Solana’s genesis story: Anatoly Yakovenko’s vision for a high-performance blockchain

“I literally had two coffees and a beer, and I had this eureka moment at four in the morning,” recalls Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, as he lies back thoughtfully.

Speaking to Cointelegraph at Solana's annual Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam, the co-founder recounts a late-night idea for a "hyper-optimized, fastest-possible" smart contract blockchain protocol.

“The use case I was looking for was for central limit order books, like how to run something like the Nasdaq, but on a permissionless public blockchain,” Yakovenko explains.

"I thought there was a clear victory if you had transparent data, everyone had fair and open rights, and all of this was running on commodity hardware."

From navigation to smart contracts

Solana's roots are intrinsically linked to Yakovenko's career as a computer engineer. Having spent most of his career at Qualcomm in San Diego alongside co-founder Raj Gokal, Yakovenko's idea for the platform is largely inspired by that period of his life.

“Solana comes from Solana Beach. My co-founders and I lived there, we would wake up, surf, bike to work, come home and surf again,” Yakovenko reflects.

“We learned how to do amazing systems programming and 2017 was when I had the initial idea for Solana.”

Yakovenko had been tinkering on a side project, building deep learning hardware, deploying graphics processing units, and mining cryptocurrency to test the project. This paved the way for the genesis of the platform.

The impulse of the idea. derivative based on a concept known as time division multiple access. As Yakovenko explains, the technology is tied to how cell towers alternate transmissions based on time intervals.

Their idea was to build a system based on a technology that researchers at Stanford University had been working on, called a testable delay function. Yakovenko jokes that he thought he had discovered something truly novel, which prompted him to start working on a smart contract layer platform:

"The intuition I had was that once you had a way to track time decentrally on a permissionless public blockchain, you could use optimizations similar to what Qualcomm made for cellular networks."

Inspired by the arrival of smart contract functionality, pioneered by Ethereum, Yakovenko and his partners set out to develop an innovative application and use cases powered by smart contract functionality:

“We wanted to build a hyper-optimized smart contract platform that could deliver the benefits of trust-minimized computing but without the performance headaches and costs associated with alternatives.”

It took two years of engineering work for 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 there was quite a bit of luck involved.

“I wish I could say everything was great, but we didn't raise enough money to create every possible feature. Many of our competitors raised ten times more than us, literally hundreds of millions of dollars,” says Yakovenko.

Solana as a green field for smart contract developers

With enough runway to build a focused blockchain, Solana focused on building “as quickly as possible.” It didn't include support for the Ethereum virtual machine or remote procedure call services and "barely had a functional browser," but Yakovenko maintains that this was part of what attracted developers.

“That's what lit up the developers' imagination when we launched it; “It was very different from Ethereum and was uniquely built for very specific optimization, making this 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. Creating a niche attracted a core group of developers who gave rise to successful projects like the Helio decentralized wireless network and smart contract protocol Anchor.

“They recognized something special and saw that we didn't have the resources to build anything else. “They took it upon themselves to create open source code.”

The Solana ecosystem saw significant capital inflows during the 2021 cryptocurrency bull market, with its native token, Solana (SUN), reaching an all-time high of around $250 in November of that year.

“Heartbreaking” network outages

The platform has also endured its fair share of setbacks. The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX cryptocurrency exchange severely damaged the ecosystem. As Cointelegraph previously reportedYakovenko admitted that he was deeply concerned about several projects that had received investments from FTX and Alameda Research and those that had capital in the bankrupt stock market.

Solana has also received heavy criticism for several outages that took the blockchain offline. Yakovenko described these cases as “heartbreaking for an engineer” and painful lessons to be learned:

“The number one priority is safety. So it is liveliness. “When you have a problem like congestion, even if you can release the code in a week, it takes auditing and testing to push it to the mainnet.”

Learning from these mishaps has been a crucial part of the continued functioning of the ecosystem. It also led the Solana Foundation to form a team to create a second validator client.

“The only other major smart contract network with more than one client is Ethereum. In my opinion, that is one of those steps that must be taken to achieve total decentralization,” says Yakovenko.

As for the perceived competition between Ethereum and Solana, Yakovenko says there is a healthy exchange of ideas between open source developers from both ecosystems. Major points of contention remain, with a small pool of talented developers and perceived overlapping features.

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