Solana didn’t start as a blockchain, but as an idea about “time”: if there were a clock in the network that everyone could verify, could nodes communicate with each other fewer times? The person behind this idea is Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.
You need to pay fees in $SOL to make transactions and run programs on Solana. Currently 105.41 (24h +0.91%).
▍An engineer with over a decade of experience
Anatoly Yakovenko, often known in the community as Toly, earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Before founding Solana, he spent more than a decade as an engineer at Qualcomm, working mainly on wireless communications and distributed systems. In distributed systems, “how can multiple machines agree on the order of events?” has always been a difficult problem—and it was the core problem Solana would later set out to solve.
▍Proof of History
In 2017, Anatoly began developing the idea of “Proof of History”: continuously performing hash calculations, with each step depending on the result of the previous one, to create a “timeline” that anyone can verify. Transactions can then be ordered along that timeline.
It’s worth noting that Proof of History is not itself a consensus mechanism. It provides a verifiable clock, while Solana still relies on votes from staked validators to confirm blocks.
▍From White Paper to Mainnet
The title of the Solana white paper is “Solana: A New Architecture for a High Performance Blockchain,” and it is credited to Anatoly Yakovenko. In 2018, he and Raj Gokal co-founded Solana.
The Solana network opened to the public in March 2020, and its first block was produced on March 16, 2020. The network’s native token is SOL, which is used to pay fees for transfers and running programs.
▍A Note on Using Solana
Fast transactions and low fees have led to a large number of new tokens and applications on Solana. There are also many counterfeit tokens with the same names, so check a token’s mint address before trading.
A fast network isn’t necessarily one that never has problems. Before making a large or important transaction, checking the network status and official announcements is a simple but useful habit.
▍A Few Final Words
From an idea about time to a public blockchain used by many people, Solana’s story shows the value of “thinking through the problem first.” As for what lies ahead for the network, that will depend on real usage data. Verify news with multiple sources before making a decision—don’t rely on just one source.
If anything wasn’t clear, let us know in the comments.