Source: Token Dispatch
Original Title: Anatoly Yakovenko: The Soul of Solana
Translation and Compilation: BitpushNews
Anatoly Yakovenko was quite frustrated at the time.
It was 2017 when a news report stated that the Bitcoin conference announced it would stop accepting Bitcoin payments because transaction fees had skyrocketed to $60-70. This global top cryptocurrency event could not even use cryptocurrency.
So he did what any frustrated engineer would do—he walked into Café Soleil in San Francisco, ordered two coffees and a beer, and stayed up until 4 AM pondering: why is Bitcoin so slow?
Between the second espresso and the last sip of beer, Yakovenko had his "Eureka moment": a way to encode the passage of time as a data structure. At that time, he didn’t know it was called a "verifiable delay function," couldn’t Google it, and even thought he had invented a brand new concept.
In a sense, he did.
When Solana launched in 2020, it could process 65,000 transactions per second. Today, this blockchain built by Yakovenko in his garage has a peak market value of over $50 billion.
The Birth of a System Thinker
Yakovenko's journey into blockchain began with an immigration story. Born in Ukraine in 1981, he moved to the U.S. with his family in the early 1990s, becoming part of the Eastern European wave of immigrants seeking technological opportunities.
In his youth, he was captivated by the precision and power of the C programming language. "There’s a magical power in writing code to solve world-class problems," he recalled of his early programming experiences during the internet bubble.
While studying computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Yakovenko founded his first startup, Alescere, in the early 2000s—providing VoIP systems for small and medium-sized enterprises. Although the company failed, it gave him crucial experience in real-time networking protocols.
In 2003, armed with entrepreneurial experience, Yakovenko joined Qualcomm in San Diego. A standard engineering position evolved into a 13-year journey where he solved some of the company’s toughest technical challenges.
His work spanned everything from QChat's instant intercom servers to the BREW mobile operating system, eventually becoming a senior engineering manager. He also optimized communication between different processors. Yakovenko became an expert in "safely extending operating system services and protection domains to auxiliary processors," essentially studying how to make different parts of a computer system work together without dragging each other down.
His patent portfolio during this time resembled a blueprint for his later blockchain work: "exposing host operating system services to auxiliary processors" and "extending protection domains to coprocessors." His focus was on minimizing overhead and improving coordination efficiency between distributed components.
"I started thinking about how we at Qualcomm solved scalability issues with wireless protocols, and that really drove me deeper into it," he recalled.
The cellular base station technology he worked on used a method called "time division multiple access," which coordinates multiple signals by carefully managing time. In 2017, after more than a decade at Qualcomm, Yakovenko began working at Dropbox on compression and distributed systems. But what truly changed everything was his side project.
He and former GPU head Stephen Akridge, also at Qualcomm, built hardware for deep learning in their spare time while mining to offset costs. The project was initially about machine learning, not blockchain innovation.
However, as Yakovenko watched their mining equipment coordinate with thousands of other computers, one question kept bothering him: why is proof-of-work so inefficient?
At that time, Bitcoin transaction fees had soared to $60-70. This network, which was supposed to be peer-to-peer electronic cash, could not handle basic payments. The Bitcoin conference incident further fueled his frustration.
All of this ultimately led to that epiphany night at Café Soleil.
The Breakthrough of Proof of History
Imagine this: 10,000 people trying to agree on the timing of an event. Everyone is arguing, and the scene is chaotic.
This is essentially how Bitcoin operates. But the problem with Bitcoin runs deeper than just "noise."
Bitcoin generates a new block every 10 minutes, a careful balance between security and speed. If it were faster, there would be a risk of the network splitting into competing versions. If it were slower, transactions would take a long time. This 10-minute setting means Bitcoin can only process about 7 transactions per second.
In contrast, Visa processes about 24,000 transactions per second on average.
The real crux is that in a distributed system made up of thousands of computers worldwide, there is no central clock. Each computer's clock runs slightly differently. Network messages take time to transmit. The order of events can appear different depending on where you are.
Thousands of Bitcoin computers spend most of their time debating these fundamental questions: "Did this transaction happen before that one?" "When was this block created?" "Which version of the blockchain is correct?"
The more computers that join, the more arguments there are.
Yakovenko had an idea. What if there was no need to argue about time?
What if the blockchain had its own built-in, tamper-proof clock? Every transaction would automatically receive a timestamp that everyone could independently verify.
This way, thousands of computers wouldn’t need to keep sending messages to reach a consensus on time; they could just look at the same tamper-proof clock and immediately know the order of events.
No endless back-and-forth arguments, just a precisely timed cryptographic stopwatch.
He called it "Proof of History."
Using computation instead of argument. Rather than having thousands of conversations about time synchronization, just check the clock. It’s that simple.
Building Solana
With this breakthrough, Yakovenko co-founded Solana Labs in 2018 with Greg Fitzgerald (another Qualcomm veteran) and Raj Gokal. The company’s name comes from their surfing days at Solana Beach in California.
The founders would wake up every day, surf first, then bike to work, code all day, and return to the beach.
They developed during the "crypto winter" of 2018-2019, a time when funding was scarce and market enthusiasm had faded. But Yakovenko saw this as an advantage. They could focus on the engineering itself without the hype and pressure.
He recalled, "It was like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. It was indeed a crypto winter, and you saw many teams disbanding. We were always relatively conservative, never raising a lot of money, only about two years of operating funds, so we were always thinking, ‘We have to get this thing done as quickly as possible, really focusing on the core product we believe can make a difference.’"
