Solana didn’t begin 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 one another fewer times? The person who came up with this idea was Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.
Token: $SOL quoted at 90.31 (24h -5.73%).
■ An engineer for over a decade
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 worked at Qualcomm for over a decade as an engineer, primarily 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 became the central problem Solana 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, creating a “timeline” that anyone can verify. Transactions can then be ordered along this timeline.
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 is titled “Solana: A New Architecture for a High Performance Blockchain” and credits Anatoly Yakovenko as its author. 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.
■ Things to Keep in Mind When Using It
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.
High 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.
■ In Closing
From an idea about time to a public blockchain used by many people, Solana’s story illustrates the value of “thinking the problem through first.” As for what lies ahead for the chain, that remains to be seen in real usage data. Be cautious when you encounter claims of high returns.
Did you know this already?
Data is drawn from public sources; please verify it yourself.