SolanaFM review: a friendly explorer after Jupiter

SolanaFM was once the explorer people recommended when a friend asked “what actually happened in this transaction?”. The SolanaFM Solana explorer turned raw instruction lists into readable flows, and it won a loyal following for it. In 2026 the picture is different: the owner changed, updates slowed, and parts of the site no longer load. This review covers what SolanaFM was, what happened after the Jupiter acquisition, what still works on solana.fm today, and how to move your habits to tools that are actively maintained.

What is SolanaFM, and why did people like it?

SolanaFM is a Solana block explorer, launched in March 2021 by students from Singapore Management University (SMU), that focused on making transactions readable for humans. Instead of showing only program IDs and instruction data, it tried to tell you who sent what to whom.

That sounds obvious now, but in 2021 most Solana explorers were closer to debugging consoles. You pasted a signature and got a list of instructions, account keys and log lines. SolanaFM’s bet was that most visitors are not developers: they are people checking whether a swap went through, or whether an airdrop landed. Two ideas carried the product:

• Human-readable transactions. Transfers and swaps were summarised as actions, so a token swap looked like a swap rather than five inner instructions.
• Labels. Known addresses (programs, exchanges, protocols) carried names, which made money flows much easier to follow.

The team raised a $4.5M seed round in 2022, according to crypto.news and Solana Compass, and the explorer became one of the familiar names alongside Solscan and the official Solana Explorer. If you want the basics of what any explorer shows, our beginner guide to reading a Solana explorer covers the vocabulary.

SolanaFM history: from student project to Jupiter

SolanaFM’s story has three chapters: a student launch, a funded growth phase, and an acquisition by Jupiter that marked the end of active development as far as we can tell.

Jupiter’s announcement framed the deal as part of building out its own data and product stack. We have not seen Jupiter publish a roadmap for SolanaFM since then, and we found no official shutdown notice either. That leaves the explorer in an awkward middle state: online, but not clearly looked after.

What happened to SolanaFM after the Jupiter acquisition?

In short: the site stayed up, but visible development slowed, and by 2026 parts of the dashboard no longer work. Helius, which runs a competing explorer, calls SolanaFM “largely unmaintained” in its own explorer roundup, so read that with its source in mind, but our own testing points the same way.

When we opened solana.fm on 23 September 2026, the homepage loaded quickly and still showed the tagline “A friendly Solana explorer”. The network widgets did not: price, epoch, TPS and the recent blocks panel all stayed on “Loading” for the whole session. For comparison, the same data loaded without trouble on other explorers and in our own live network stats page in the same minute.

We don’t know the reason for the stuck widgets. It could be an expired data provider, a broken backend job or a deliberate wind-down. What matters for you is the practical result: SolanaFM is no longer a tool you should depend on for time-sensitive checks, tax records or support tickets.

Does the SolanaFM Solana explorer still work for lookups?

Sometimes, and only for low-stakes checks. The interface still renders, and you can still paste a signature or address into the search bar. Whether you get a complete, current answer depends on which backend services behind that page are still running, and that is exactly what you cannot see from the outside.

Here is how we would use solana.fm in 2026:

• As a second opinion. If Solscan and Orb disagree on how to describe a complex transaction, a third rendering can help you reason about it.
• For old bookmarks. If you saved SolanaFM links for past transactions, the signature in the URL is still the key you need. Copy it out and open it elsewhere.
• Not for anything official. Don’t send SolanaFM screenshots to an exchange support desk or an accountant. Use a maintained explorer, or the raw data from the official Solana RPC docs.

If the page is slow or broken, that’s not a problem with your wallet or the network. Our guide to what to do when a Solana explorer is down explains how to tell a site outage from a network issue.

SolanaFM alternatives: where to go instead

The good news is that every job SolanaFM did is now covered, often better, by explorers that ship updates. Pick based on what you used SolanaFM for.

Orb by Helius is the closest spiritual match. Launched on 29 October 2025, it uses AI to explain transactions and tokens in plain language, filters spam, and shows verified program IDLs. It also replaced Helius’s older XRAY explorer, which now redirects to Orb. Our Orb review goes deeper.

Solscan, owned by Etherscan since January 2024, is the all-rounder: fast search, labels, token holder lists and CSV export from the Transfers and Holders tabs. See the full Solscan review for its API tiers and limits.

Solana Explorer at explorer.solana.com is the open-source reference explorer maintained by the Solana Foundation. It is the one to trust for devnet, testnet, IDLs and program verification. Our Solana Explorer review explains its tabs.

How to migrate your SolanaFM habits in five steps

Moving off an explorer is mostly about bookmarks and muscle memory. This takes about ten minutes.

1. Export your bookmarks. Search your browser bookmarks and notes for “solana.fm” and list every saved transaction and address link.
2. Extract the identifiers. From each URL, copy the transaction signature (usually 87–88 characters) or the account address (32–44 characters). Those are permanent on-chain keys.
3. Re-open them in a maintained explorer. Paste each one into Orb or Solscan, or paste the signature into our free Solana lookup tool to see the raw status, fee and slot.
4. Rebuild your watchlist. If you tracked wallets on SolanaFM, recreate the list in an explorer with a watchlist feature. Solscan documents a watchlist and notification bot.
5. Change your default search. Update browser keyword shortcuts or wallet settings that still point to solana.fm, so new transaction links open somewhere reliable.

Many wallets let you pick which explorer opens when you tap a transaction. It is worth changing that setting now, because it is the source of most accidental SolanaFM visits. If you are unsure how to read what the new explorer shows, our step-by-step Solana transaction explorer guide walks through status, fees, compute units and inner instructions.

How we tested SolanaFM and scored it 7.2

We scored SolanaFM against the same four criteria as every explorer on this site: speed, token data, readability and developer tools. The full scoring rules are on our methodology page.

• Speed (6.5). The homepage itself loaded quickly, but live panels never resolved, which is the part of speed that matters.
• Token data (6.8). Token pages exist, but with market widgets stuck we can’t recommend relying on them for holders or prices.
• Readability (8.6). This is still SolanaFM’s strongest point. The layout and the idea of readable transactions hold up, and the design aged well.
• Developer tools (6.9). No sign of new developer features since the acquisition, while Solana Explorer and Orb keep adding IDL views, verified builds and more.

The 7.2 is higher than a broken site would get, because the product design still has value and the site is online. It is lower than every actively maintained explorer in our ranking of the best Solana explorers, because you should not have to wonder whether the data is current.

Who should still use solana.fm?

Very few people should use solana.fm as their main explorer in 2026. It still makes sense in three cases.

First, researchers and long-time users who want to compare how different explorers interpret the same complex transaction. A third rendering sometimes helps you spot which explorer is mislabelling an instruction.

Second, anyone following old links in forum threads, Discord posts or documentation from 2021–2024. Those pages might still open, and when they don’t, the signature in the URL gets you to the same transaction elsewhere.

Third, people curious about explorer design. SolanaFM’s early focus on labels and readable flows influenced how explorers present data today, and it is still a pleasant interface to look at.

Everyone else, from traders checking a swap to developers debugging a program, will get fresher data and active support elsewhere. If you keep one habit from SolanaFM, keep this one: always read a transaction as a story of who paid whom, not as a list of instructions. Then pick an explorer that tells that story with data you can trust, and check the chain directly with getTransaction on Solana’s RPC when the stakes are high. For background on the acquisition itself, see Jupiter’s announcement on X and the Helius explorer roundup; the explorer is still at solana.fm if you want to see it for yourself.