in common. The first, near $260 in November 2021, was driven by NFT and DeFi activity. The second, around $294 in January 2025, was driven
Learn/Crypto Basics/Hot Concepts/Solana Price History: What the SOL Chart Shows and What It Leaves Out
Solana Price History: What the SOL Chart Shows and What It Leaves Out
Solana has two all-time highs, and they have almost nothing in common.
The first, near $260 in November 2021, was driven by NFT and DeFi activity.
The second, around $294 in January 2025, was driven by a single memecoin weekend.
Read Solana's price history as one long repeating cycle and you miss that.
You also miss something stranger: the $0.22 everyone quotes as Solana's launch price doesn't appear on the major price indexes.
- New to Solana? Start with our complete beginner's guide to Solana.
Key Takeaways
- Solana sold SOL at $0.22 in a March 2020 CoinList Dutch auction, but the major price indexes never recorded a trade at that price.
- SOL peaked near $260 on November 6, 2021 and at $293–295 on January 19, 2025 — the second peak still stands.
- The two peaks had different proximate causes: NFT and DeFi activity, then one memecoin weekend.
- Solana's recorded all-time low of $0.5008 sits above its $0.22 launch price, because the two numbers come from different markets.
- Three data providers publish three different all-time highs for the same day, from $293.31 to $294.87.
Solana Price History: The Full SOL Timeline
Date | What happened | The fixed number |
Apr 2018 | Seed sale | $0.04 |
2018 | Founding round | $0.20 |
2019 | Validator round | $0.225 |
Mar 23–24, 2020 | CoinList Dutch auction sells 8 million SOL in six hours, raising $1.76 million | $0.22 clearing price |
Apr 2020 | SOL begins trading publicly; price indexes start tracking it | — |
May 11, 2020 | Lowest price ever recorded on an index | $0.5008 |
Aug 15, 2021 | Degenerate Ape Academy sells out 10,000 NFTs in eight minutes | SOL ~$56 → ~$63 |
Nov 6, 2021 | First peak | ~$260 |
Nov 2022 | FTX — Solana's largest backer — collapses | — |
Dec 2022 | Cycle low | $8.13 |
Sep 5, 2023 | — | |
Sep 11, 2023 | $1.16 billion | |
2024 | The estate auctions 41 million locked SOL to Galaxy Digital and Pantera Capital | $64 per token |
Jan 17, 2025 | The TRUMP token launches on Solana | — |
Jan 19, 2025 | Second peak, and the all-time high that still stands | $293.31–$294.87 |
Oct 28, 2025 | — | |
Dec 2025 | — | |
Q1 2026 | $0 |
For any date not in this table, pull it from a live chart rather than an article — SOL price and chart on MEXC.
Why No Two Solana Price History Charts Agree
Pull "Solana price history" from three different sources and you get three different stories.
Not slightly different — different start dates, different all-time highs, and in one case a 9× difference in the same year's return.
None of them is lying.
The $0.22 Was Never a Market Price
On March 23, 2020, Solana ran a Dutch auction on CoinList.
A clearing price is where a fixed quantity runs out — it is set once, in a primary sale, not continuously by an open order book.
It was the last of several prices SOL had been sold at, across rounds totaling $25.6 million.
Buyers who joined Solana's Staker Price Guarantee program weren't even fully exposed to it — they could redeem at 90% of the clearing price for twelve months.
So the "launch price" was an auction outcome, in a market that had no order book, in a market that had no order book.
Then SOL got listed, and a completely different market started setting the price.
Why Solana's All-Time Low Sits Above Its Launch Price
CoinGecko records Solana's all-time low as $0.5008, on May 11, 2020.
That is more than double the $0.22 launch price quoted above — and almost every article about Solana prints both numbers without noticing.
The resolution isn't that one is wrong.
It's that "all-time low" means the lowest value this index ever computed, and the index doesn't start until SOL was listed and tracked.
March 2020 is not in the data.
An index cannot record a low for a market that didn't exist yet.
Three Sources, Three All-Time Highs
Solana peaked on January 19, 2025. Here is that the same day, as published:
Source | Solana all-time high |
CoinGecko | $293.31 |
CoinMarketCap | $294.33 |
CoinLore | $294.87 |
A $1.56 spread on the same moment, because each source averages trades across a different set of venues.
The start dates diverge too: CoinLore has no Solana data before March 2021, and the first price it ever recorded was $14.23.
Which produces this, for the same calendar year: measured from January 2021, SOL gained over 11,000% in 2021 — measured from where CoinLore's data begins, it gained 1,197%.
Same asset, same year, two true answers, nine times apart.
Solana Price History 2021 vs 2025: Two Peaks, Two Stories
November 2021 — ~$260 | January 2025 — ~$294 | |
Trigger | NFT mints and DeFi growth | One token launch |
Built over | 83 days (Aug 15 → Nov 6) | 2 days (Jan 17 → Jan 19) |
What it needed | Developers, users, capital | A token launch and a weekend |
What was left after | An ecosystem | A year of DeFi and NFT building / A memecoin market that peaked with it |
For the exact peak figures and dates, see Solana's all-time high explained.
