A reader asked me about this privately, so let me explain it in plain English.
Solana didn't begin as a blockchain, but as an idea about “time”: if a network had a clock that everyone could verify, could nodes communicate with one another fewer times? The person who came up with this idea was Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana's co-founder.
Coin mentioned in this article: $SOL Current price: 103.33 (24h -1.01%).
■ 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 do multiple machines agree on the order of events?” has always been a difficult problem—and it was the core problem Solana 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. This creates a “timeline” that anyone can verify, allowing transactions to be ordered along it.
It’s worth noting that Proof of History itself is not 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 Solana white paper was titled “Solana: A New Architecture for a High Performance Blockchain” and credited to Anatoly Yakovenko. In 2018, he co-founded Solana with Raj Gokal.
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 apps appearing on Solana. There are also many counterfeit tokens with the same names, so check a token’s mint address before trading.
A fast network can still run into problems. Before making a large or important transaction, checking the network status and official announcements is a simple but useful habit.
■ Summary
From an idea about time to a public blockchain used by many people, Solana’s story shows the value of “thinking the problem through first.” As for what lies ahead for the network, that remains to be seen in the real-world usage data. Cross-check information across multiple sources before acting, rather than relying on just one person’s account.
Had you heard about this before?