What is Solana and Why BILS Runs on It (2026 Guide)

When Israel's Capital Market Authority approved BILS — the country's first regulated shekel stablecoin — one decision stood out: BILS runs on Solana, not Ethereum. Here's why that choice matters and what it means for users.

What is Solana?

Solana is a high-performance blockchain launched in 2020 by Anatoly Yakovenko, a former Qualcomm engineer. It is designed to be fast, cheap, and scalable — solving the three biggest problems that plagued earlier blockchains like Ethereum.

Solana uses a unique combination of two consensus mechanisms:

- Proof of History (PoH) — Solana's signature innovation. It creates a historical record that proves events occurred at specific moments in time, allowing validators to process transactions in parallel rather than sequentially. - Proof of Stake (PoS) — validators stake SOL tokens to participate in consensus and earn rewards.

Together these mechanisms allow Solana to process thousands of transactions per second with near-instant finality.

Solana by the numbers

These numbers explain why Solana has become the blockchain of choice for payment applications, stablecoins, and high-frequency DeFi protocols.

Why did BILS choose Solana?

When Bits of Gold designed BILS, they had a choice of dozens of blockchains. They chose Solana for five key reasons.

1. Speed

A shekel transfer using BILS settles in under 400 milliseconds. Compare this to Ethereum, where transactions can take 12–15 seconds, or Bitcoin, where confirmation can take an hour or more.

For a payment system — which is what BILS is designed to be — speed is critical. You cannot ask someone to wait 15 seconds every time they send shekels.

2. Low fees

Every BILS transaction costs less than $0.01. On Ethereum, the same transaction could cost anywhere from $1 to $50 depending on network congestion.

Low fees make BILS practical for everyday use — small payments, frequent transfers, microtransactions. High fees would make it impractical for anything other than large transfers.

3. Proven stablecoin infrastructure

Solana is already home to billions of dollars in stablecoin volume. USDC has a massive presence on Solana. The DEX infrastructure — Jupiter, Raydium, Orca — is mature and battle-tested.

This means BILS can immediately tap into existing liquidity pools, trading pairs, and DeFi protocols without waiting for an ecosystem to develop around it.

4. Institutional credibility

Fireblocks — BILS's custody provider — is deeply integrated with Solana. Fireblocks manages custody for some of the world's largest financial institutions including BNY Mellon, Worldpay, and Visa.

The combination of Fireblocks custody and Solana infrastructure gave Israeli regulators confidence in the technical security of BILS.

5. Privacy with QEDIT

BILS integrates Zero Knowledge Proofs developed by QEDIT, an Israeli privacy technology company. ZK proofs allow BILS to verify transaction compliance without exposing private financial data — a critical requirement for a regulated financial instrument.

QEDIT's ZK technology is natively compatible with Solana's architecture, making the integration technically feasible at scale.

Is Solana reliable?

A fair question. Solana has experienced several network outages since its launch in 2020 — a fact acknowledged by the BILS regulatory approval documents, which list network reliability as an ongoing risk to monitor.

However, Solana has improved significantly in stability since 2022. The network has maintained strong uptime through 2024 and 2025, and its validator set has grown substantially, making outages less likely.

The Israel Capital Market Authority explicitly recognized this risk in BILS's approval conditions, requiring Bits of Gold to maintain business continuity plans in the event of a Solana outage.

What can you do with BILS on Solana?

Because BILS is a native Solana token, it can interact with the entire Solana ecosystem:

Swap on DEXes: Trade BILS for USDC, USDT, SOL, or any other Solana token on Jupiter, Raydium, or Orca — instantly, with minimal fees.

Provide liquidity: Add BILS to liquidity pools alongside USDC and earn yield on your shekel holdings.

Smart contract payments: Use BILS in programmable finance applications — escrow contracts, payroll automation, subscription payments.

Hold in any Solana wallet: Store BILS in Phantom, Solflare, Backpack, or any Solana-compatible wallet. You control your own keys.

Send globally: Transfer shekels to anyone with a Solana wallet address, anywhere in the world, in under a second.

The bigger picture

BILS on Solana represents something genuinely new: a regulated national currency stablecoin on a high-performance public blockchain. Not a CBDC controlled by a central bank. Not an experimental algorithmic token. A fully backed, audited, regulated digital shekel operating on open infrastructure.

As Solana's ecosystem continues to grow — with institutional adoption accelerating and new financial applications launching regularly — BILS is well-positioned to become the shekel layer of the global digital asset economy.

For a complete guide to BILS, how to get it, and how to use it, visit bilstoken.com.

This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.