Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko recalled the ‘moment of realisation’ that spawned a project of a ‘hyper-optimised’ and ‘maximally fast’ blockchain. He spoke about it at Breakpoint, writes Cointelegraph.
‘I had literally two cups of coffee and a beer, and at four in the morning it dawned on me,’ he said.
The platform’s use case concerned a central ledger and aimed to launch a Nasdaq-like stock-exchange analogue on a public network, Yakovenko explained.
Solana’s roots trace back to his career as a computer engineer. He spent the bulk of it at Qualcomm in San Diego, alongside the blockchain’s cofounder Raj Gokal.
Yakovenko pursued side projects, building hardware for deep learning, deploying GPUs, and testing cryptocurrency mining.
‘We learned impressive system programming, and in 2017 I had the idea to create Solana,’ the blockchain founder recalls.
The impetus in this direction was the concept of time-division multiple access. According to Yakovenko, the technology hinges on how cellular towers alternate transmissions according to time intervals.
‘I had an intuition that once we have a way to decentralisedly track time in a permissionless public blockchain, we could use the same optimisations Qualcomm had for mobile networks,’ the programmer added.
Inspired by Ethereum, Yakovenko began building his own ‘hyper-optimised’ platform.
Two years of work went into Solana before its official launch in March 2020, as the world grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic. The platform enjoyed considerable success and community support, but Yakovenko acknowledged a fair share of luck.
‘I would like to say that all of this was brilliant, but we did not raise enough money to realise all possible features. Many of our competitors raised ten times more than us — literally hundreds of millions of dollars,’ he said.
The head of Solana recalled that at launch the blockchain was not easy, and the block explorer barely functioned. However, speed, optimisation and global differences from Ethereum attracted new developers.
In the network appeared the first projects — a decentralized wireless network Helium and the smart contract protocol Anchor.
‘They recognised something special and saw that we did not have resources to build anything else. New teams took on the task of creating open-source code,’ Yakovenko recalled.
In 2021 Solana saw a significant influx of capital amid a bullish market. In November of the same year the native token SOL reached a peak of $250.
The blockchain endured several outages. On May 1, 2022 Solana paused operations due to a high number of transactions and heavy traffic. On June 1 the network for more than four hours did not produce new blocks due to a processing issue with ‘long-running non-targeted transactions’.
The collapse of the crypto exchange FTX caused significant damage to the ecosystem, Yakovenko recalled. He remains concerned about certain projects in the ecosystem that were funded by the fallen firm.
The Solana co-founder believes that drawing lessons from these failures became an important part of the network’s ongoing operation and led to the creation of a second validator client.
‘The only other major smart-contract network with more than one client is Ethereum. In my view, this is one of the steps that must be taken to achieve full decentralisation,’ the developer said.
Regarding competition between the two blockchains, Yakovenko noted that there is a healthy exchange of views between teams in the ecosystems. The main contentious issues remain, as there is a ‘small pool of talented developers and potential duplication of features’.
Earlier, Yakovenko allowed using Ethereum as a second-layer solution for Solana. Through technical collaboration, asset holders in a potential L2 network ‘will have finality guarantees and will be able to return to the protocol even in the event of double-spending’.
In October 2023, the head of Solana stated that Ethereum is not a herald of a genuine revolution, but merely a ‘new spectacle of bourgeois upheavals’.