Ethereum’s (ETH) complexity brings Solana’s (SOL) mission into focus, according to Anatoly Yakovenko. The Solana co-founder says in a new interview on Bankless that his mission is simply building a hyperfast chain. [1:49:29] “Yeah, network effects, TVL (total value locked), all these things could matter, but it’s not hard. It’s not something that I can […]
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Fantom (FTM) co-founder Andre Cronje says the Solana (SOL) network is a victim of success as the smart contract platform faces criticisms due to congestion issues. In a post on social media platform X, Cronje says that Solana’s recent outages are only because of its rising user activity and popularity. “Seeing a lot of ‘I […]
The post Fantom (FTM) Founder Andre Cronje Shows Support for Solana Amid Network Congestion Issues appeared first on The Daily Hodl.
Anza, a collective of Solana-focused developers, has announced the measures it is taking to mitigate the congestion issues the network has been facing. Anza stated that it has made significant progress in tackling these problems and hopes to release patches next week. Currently, 70% of users’ transactions in Solana are failing. Solana Dev Collective Anza […]
The meme coin phenomenon, where communities produce tokens with no other support than a meme behind it, has given rise to opposing opinions. These range from the most positive ones, which regard them as value-affirming elements, to the negative ones, which state that there is no value behind them. Bitcoin.com News examines the views of […]
An investigation carried out by blockchain sleuth Zackxbt has found that the trend where individuals ask for funds on social networks and promote their meme coin launches has grown in popularity. Almost $150 million has been raised on Solana after Book of Meme (BOME), the token that pioneered this trend, launched earlier this month. Meme […]
Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, believes that crypto can have a shot at disrupting Google’s and Apple’s app store duopoly. He criticized the state of the software distribution on mobile devices, lamenting that the two stores collected over 30% of all earnings just to display a top 10 list of the most downloaded apps. […]
Peer-to-peer file storage network Filecoin (FIL) is collaborating with smart contract platform Solana (SOL) for decentralized blockchain storage solutions. In a new thread on the social media platform X, the team behind Filecoin says that integrating with Solana will greatly enhance the Ethereum (ETH) rival’s capabilities as well as advance the concept of decentralized storage. […]
The post Filecoin Announces Integration With Solana (SOL) for Decentralized Blockchain Storage Solution appeared first on The Daily Hodl.
Solana Mobile, Solana Labs’ smartphone subsidiary, processed over $20 million in payments in alliance with Shopify and USDC, the second-largest dollar-pegged stablecoin. Anatoly Yakovenko, a co-founder of Solana Labs, explained that 51% of Chapter 2’s payments were completed using USDC, with no payment processing fees associated. Solana Mobile Processed Over $20 Million in USDC Payments […]
Solana (SOL) co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko is unveiling one of the most impactful innovations that’s emanated from the crypto industry In a new interview with macro guru Raoul Pal, Yakovenko says that decentralized finance (DeFi) is possibly the best thing that came out of crypto. “DeFi is the most important app for crypto. It is the […]
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Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko recounts the “eureka moment” that birthed the blueprint for the layer 1 smart contract protocol aiming to be “hyper-optimized” and “fast as possible.”
“I literally had two coffees and a beer, and I had this eureka moment at four in the morning,” Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko recalls as he leans back thoughtfully.
Speaking to Cointelegraph at Solana’s annual Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam, the co-founder recounts a late-night brainwave of a “hyper-optimized, fast as possible” smart contract blockchain protocol.
“The use case that I was going after was for central limit order books, like how to run something that’s like the Nasdaq, but on a public permissionless blockchain,” Yakovenko explains.
“I thought that there was a clear win there if you have transparent data, everyone has fair and open rights, and all this stuff is running on commodity hardware.”
Solana’s roots are intrinsically linked to Yakovenko’s journey as a computer engineer. Having spent the majority of his career at Qualcomm in San Diego alongside co-founder Raj Gokal, Yakovenko’s idea for the platform carries plenty of inspiration from that period of his life.
“Solana comes from Solana Beach. Me and my co-founders lived there, we’d wake up, we’d surf, bike to work, go back home and surf again,” Yakovenko reflects.
“We learned how to do awesome systems programming out there and 2017 is when I kind of had the inception idea for Solana.”
Yakovenko had been tinkering on a side project, building deep learning hardware, deploying graphics processing units and mining cryptocurrencies to test out the project. This paved the way for the genesis of the platform.
The impetus for the idea stemmed from a concept known as time division multiple access. As Yakovenko explains, the technology is tied to how cellular towers alternate transmissions based on time intervals.
His idea was to build a system based on technology that Stanford University researchers had been working on called a verifiable delay function. Yakovenko jokes that he thought he discovered something truly novel, which prompted him to begin working on a smart contract layer platform:
“The intuition that I had was that once you have a way to track time in a decentralized way on a public permissionless blockchain, you could use similar optimizations that Qualcomm did for cellular networks.”
Inspired by the advent of smart contract functionality pioneered by Ethereum, Yakovenko and his partners set out to develop a breakout application and use cases powered by smart contract functionality:
“We wanted to build a hyper-optimized, smart contract platform that could give the benefits of trust-minimized computing but without the performance headaches or costs associated with alternatives.”
Two years of work went into the engineering of Solana before its eventual launch in March 2020 just as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world. The platform enjoyed significant success, fanfare and support, but Yakovenko admits that a fair amount of luck was involved.
“I wish I could say it was all genius, but we didn't raise enough money to build all the features possible. A lot of our competitors raised ten times more than us, literally hundreds of millions of dollars," Yakovenko says.
With just enough runway to build a focused blockchain, Solana honed in on creating “the fastest thing possible.” It didn’t include Ethereum Virtual Machine support or remote procedure call services and “barely had a functioning explorer,” but Yakovenko maintains that this was part of what drew in builders.
“That’s what kind of lit up the developers imagination when we launched, it was so different from Ethereum and so uniquely built for a very specific optimization, making this thing as fast as humanly possible,” he explains.
The co-founder adds that the engineering did not sacrifice decentralization because Solana can operate with a large number of nodes. Carving out a niche attracted a core group of developers which birthed successful projects like decentralized wireless network Helium and smart contract protocol Anchor.
“They recognized something special and they saw that we didn't have any resources to build anything else. They took it upon themselves to go build open source code.”
The Solana ecosystem saw significant capital inflows during the cryptocurrency bull market of 2021, with its native token Sonala (SOL) reaching an all-time high just shy of $250 in November of that year.
The platform has also endured its fair share of hiccups. The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried cryptocurrency exchange FTX badly hurt the ecosystem. As Cointelegraph previously reported, Yakovenko admitted that he had been left deeply concerned for a number of projects that had received investments from FTX and Alameda Research and those that had held capital on the bankrupt exchange.
Solana has also copped heavy criticism for a handful of outages that took the blockchain offline. Yakovenko described these instances as “gut-wrenching for an engineer” and painful lessons to learn:
“The number one priority is safety. Then it's liveness. When you have a problem like congestion, even if you can like bang out the code in a week, it takes audits and testing to ship it to mainnet.”
Learning from these mishaps has been a crucial part in the ecosystem’s continued operation. It also led to the Solana Foundation assembling a team to build a second validator client.
“The only other major smart contract network with more than one client is Ethereum. That's one of those steps that you have to do to get to full decentralization, in my opinion,” Yakovenko says.
As for the perceived competition between Ethereum and Solana? Yakovenko says there is healthy thought-sharing between open-source developers from both ecosystems. The main points of contention remain — a small pool of developer talent and perceived overlapping features.
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