2021 — A Peak Built on Usage
On August 15, 2021, the Degenerate Ape Academy sold 10,000 NFTs in eight minutes.
SOL was around $56 going in and roughly $63 coming out — a real move, but not the story on its own.
The mint broke — the team's first attempt collapsed under traffic and had to be restarted on a new contract the next day.
By November 6, SOL touched roughly $260.
That peak took twelve weeks from the mint that put Solana on the map, and the activity was still there afterward.
2025 — A Peak Built on One Weekend
On the evening of January 17, 2025, the TRUMP token launched on Solana, three days before the presidential inauguration.
Solana's stablecoin supply jumped 72% in six days — from $6.15 billion on January 17 to $10.6 billion by January 23 — and returning daily active addresses went from 1.9 million to 2.7 million.
SOL peaked on January 19 and has not been back since.
Spot Solana ETFs are often credited with this rally. They didn't exist yet — the first one launched on October 28, 2025, nine months later.
- Want the current read? See what drives Solana's price surges and why Solana drops.
What the FTX Collapse Actually Did to Solana
FTX and Alameda Research held roughly 58 million SOL when the exchange failed in November 2022, making them the largest single holder of Solana in existence.
The usual telling is that those positions were force-liquidated and the price collapsed.
That isn't what happened.
Most of the estate's SOL was locked on a vesting schedule and could not be dumped, and the estate staked much of it instead.
What collapsed was the market's willingness to hold an asset whose biggest backer had just been exposed as a fraud, while 58 million tokens sat in a bankruptcy estate waiting to come loose.
SOL was already down to roughly $38 when FTX failed; it fell below $15 within days and bottomed at $8.13 in December — about 97% below the 2021 peak, on an overhang that hadn't been sold.
The selling came later, and quietly: in 2024 the estate auctioned 41 million locked SOL at $64 a token to buyers including Galaxy Digital and Pantera Capital, at a steep discount to market, with releases scheduled to run into 2028.
That overhang is the least discussed line on Solana's price history chart, and it's still unwinding.
The MEXC View: Solana's All-Time High Is a Measurement, Not a Trade
Every price on a chart is an average, not a receipt.
CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap each build a SOL price by weighting trades across the venues they track, and those lists aren't identical.
When two indexes report the same instant $1.02 apart, neither made a mistake — they polled different order books.
Now look at January 19, 2025.
Solana was carrying record volume that weekend, and wallet providers were failing under the load.
The all-time high is the single most quoted number in Solana's price history, and it is the one number three sources cannot agree on.
That's visible from an exchange seat in a way it isn't from a data aggregator.
An exchange has one order book and knows precisely what filled and what didn't.
An index has no order book at all. It has a formula.
So when you ask what SOL was worth on a specific date, the useful question back is: on which venue, and by whose average?
For a date that matters to you, take the number from the market you'd actually have traded in — SOL/USDT on MEXC.
What Solana's Price History Can and Can't Tell You
Solana's price history is often summarized as a pattern: deep crash, strong recovery, higher floor each cycle.
It's a tidy story built on two data points.
Two peaks and two floors is a line drawn through two dots — you can draw a line through any two dots, and it will always look like a trend.
What the record does support is narrower and more useful.
SOL has survived a 97% drawdown and a fraud scandal that took its name down with it, and the network kept shipping through both.
That says something real about durability. It says nothing about timing.
The 2021 peak took twelve weeks of real adoption to build. The 2025 peak took a weekend, and what it brought in left with it.
If you're using this chart to decide anything, the honest read is that the two peaks aren't the same kind of event, so treating one as a template for the next is guesswork wearing a chart.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was Solana's price when it launched?
Solana sold 8 million SOL at a $0.22 clearing price in a CoinList Dutch auction on March 23–24, 2020, though no exchange ever recorded a trade at that price.
Why is Solana's all-time low higher than its launch price?
Because $0.22 was a primary-issuance auction price and $0.5008 is the lowest value on a secondary-market index that doesn't begin until SOL was listed.
Why do sources disagree about Solana's all-time high?
Each index averages trades across a different set of exchanges, so the same instant produces slightly different numbers.
How far back does Solana's price history go?
It depends entirely on the source — one major index has no Solana data at all before March 2021.
Why did Solana crash in 2022?
FTX, Solana's largest backer, collapsed in November 2022 while holding roughly 58 million SOL that the market knew would eventually reach it.
Did FTX dump its Solana on the market in 2022?
No — the estate's SOL was locked and vesting, and most of it was sold privately in 2024 at $64 per token.
Is Solana's price history a reliable guide to what happens next?
It offers two peaks with unrelated causes, which is a small sample and a weak basis for extrapolation.
Conclusion
Solana's price history is a real story, and it's not the one the chart tells.
The launch price isn't on the chart. The all-time low is above it. Three sources publish three different peaks, and the biggest single number in the whole record was measured on the day the measurement worked worst.
None of that makes the history useless — it makes it readable, once you know what you're reading.
Two peaks, forty times apart in effort and three years apart in time, built on completely different things.
- Want the fundamentals? Read our complete guide to Solana (SOL).
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