Solana: Who is Anatoly Yakovenko? The story (2024)

Anatoly Yakovenko, the creator of Solana‘s innovative Proof-of-History protocol, is an engineer as brilliant as he is secretive. Although he does not fit the beach boy stereotype, it is his surfing background that gave the blockchain its name.

The American Dream: soviet Anatoly

Anatoly Yakovenko’s date of birth is unknown, much of his private life is shrouded in mystery, as befits an expert in cryptography. Nevertheless, we can trace his former Soviet origins to what is now Ukraine.

His story tells of the “American dream” from the perspective of a gritty immigrant with a passion for hard work. In fact, the Soviet boy, with the stereotype of the “businessman” in his head, made his first entrepreneurial experience already in his college days, creating the start-up Alescere, which unfortunately did not survive the Dot-com bubble.

The project, which closed in 2003, concerned VOIP (Voice over IP) technology, i.e. the transmission of voice over the Internet, which we still use today for calls. The interest in protocols (SIP and RTP) and p2p connections would come in handy for the creation of Solana.

Solana: Who is Anatoly Yakovenko? The story (1)

Fun fact

The dot-com speculative bubble, between 2000 and 2001, involved most of the nascent companies in the internet-related sector. The market of reckless investors, carried away by their faith in technological progress, overestimated the potential of some projects, prompting the exorbitant growth of the shares. This rapid price increase, which turned out to be insubstantial, followed the imperative to “get big fast” – expand or fail. As the bubble burst, many companies went bankrupt, but some were able to rise from the ashes and become market leaders in the following decades, such as Amazon.

The Qualcomm days

Graduated in Computer Science from the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) in 2003, he began his engineering career at Qualcomm, which continued until 2016.

Among the many products and services developed, we can mention Augmented and Virtual Reality applications, 3D cameras, mobile operating systems and components for Push2Talk services.

Before founding Solana Labs in 2017, he worked as a Software Engineer at Mesosphere, now D2iQ, and Dropbox, focusing mainly on the development of distributed systems.These experiences, as the “history” section of solana.com explains, taught him that “a reliable clock makes network synchronization very easy.”

Proof-of-History: time is relative to SHA-256

Suddenly, an idea popped into Anatoly’s head: using Bitcoin’s SHA-256 cryptographic hash function to overcome blockchain scalability limitations. This would save the time required to reach consensus on the order of transactions.

His timing protocol, called Proof-of-History (PoH), assigns a cryptographic timestamp to each of the transactions, so as to “keep time” according to a unique and artificial reference system.The description of the PoH protocol is organised in a whitepaper, published in November 2017. This innovation will make it possible to exceed the 6-15 tps (transactions per second) of blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, without resorting to sharding or Layer 2 solutions such as the Lightning Network.

The PoH will make Solana scalable and competitive for centralised payment systems such as Visa, which can support 65,000 tps, by “simply” agreeing on the time order between nodes.

Solana: the blockchain born between silk and sea

So Anatoly, Greg FitzGerald and Stephen Akridge, two colleagues from Qualcomm, together with 3 other engineers (from Google, Microsoft and Apple), built a prototype blockchain they called Silk and founded the company Loom, planning to weave all the world’s transactions into a single blockchain.

Around the same time, however, another project with the same name, a Layer 2 for Ethereum, was released. The team, therefore, decided on a rebranding operation: on 28 March, the organisation appeared as Solana Labs on GitHub, renaming the Silk project to Solana.

Solana’s whitepaper, which had been continuously updated since the first implementation, features several consensus mechanisms and innovative protocols: Turbine, Gulf Stream Protocol, Sealevel, Pipelining Infrastructure, Cloudbreak Protocol. These curious names all belong to the semantic field of water, why?The origin of Solana is the sea at Solana Beach, a town north of San Diego, California, where Anatoly and colleagues Greg and Stephen lived and surfed during the three years they worked together at Qualcomm.

The “biodiversity” of the Solana ecosystem

The beta version of the Mainnet, Solana’s main network, was launched in March 2020 and has been under constant development and update ever since.

Initially, it was only possible to carry out transactions and support simple smart contracts on Solana. Today, however, many functions are available, including staking rewards (from 11 February 2021), as well as a sea of dapps built thanks to its protocol.These include DeFi projects such as Mango, Orca and Serum, an ultra-fast decentralised exchange (DEX) founded by Sam Bankman-Fried (CEO of Alameda Research), an early supporter of Solana.

Solana’s ecosystem is also populated by lending protocols (Apricot Finance, Solend and many others), marketplaces for NFTs (Solanart, Solsea, Magic Eden and others) and Web3 applications such as the Brave browser and Grape, a protocol for building token-based communities.

