You can easily buy and sell Solana (SOL) on a cryptocurrency exchange like [Cointree](/home/). All you have to do to get started is sign up to the exchange, verify your account, make a bank transfer to deposit funds or use one of our many other payment methods, and you're ready to make your first Solana purchase.

Solana trading is popular in Cointree because we offer the best current price, low fees, and a safe and secure trading platform. Firstly, we are constantly updating our prices to match the current market demand so that you can quickly make informed crypto trades. You can also quickly check the market cap on each crypto page. Secondly, compared to some other exchanges, we provide low trading fees so you can get the most [crypto](/trade/cryptocurrencies/) for every Australian dollar you invest. This is true for every crypto we offer, including bitcoin and Ethereum. Finally, security is paramount within our organisation and we take a number of steps above and beyond the industry best practices to ensure that your crypto is protected at all times.

You can buy SOL after you deposit money into your account. Simply make a bank transfer using mobile banking, online banking or PayID. Then the banks send the funds to your account and you can begin buying Solana. What's the best payment option? PayID is the fastest way to add money to your account. It's easier than using a debit card and is instantaneous. You can make your first purchase in minutes.

You can store your SOL tokens in your free multi-coin wallet on Cointree. When you create an account, you'll receive a multi-coin wallet that can store any cryptocurrency supported on the Cointree platform. Alternatively, you can also send your SOL to a hardware wallet, such as a Ledger. You can enter the address and send it directly from your wallet on Cointree.

Currently, Solana is producing 400 millisecond block times, but this speed will continue to improve as the hardware that validators use improves. "The speed of light is how fast we can make this network go," says Solana's founder Anatoly Yakovenko. This high-performance speed is possible as the validators follow a calculation based on data already on the blockchain to determine a schedule for adding blocks. Instead of validators having to communicate with each other, the calculation determines the next block leader, allowing the network to process new blocks much faster than other blockchains. Importantly, blocks from validators are then only accepted if they follow the schedule, which is enforced with their proof-of-history consensus mechanism.

It's what makes Solana a high performance blockchain. It uses cryptography to create a synchronized clock across the network. By enabling a timestamp for every transaction, it stops validators and bots from ordering a transaction for their own benefit, a problem that other blockchains face as miners front-run transactions. It's important to note that the history mechanism doesn't replace Solana's proof-of-stake [consensus mechanism](/learn/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake/). Instead, it links together to make the proof-of-stake system more powerful. As you may know, a consensus mechanism is a process for verifying new transactions on the network and is how everyone in a decentralised crypto network can agree on who owns what crypto. Common cryptocurrency examples are Bitcoin's proof-of-work consensus mechanism and Ethereum's proof-of-stake mechanism. While proof-of-stake makes sure validators are honest, proof-of-history makes sure they're fast. Solana uses both to produce a high-performance decentralised cryptocurrency.