Solana didn't start 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 behind this idea was Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana's co-founder.
Related token: $SOL at 96.36 (+3.37% over 24h).
■ More than a decade as an engineer
Anatoly Yakovenko is often known in the community as Toly. He earned his bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Before founding Solana, he worked as an engineer at Qualcomm for more than a decade, focusing 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 later became the core problem Solana set out to solve.
■ Proof of History
In 2017, Anatoly began developing the idea of “Proof of History”: continuously performing hash computations, 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 is not a consensus mechanism in itself. 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 Solana’s white paper is “Solana: A New Architecture for High Performance Blockchains,” 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 Few Things to Keep in Mind
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 be sure to check a token’s mint address before trading.
Speed doesn’t mean the network will never have problems. Before making a large or important transaction, checking the network status and official announcements is a simple but useful habit.
■ A Few Final Thoughts
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 the future holds for this chain, that remains to be seen in real-world usage data. Only invest what you can afford, and leave yourself enough room to maneuver.
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