Anatoly Yakovenko’s vision for a high-performance blockchain
“I actually had two coffees and a beer and had this eureka moment at four in the morning,” Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko says, leaning back in thought.
Speaking to Cointelegraph at Solana's annual Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam, the co-founder recounts the brainstorm behind the “highly optimized, fastest possible” smart contract blockchain protocol.
“The use case I was pursuing was how to run something like Nasdaq for centralized limit order books, but on a blockchain without public permission,” Yakovenko explains.
“If you have open data, everyone has fair and open rights, and I thought it all worked on commodity hardware.”
From surfing to smart contracts
Solana's roots are intertwined with Yakovenko's journey as a computer engineer. Yakovenko, who spent most of his career at Qualcomm in San Diego with co-founder Raj Gokal, took many inspirations from that lifetime.
“Solana is from Solana Beach. My co-workers and I used to live there, wake up, ride, bike to work, come home and surf again,” reflected Yakovenko.
“We learned how to do amazing systems programming there and 2017 is when I had the initial idea for Solana.”
Yakovenko has been working on a side project to test the project, building deep learning hardware, deploying graphics processing units and mining cryptocurrencies. This paved the way for the genesis of the forum.
The inspiration for the idea comes from a concept called time-sharing multiple access. As Yakovenko explained, the technology is related to how cellular towers change transmissions based on time intervals.
His idea was to build a system based on the technology Stanford University researchers were working on, called the Verification Delay Function. Yakovenko joked that he thought he had found something truly novel that inspired him to start working on a modern contract layer platform:
“My understanding is that once you find a way to track time in a decentralized way on a public permissionless blockchain, you can use the same improvements that Qualcomm did for cellular networks.”
Inspired by the advent of smart contract functionality pioneered by Ethereum, Yakovenko and his partners set out to develop superior applications and use cases supported by smart contract functionality:
“We wanted to build a highly-optimized, smart contract platform that could provide the benefits of trust-less computation, but without the performance headaches or costs associated with alternatives.”
Two years of work went into Solana's engineering before launching in March 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic took the world by storm. The platform has garnered significant success, fans and endorsements, but Yakovenko admits a fair amount of luck was involved.
“I wish I could say it's all genius, but we haven't raised enough money to build every possible feature. Many of our competitors have raised ten times more than us, literally hundreds of millions of dollars,” says Yakovenko.
Solana as a green field for smart contract developers
By having enough runway to build a decentralized blockchain, Solana was able to create “the fastest thing possible.” