Swap Solana (SOL)

Solana is the fastest network on this site to confirm a deposit, and the one whose fee model is least like the others. The numbers below come from Solana's documentation and from a mainnet node, both read on 14 October 2026.

Slots of a few hundred milliseconds

Time on Solana runs in slots, each assigned to one validator as leader; an epoch is 432,000 slots. The design figure for a slot is 400 milliseconds, and until August 2026 that is what the chain kept: block timestamps ten million slots apart averaged 416 ms per slot. A proposal, SIMD-0525, shortens slots in 50-millisecond steps, and the first step to 350 ms went live on mainnet in late August 2026 (reported by The Block). By 14 October the latest 100,000 slots averaged about 220 ms. Whatever the current figure, it is far under a second.

Confirmations and the swap

A block is confirmed when two-thirds of the stake has voted for it, and finalized when enough blocks are built on top. The route data this site is built from waits for 1 confirmation on a SOL deposit, so almost all of the 2–5 minute estimate is processing rather than waiting for the chain. The same 1 applies to USDC on Solana. A swap into SOL depends on the other network: 2–5 minutes from TRON, 4–10 from Ethereum, 11–24 from Monero.

Fees: fixed per signature, plus a priority

The base fee is 5,000 lamports per signature — a plain transfer has one — and half of it is burned, half paid to the validator (Solana docs, fees). A wallet can add a priority fee, priced per compute unit, to be scheduled first when the network is busy; most wallets do this on their own. There is no gas auction in the Ethereum sense and no fee market that doubles the cost of a transfer; the fee is small and predictable.

Accounts and the minimum balance

Every account on Solana — a wallet, a token account, a program's data — must hold a minimum balance in lamports proportional to its size, or it is removed (Solana docs, accounts). A mainnet node reported 650,240 lamports for an account with no data and 1,488,440 lamports for a 165-byte token account on 14 October 2026. For a sender this has two consequences: a payout to a brand-new address must be at least the minimum, which every route's minimum is by a wide margin; and the first token a wallet receives creates a token account whose minimum the sender's transaction pays.

What the site needs from a SOL deposit. One confirmation, which the chain gives in seconds, and an amount at or above the route's minimum. The deposit fee is a few thousand lamports; your wallet keeps a little SOL for it.

A Solana address is a 32-byte Ed25519 public key written in base58: 32 to 44 characters from an alphabet that leaves out 0, O, I and l. There is no prefix and no network byte, because SOL exists on one network. Checked against Solana's documentation on 14 October 2026.

What the form accepts

For a SOL payout: a base58 string that decodes to 32 bytes. A 0x… address fails, a T… address fails, and a string with a 0 or an l in it fails before decoding. That makes Solana one of the safer networks to paste into: the format itself rules out every other chain on this site.

Program-derived addresses and token accounts

Not every Solana address is a wallet. Programs own addresses too, and the token account that holds your USDC is an address of its own, owned by the token program and tied to your wallet. For a SOL payout, give the wallet address — the one your wallet shows on its Receive screen — never a token account. Explorers mark the difference: a wallet is a "system account", a token account names its owner and mint.

Which to give

1. Your own wallet: the address on its Receive screen. A new wallet needs no setup to receive SOL; the first transfer creates the account and pays its minimum balance out of the amount.
2. An exchange: the SOL deposit address from its page. SOL exists only on Solana, so there is no network to choose; make sure the page is the SOL one and not the USDC-on-Solana one, which can differ.
3. Another person: ask for the address and read the first and last four characters back.

Wrapped SOL

SOL on Ethereum or BNB Smart Chain is a token issued by a bridge, at a 0x… address, and is not what this page sends or receives. The form rejects such an address for a SOL payout, and a deposit sent as wrapped SOL from an exchange never reaches the Solana deposit address — withdraw on the Solana network only.

Memo, destination tag, payment ID covers the networks that need an extra field. Solana is not one of them: a SOL payout to a personal wallet or to an exchange's address needs nothing but the address.

A Solana transaction is identified by its signature, an 87–88-character base58 string, which plays the role of the hash elsewhere. The status page links the Solana side of a swap to solscan.io; the official explorer at explorer.solana.com shows the same fields. Read on 14 October 2026.

The transaction page shows the signature, the result (Success or Fail), the block (slot) and its time, the confirmation status (processed, confirmed, finalized), the fee in SOL, the signer, and then the instructions the transaction ran — a plain transfer is one "System Program: transfer" instruction with from, to and the amount in SOL. Below are the SOL balance changes of every account touched and, for tokens, the token balance changes.

A deposit you sent

1. Copy the signature from your wallet's activity.
2. Open it on Solscan. Not found after a minute means it was not processed — Solana transactions carry a recent blockhash and expire if a leader does not include them in time, which happens under load; the wallet usually reports this and you send again. Nothing was spent.
3. Check the transfer instruction: to the deposit address from the form, with the amount.
4. Check the confirmation status. Confirmed is what the site waits for; finalized follows within a minute.
5. The status page updates on its own.

