Anatoly Yakovenko started the multi-billion-dollar blockchain ecosystem that was used to launch at least 7 crypto unicorns in less than 2 years. Here's how he did it. (2024)

Anatoly Yakovenko's startup developed Solana, a layer-1 blockchain that led to a multi-billion-dollar crypto ecosystem in less than five years. The software that Solana Labs created allowed founders to build seven crypto unicorns and the layer-1 later notched itself as the ninth largest blockchainby market cap in the industry.

The 41-year-old's idea began at a San Francisco cafe with two coffees, a beer, and a night of working until 4 a.m., cofounder Yakovenko told Insider. Crypto's ecosystem looked very different at the time and Yakovenko, who worked as a systems engineer at semi-conductor giant Qualcomm, was taking notes.

Ethereum had gone live just two years earlier and its token was trading near $7 at the start of 2017. Meanwhile, its network was clogged and slowed down by early blockchain game CryptoKitties, better thought of as "decentralized Tamagotchi." And MetaMask, the now-popular Ethereum wallet, couldn't go longer than a few weeks without user complaints.

"I had a eureka moment," Yakovenko said, adding that he could develop something to improve some of the technical issues other blockchains faced. "That's what really pushed me over the edge."

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Thus ensues the "proof-of-history" protocol, which is what sets Solana's blockchain apart from Bitcoin or Ethereum. The protocol develops a kind of "synchronized clock that, in essence, assigns a timestamp for each transaction and disables the ability for miners and bots to decide the order of which transactions get recorded onto the blockchain," according to TechCrunch. Solana runs on proof-of-stake and the Nakamoto Consensus, but the proof-of-history is an accelerator added on to this. This, per Yakovenko, allows Solana to have cheaper fees and quicker transactions times.

Solana is currently processing 2,745 transactions per second, per its website, while Ethereum can do roughly 30 transactions in the same time frame on its network. Ethereum, however, still has a far larger grasp on the nascent space, as the second largest crypto by market value. The network also has a series of upgrades called The Merge which could give it another boost over its alleged competitor.

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Raj Gokal later joined Yakovenko as cofounder, along with Qualcomm alumni Greg Fitzgerald and Stephen Akridge. Yakovenko says part of the reason for Solana's success is attributed to bringing on "rockstars" that he was able to pull from his network.

"We have the best team in crypto at the time, in terms of experience and understanding of how network protocols work and how operating systems work," Yakovenko said.

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Solana's do or die moment

The project's success, however, was not linear.

Solana's mainnet went live in March, 2020. Its auction was three days after the coronavirus was declared a global pandemic and the same week of the infamous "Black Thursday" crash, where bitcoin slashed half of its value in a day.

"That was a really, really stressful time. We barely got everything to work and the macro seemed like everything was going to die," he said. "It was kind of a do or die moment for us and for the network."

Yakovenko said the company had no more than 22 months of runway at a time, adding that they were just trying to survive for years before the last bull market.

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"We launched at the bottom," he said. "I think that part of the reason why it succeeded was because the people that joined our community were the real true believers and die hards. They were paying attention to crypto as the world was kind of setting on fire."

Small boutiques were early investors in Solana like Multicoin. And some of the earliest token buyers received a 4,300-fold increase in their investment. Other ventures firms like Andreessen Horowitz began diversifying portfolios with Solana much later in June 2021, when it closed a $314 million private token sale.

In 2021, Solana's ecosystem began picking up traction. Startups with unicorn valuations built on the blockchain including non-fungible token marketplace Magic Eden, move-to-earn game StepN, decentralized exchange Serum, wallet Phantom, and more.

"It's just not something that I expected," Yakovenko said. "I don't know if the momentum is sustainable, but I would love to see more of those trailblazers like these grow really quickly."

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Crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded Serum, which is built on Solana, previously told Fortune in an email that the layer-1 has a chance to become a key layer of infrastructure for the future of crypto. "They were by far the most serious [layer 1] we talked to about continuing to scale their blockchain and expand its opportunities," Bankman-Fried said.

Price action isn't a sole indicator of market health, but Solana's native token, SOL, has jumped 85.42% in the past year, according to Messari. In tandem with broader crypto markets and the macro environment, the altcoin has declined 56.56% in the past three months.

