“I consumed two coffees and a beer, and at four in the morning, it all clicked,” reflects Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, leaning back contemplatively.
During an interview with Cointelegraph at the Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam, Yakovenko recounts a late-night revelation of a “hyper-optimized, fast-as-possible” smart contract blockchain protocol.
“I was targeting a use case for central limit order books, envisioning how to establish a system akin to Nasdaq but on a public, permission-less blockchain,” Yakovenko explains.
Transitioning from riding waves to engaging with smart contracts.
Solana’s origins are inherently intertwined with Anatoly Yakovenko’s journey as a computer engineer. With the majority of his career spent at Qualcomm in San Diego, alongside co-founder Raj Gokal, Yakovenko drew considerable inspiration from that period of his life for the platform’s inception.
“Solana comes from Solana Beach. My co-founders and I lived there; we’d wake up, surf, bike to work, return home, and surf again,” reflects Yakovenko. His involvement in a side project focused on building deep learning hardware, deploying GPUs, and mining cryptocurrencies served as the catalyst for the platform’s genesis.
The spark for the idea originated from a concept called time division multiple access. Yakovenko explains that the technology is linked to how cellular towers alternate transmissions based on time intervals.
His concept centered on constructing a system based on the verifiable delay function, a technology that researchers at Stanford University had been actively developing. Yakovenko playfully admits that he initially believed he had stumbled upon something truly groundbreaking, spurring him to embark on the creation of a smart contract layer platform.
Motivated by the emergence of smart contract functionality pioneered by Ethereum, Yakovenko and his collaborators undertook the challenge of crafting a groundbreaking application and use cases fueled by smart contract capabilities. Two years of dedicated effort went into the engineering of Solana, culminating in its official launch in March 2020, coinciding with the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the challenging circumstances, the platform garnered significant success, acclaim, and support. Yakovenko acknowledges that, while there was a level of strategic brilliance, luck also played a substantial role.
“I wish I could say it was all genius, but we didn’t secure enough funding to implement all the possible features. Many of our competitors raised ten times more than us, literally hundreds of millions of dollars,” admits Yakovenko.
Solana serves as an open canvas for smart contract developers, offering a fertile ground for innovation and exploration.
With a limited runway dedicated to constructing a streamlined blockchain, Solana focused on creating “the fastest thing possible.” It omitted features like Ethereum Virtual Machine support, remote procedure call services, and had a rudimentary explorer. However, according to Yakovenko, this intentional simplicity was a key factor in attracting developers.
“When we launched, it was so different from Ethereum and uniquely designed for a specific optimization—making it as fast as humanly possible,” he explains, emphasizing that this approach did not compromise decentralization, as Solana can function with a large number of nodes. This distinct approach drew in a core group of developers, leading to the emergence of successful projects such as the decentralized wireless network Helium and the smart contract protocol Anchor.
During the cryptocurrency bull market of 2021, the Solana ecosystem experienced significant capital inflows, with its native token, Solana (SOL), reaching an all-time high just shy of $250 in November of that year.
“Painful” network outages
The platform has faced its share of challenges. The collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, led by Sam Bankman-Fried, significantly impacted the ecosystem. Anatoly Yakovenko expressed deep concern for projects that had received investments from FTX and Alameda Research, as well as those with capital on the bankrupt exchange.
Solana has also received notable criticism for several outages that temporarily disrupted the blockchain. Yakovenko described these incidents as “gut-wrenching for an engineer” and acknowledged them as painful but essential lessons. Learning from these experiences played a vital role in the ongoing operation of the ecosystem, prompting the Solana Foundation to assemble a team for the development of a second validator client.
Yakovenko emphasized the importance of having more than one client, citing Ethereum as the only other major smart contract network with this feature. He views it as a crucial step toward achieving full decentralization.
Regarding the perceived competition between Ethereum and Solana, Yakovenko highlighted healthy thought-sharing between open-source developers from both ecosystems. However, he acknowledged persistent challenges, such as a limited pool of developer talent and perceptions of overlapping features.