The team not only built "Proof of History." They also created a whole suite of innovative ecosystems to support high throughput:
Sealevel: A parallel smart contract runtime that allows the blockchain to run multiple transactions simultaneously by pre-declaring the accounts that transactions will touch.
Turbine: A BitTorrent-inspired system that uses erasure coding and a randomly partitioned tree structure based on stake weight to propagate transaction data across the network.
Gulf Stream: A mempool-less transaction forwarding system that can send transactions to future leaders before they start generating blocks.
Cloudbreak: A horizontally scalable account storage system designed for high concurrent access.
Each innovation addresses different bottlenecks. Together, they created something unprecedented—a blockchain that gets faster as it scales.
On March 16, 2020, as the world was falling apart—stock markets crashing, countries locked down, startups failing—Yakovenko chose this day to launch Solana. Months later, it proved to be the perfect timing to introduce the world’s fastest blockchain.
By the end of 2020, Solana had processed 8.3 billion transactions, created 54 million blocks, and attracted over 100 projects in areas like DeFi, gaming, and Web3. The number of validators grew to over 300 nodes globally, an impressive figure for a network that had been live for less than a year.
Developers began building applications that were impossible to achieve on slower blockchains: high-frequency trading systems, real-time games, and social media platforms, which for the first time in blockchain history became possible.
Downtime Controversies
Success brought new challenges. Solana's high throughput made it a target for malicious traffic and exposed systemic weaknesses.
September 14, 2021: During a Grape IDO, a surge in transaction volume caused a network fork, resulting in 17 hours of downtime.
May 1, 2022: An automated NFT "blind minting" bot caused a consensus failure, taking the network offline for 7-8 hours.
May 31, 2022: A vulnerability in offline transaction processing led to 4.5 hours of downtime.
October 1, 2022: A configuration error caused 6 hours of downtime.
Critics seized on these events to argue that Solana sacrificed decentralization for speed. This "monolithic" design meant that when something went wrong, the entire system could collapse.
The team's response was to implement systemic improvements. Better deduplication, improved nonce handling, fixing fork selection errors, and introducing protocols like QUIC to enhance network reliability.
In November 2022, Solana faced its biggest test—the collapse of FTX.
Sam Bankman-Fried was once one of Solana's most prominent supporters, and when his exchange collapsed, panic quickly spread. Investors generally believed that anything associated with FTX would fail. As people rushed to sell, the price of Solana tokens plummeted.
The Solana community did not sit back and wait for others to solve the problem.
FTX had controlled a popular trading platform called Serum, which many Solana users relied on. When FTX went down, the platform effectively became an "orphan." No one knew what would happen to it.
Within just a few hours, Solana developers and community members took action. They copied all of Serum's code and created their own version called OpenBook, completely independent of FTX.
This technical term is called "forking," which means creating a new version that operates in exactly the same way but has no ownership issues.
Throughout the crisis, Solana itself never stopped working.
Despite the price crash and spreading panic, the blockchain continued to process transactions. There were no outages and no technical failures.
Unlike traditional companies, where a CEO's arrest could lead to a collapse, Solana had grown larger than any individual or company supporting it. This technology and community could survive independently.
Looking Ahead
At 44, Yakovenko has built something remarkable while maintaining a unique quality that combines engineering pragmatism with crypto idealism, a common trait among successful blockchain founders.
He advocates for what he calls "sensible rules," such as lawmakers trying to use technology before regulating it.
Strangely, while he hopes for crypto-friendly policies, he opposes Trump's proposal to establish a government crypto reserve.
He believes this is too centralized, a principled stance that makes one wonder if he is truly suited for politics. He would rather see innovation thrive organically than have the government control digital currencies, even if those in power happen to favor the blockchain he created.
His ultimate vision is to make Solana a global financial infrastructure, allowing information and funds to flow at the speed of light.
Even as Solana directly competes with Ethereum in the so-called "blockchain wars" of the crypto world, Yakovenko rejects tribalistic thinking. He firmly believes that different blockchains can coexist and complement each other rather than fight to the death. In an industry where people often predict that a competitor's protocol will "go to zero" over minor technical differences, his perspective seems remarkably mature.
With an insight that now seems obvious in hindsight but once puzzled everyone, Yakovenko built one of the world's most powerful distributed computers.
That is turning time itself into a blockchain data structure.
He estimates his net worth to be between $500 million and $800 million, having achieved financial success that allows him to focus on building rather than wealth accumulation.
But the form of validation that can prove its value in the financial world is coming: external funding.
Four public companies now hold over $591 million in Solana tokens in their corporate treasuries, with Upexi accumulating 1.9 million SOL tokens in just four months, leading the pack. SOL Strategies has taken a more systematic dollar-cost averaging approach. Classover Holdings announced a potential $500 million investment plan in Solana, and in Trump's proposed U.S. strategic crypto reserve, Solana is listed as a strategic asset alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Institutional adoption indicates that Yakovenko's vision of making Solana a global financial infrastructure may not be as far-fetched as it sounds.
As institutions like Franklin Templeton apply for Solana spot ETFs, and four public companies hold $591 million in SOL (with Upexi hoarding 1.9 million tokens in four months), Yakovenko's vision is gaining capital validation. When companies start viewing SOL as equivalent to U.S. Treasury bonds, that late-night inspiration at Café Soleil may indeed reshape the financial system.
This is the story of the founder of Solana.
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