Solana at a Seven-Month High: Why SOL Is Rising Twice as Fast as Bitcoin and What Stakers Should Check

Solana is leading the recovery in the crypto market. According to CoinGecko data, SOL stood at $112.41 on Friday evening, September 18, 2026, 11.5 percent above the previous day. That is the highest level in seven months and almost twice bitcoin's daily gain. For stakers, a technical change arrives on the same day: Solana has shortened the time per block, and that alters how quickly rewards and payouts arrive. What is documented in this article is the price data, the upgrade and the liquidation figures. Where it turns to the further course of the price, that is an assessment by our editorial team, and we label it as such. Solana price at a seven-month high: the numbers at a glance The daily range ran from $100.78 to $112.79. Over one week SOL is up 10 percent, over 30 days a good 37 percent. Market capitalization comes to around $66 billion, which puts Solana in seventh place. Trading volume over the past 24 hours was around $6.1 billion. Despite the rally, SOL is still more than 60 percent away from its all-time high of $293.31 from January 2025. Why is Solana rising more strongly than bitcoin? Three factors come together. The first concerns the whole market: on September 17 the US futures regulator CFTC sent two rule proposals for crypto markets to the White House for review, two days after the CLARITY Act failed in the Senate. That noticeably turned the mood. The second factor is mechanical. According to CoinDesk, short positions worth around $470 million were forcibly closed within 24 hours. Short sellers who had bet on falling prices with leverage had to buy back. That amplifies moves especially in coins such as Solana, on which a lot of leveraged bets are placed. The third factor is specific to Solana. Tokens from the Solana ecosystem such as Jupiter and Raydium gained 15 to 20 percent according to CoinDesk. Investors are therefore rotating into the whole network, not only into SOL. On top of that comes the upgrade that went live the same day. Shorter slots, shorter epochs: the upgrade changes the rhythm in which stakers see their rewards. Solana upgrade: slot time down from 300 to 250 milliseconds A slot is the time window in which a validator may produce a block. On September 18 Solana lowered the target time for it from 300 to 250 milliseconds. Instead of around 3.3 slots per second there are now four. According to crypto.news, applications thereby receive current data faster, while each slot proportionally carries less work. Total capacity stays essentially the same. The change is part of proposal SIMD-0525, which targets 200 milliseconds in the long run, with no date set for it yet.