Solana isn’t cheap. It’s subsidized.
A Solana transaction looks like it costs half a cent. The rest of the bill is paid by SOL holders through inflation: new tokens minted for validators and sold into the market. This page tracks how much, and what a transaction really costs once inflation is counted.
What a Solana transaction really costs
Sticker price, plus the inflation dumped on hodlers to make the sticker price possible, spread over every non-vote transaction in the window. The toggle in the bar adds what MEV searchers extract from DeFi users.
Real transaction fees
Daily real cost per transaction, Solana against Arbitrum One, Base and Robinhood Chain. The bottom chart is the daily dollar value of SOL dumped on hodlers. The window follows the bar above.
Real cost per transaction, daily
$SOL dumped on hodlers per day, in dollars
new issuance × that day’s SOL priceWhy inflation is a subsidy
The fee you pay on Solana is not the real cost of running the chain. Holders are covering the difference.
Cheap fees, paid for with new SOL
Solana’s validators earn mostly from newly minted SOL. That is what lets a transaction cost half a cent while a large validator set keeps running. Set inflation to zero tomorrow and one of two things happens: fees rise a lot to keep the same number of validators, or the validator set shrinks and the network gets less decentralized.
The inflation is the fee. It is just billed to hodlers instead of users.
L2s inherit verifiability from Ethereum
An L1 has to pay for security, scalability and decentralization itself. An L2 inherits verifiability from Ethereum instead. Ethereum charges for that, but the L2 compresses thousands of transactions into one proof and splits the bill across all of them. That cost is already inside the fee, so L2s don’t need to print tokens to subsidize transaction fees.
For the L2s on this page, the fee paid is the whole cost.
How the real fee is calculated
The formulas behind the numbers, filled in for the Live window.
- All figures are means in USD over UTC days.
- Transaction counts exclude votes and include failed transactions, about one in five.
- Live throughput is measured on-chain; historical windows use The Block’s 7-day average.
- FDV is total supply × price, as in the thread. Past inflation follows the 8% → 1.5% schedule, calibrated to real epochs.
- MEV is what searchers extract from DeFi users. Estimated as Jito tips ÷ 0.4, since searchers tip validators roughly 40% of profits.
- Robinhood Chain launched Jul 1, 2026.
Live mode refreshes prices, inflation, throughput, tips and L2 fees on load where the host allows it; otherwise you see the snapshot dated in the status pill.
Yearly inflation × FDV is what SOL holders pay to keep fees low. Divide it by non-vote throughput and you get the real fee per transaction.