Critics says Solana's network, however, is too centralized due to its token distribution.The layer-1 also continues to experience outages for hours at a time. In June, validators in the network were not processing new blocks for several hours, resulting in many decentralized apps going offline.

Moving forward, Yakovenko is bullish on both the future of crypto and Solana. He says he wants to help onboard the next one billion users into the space with a web3 mobile phone, called Saga.

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"Almost 7 billion people use smartphones around the world and more than 100 million people hold digital assets - and both of those numbers will continue to grow," Yakovenko said in a statement on June 23.

Anatoly Yakovenko started the multi-billion-dollar blockchain ecosystem that was used to launch at least 7 crypto unicorns in less than 2 years. Here's how he did it. (2024)

FAQs

Who are the main founders of Anatoly Yakovenko Greg Fitzgerald and Stephen Akridge? ›

History. Solana was founded by Anatoly Yakovenko, Greg Fitzgerald, Stephen Akridge, Raj Gokal, and Zed Zed. In November 2017, Anatoly Yakovenko published a draft of his whitepaper describing the PoH Proof of History algorithm.

What are the 8 innovations that make Solana the first web scale blockchain? ›

The others are Tower BFT, which is Solana's custom implementation of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance; Pipeline, a web-scale transaction processing unit; Turbine, Solana's block propagation protocol that solves the blockchain scalability trilemma; Cloudbreak, the project's horizontally-scaled accounts database; Gulf ...

Who is the founder of Solana blockchain? ›

Its native cryptocurrency is SOL. Solana was launched in 2020 by Solana Labs, which was founded by Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal in 2018.

Who is the owner of Solana contract? ›

The owner of Solana programs is the BPFLoaderUpgradeable system program, so by default, the wallet that deployed the program cannot change the data (bytecode) stored in an account. To enable upgrading programs, the Solana runtime embeds the wallet of the deployer into the bytecode of the program.

Who is the co-founder of Solana Raj? ›

Raj Gokal is the co-founder of Solana and president of Solana Labs. He also serves on the board of the Solana Foundation. He was previously focused on startups in behavioral health.

What is proof of history in Solana? ›

Solana's Proof of History consensus mechanism verifies the time elapsed between two events. It involves a sequence of computations performed by a cryptographically secure function. This function operates sequentially on a single-core processor, with each output as input for the next computation.

How much was Solana when it first launched? ›

Solana first went public via its initial coin offering (ICO) in April 2020, entering the crypto market at an initial price of $US0. 9511.

What coding language does Solana blockchain use? ›

Solana programs are typically written in the Rust language, but C/C++ are also supported.

Who is suing Solana? ›

The plaintiff, Mark Young, filed the suit on July 1 against Solana Labs, Solana Foundation, Solana CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, crypto investment firm Multicoin Capital and its co-founder Kyle Samani, as well as trading platform FalconX.

Who controls Solana? ›

Raj Gokal is the Chief Operating Officer of Solana Labs and co-founded the company with Anatoly in 2017. His expertise lies in scaling businesses, demonstrated by his medical device startup, Sano, which raised over $20 million in funding.

Is Solana better than Ethereum? ›

While both projects offer similar functionality, Solana is faster and cheaper, thanks to the underlying technology. Solana can process speeds of up to 29,000 transactions per second, while Ethereum can still only manage a maximum of around 45 transactions per second, even following several key upgrades.

Who is the founder of Solana Ukraine? ›

He is a Ukrainian-born programmer, co-founder, and CEO of the Solana platform.

Which country did Anatoly Yakovenko come from? ›

Anatoly Yakovenko is a co-founder of Solana and the CEO of Solana Labs. I was born under Soviet rule in modern-day Ukraine. We moved to America when I was 11.

Who are the investors in Solana? ›

Who are Solana's investors? Solana has 91 institutional investors including a16z, Polychain and Multicoin Capital.

What is the career of Anatoly Yakovenko? ›

Anatoly Yakovenko began his career in the tech industry, gaining experience in systems engineering and software development. His background includes a significant tenure at Qualcomm, where he worked on optimizing operating systems and held a pivotal role in developing automated tools that managed software performance.

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