A payout you received

The status page shows the payout signature when the payout is sent. On Solscan the transfer instruction names your address as the destination and "You get" as the amount, with the payout network fee already taken out. Your wallet shows the balance within seconds. If this was the first SOL the address ever held, the balance change on the page includes the creation of the account — the whole amount still reaches you.

Fail is not pending

A Solana transaction that fails is included in the ledger with Fail as its result and only the fee spent. For a plain transfer the usual cause is an insufficient balance after the fee. A failed deposit did not reach the swap; send a new one.

Reading a token payout

For USDC on Solana the page shows a token program instruction instead of a system transfer, and the destination is a token account whose owner is your wallet. The "token balance changes" table lists the owner, which is the address to match. If your wallet had no USDC before, an extra instruction creates the token account first.

What a block explorer shows about a swap covers the same reading on the other networks; Reading a swap status page explains each stage.

Solana's mistakes are small in number and mostly about the fee coin and the token accounts. Nothing lands on the wrong chain, because the address format rules out every other network here.

The balance that cannot go to zero

A wallet account must keep its minimum balance — 650,240 lamports on 14 October 2026 — or it is removed from the ledger. Wallets hide this well, but a hand-typed amount equal to the full balance fails. Keep a few thousand lamports for the fee and the minimum, which is a fraction of a cent at any price SOL has traded at.

The token account is not the wallet

Every token your wallet holds lives in its own account, owned by the token program, with your wallet as owner. Explorers and some wallets show those addresses. A SOL payout to a token account address goes through — the format is valid — and lands in an account that only the token program can debit. Give the wallet address, always.

Less than the minimum

A deposit under the route's minimum cannot be processed as a swap, because the payout fee has to fit inside it. On a route from SOL the deposit side costs almost nothing, so the minimum is driven by the payout network: SOL → USDT TRC-20 has a smaller one than SOL → USDT BEP-20 when BNB Smart Chain gas is higher, and the form shows both. Minimums, maximums and network fees on small swaps explains how it is set, and SOL to USDT: choosing the network compares the two payouts.

Solana changes by feature gates that validators activate epoch by epoch, not by named hard forks, so most changes have no single date a holder would notice. Three things in its history matter to a sender, and one is in progress. Dates come from a mainnet node and from the proposals on github.com, read on 14 October 2026; where only press reports exist, they are named.

Slot time, 2026. For six years a slot was 400 ms. SIMD-0525 shortens it in 50-millisecond steps, each behind its own feature gate so the network can stop if too many blocks are skipped. The first step went live in late August 2026; by mid-October the measured average was about 220 ms. A deposit here waits for one confirmation, so the practical effect is small — the swap's time is processing, not block time — but it is why a figure of "400 ms" in older guides no longer matches what the explorer shows.

Alpenglow. SIMD-0326 proposes replacing Tower BFT with a new voting protocol, Votor, to bring finality well under the 12.8 seconds of the current design. Validators voted for it in September 2025. On 14 October 2026 the proposal's status on github.com was "Review", and press reports in late September 2026 quoted its authors denying that it had reached mainnet. When it does, the change is inside the validators; addresses, fees and balances are untouched.

Inflation. The schedule set at launch is still the one a mainnet node reports: 8 % a year at the start, falling by 15 % each year to a floor of 1.5 %. In epoch 1056 the rate stood at about 3.6 %. There is no supply cap; half of every base fee is burned, which offsets a little of the issuance.

What has not changed. The base58 address, 9 decimals, the 5,000-lamport base fee, the minimum balance on every account, and the rule that a token transfer is paid in SOL. A wallet from 2020 sends and receives today without change.

Nothing to migrate. No Solana upgrade has ever required holders to move, swap or claim anything. A message that says otherwise is a scam.

Both are networks where a stablecoin moves cheaply and a deposit confirms in minutes, and both appear on this site as the fee coin people need for the dollars they hold. The dollars differ: this site carries USDC on Solana and USDT on TRON. The comparison uses Solana's documentation, TRON's developer documentation and both chains' public nodes, read on 14 October 2026, and the route data this site uses.

Fees. On Solana a token transfer costs a fixed base fee plus whatever priority the wallet adds; it is small and does not depend on the token. On TRON a USDT transfer is a contract call that burns energy — and the energy for a transfer to an address that already holds USDT is roughly half of one to an address that does not. A TRON wallet can stake TRX to earn energy and pay nothing per transfer; a Solana wallet cannot pre-pay, but has little to pre-pay for. TRON energy and bandwidth and USDT network fees compared go through the numbers.

Receiving for the first time. A Solana wallet's first USDC creates a token account whose minimum balance the sender pays. A TRON address's first transaction activates the account, and the sender pays an activation fee of about 1 TRX (TRON developer docs). Both are small, both are the sender's, and both show on the explorer as something extra.

Addresses. Neither can be confused with the other or with the 0x… family: base58 without prefix on one side, T… on the other. The form checks both and rejects the wrong one.

Which to hold dollars on. Where the receiver is. USDT on TRON is the most widely accepted deposit on exchanges; USDC on Solana is the dollar of the Solana ecosystem. SOL to USDT: choosing the network is about the payout side of that choice; the TRX page is about keeping the fee coin on hand once the dollars are on TRON.