Solana itself, like Avalanche, invests first and foremost in innovation and decentralised technologies, which is why “The Solana Foundation” was created on 8 April 2020.

The Solana Foundation: mission freedom

Solana Labs transferred 167 million SOL, along with all protocol-related IP addresses, to the Solana Foundation, announcing the birth of the organisation. The Solana Foundation’s funds are used to organise marketing campaigns and incentives to support and further develop Solana.

Anatoly Yakovenko, in fact, as president of the Solana Foundation, has a clear vision: a decentralised world, where individuals can be masters of their own data and managers of their own finances, being able to transfer value through the Solana network, independent of third parties.

Recalling the birth of the WWW (World Wide Web), Anatoly explains how the initial idea of freedom, sharing and trust was traded for the security and authority of centralised systems. According to Solana’s CEO, digital equality, privacy, resistance to censorship and accessibility to services can only be guaranteed by decentralised technologies, thus renewing the original idea of the web.

This desire for global liberation fuels the commitment of the Solana Foundation, which therefore accelerates the innovation of the protocol and the expansion of the Solana network through the following initiatives:

  • Incentives to populate Solana’s sea with more “fish” and welcome other projects to its harbour
  • Education on decentralised technologies
  • Protocol development and enhancement to ward off hackers and open routes to other interoperable blockchains
  • Research on topics critical to decentralisation, such as cryptography, consensus algorithms and governance

Where everyone sees pools Solana sees the sea, ready to set sail?

Solana: Who is Anatoly Yakovenko? The story (2024)

FAQs

Who is the man behind Solana? ›

Raj Gokal and Anatoly Yakovenko are distinctly named as Solana Labs co-founders. However, the majority of the crypto world still considers Yakovenko to be the one who ultimately calls the shots and makes Solana the industry's leading Ethereum-Killer.

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.

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.

Who is behind Sol? ›

The cryptocurrency platform is called Solana, while the individual unit is called a sol. Created by Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana operates on a decentralized computer network using a ledger called blockchain.

Who is the founder of Anatoly Solana? ›

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

Who is the ownership of Solana? ›

Founded by Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana is a high-performance blockchain designed for decentralized applications and crypto-currencies.

Why Solana will win? ›

Solana's ability to match or even surpass Ethereum in these critical aspects of the blockchain economy indicates a robust and scalable infrastructure capable of handling significant transaction volumes, a crucial factor for its continued adoption and growth.

Is Anatoly Yakovenko Russian or Ukrainian? ›

Solana Founder Anatoly Yakovenko was born in Ukraine and moved to the United States.

Did Solana make millionaires? ›

CRYPTO: SOL

Could Ethereum's rival generate major multibagger gains? Solana (SOL -2.53%) has minted a lot of millionaires since its launch in 2020.

Who is the developer of Solana? ›

Solana (blockchain platform)
Denominations
Developer(s)Solana Labs & Solana Foundation
LicenseApache 2.0
Ledger
Block explorerhttps://explorer.solana.com/
9 more rows

Who is the maker of Solana? ›

Named after a small Southern Californian coastal city, Solana is the brainchild of software developer Anatoly Yakovenko. Yakovenko first proposed this innovative blockchain in 2017, and Solana launched in March 2020.

Who invested in Solana? ›

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

How does Solana make money? ›

The value of Solana's native SOL cryptocurrency is derived from its utility. SOL can be used to secure the network through staking, either as a validator node or a delegator. This is a profitable choice for SOL holders as stakers receive half of transaction fees and most of the emission of new tokens.

Why is Solana so popular? ›

Solana's high-performance blockchain provides an ideal foundation for building DApps that require fast transaction speeds and low latency, making it a preferred choice for developers seeking to create scalable and efficient applications.

Who is the head of Solana? ›

Anatoly Yakovenko - Founder & CEO @ Solana - Crunchbase Person Profile.

Who are the major holders of Solana? ›

List of Major Exchange's Solana Volume. Binance Exchange tops this list with 30% of the total volume in SOL/ USDT pairs on the platform. The 30% comes to a total of $714,685,785 in volume. The second spot goes to the OKX exchange, which has $277,601,817, around 11.67% of the total volume.

Who are the biggest investors in Solana? ›

Saber
  • lead. a16z. (9280 Investments)
  • lead. Polychain Capital. (13206 Investments)
  • Sino Global Capital. (648 Investments)
  • CMS Holdings. (3168 Investments)
  • Alameda Research. (8640 Investments)
  • Jump Capital. (11700 Investments)

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 funded Solana? ›

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

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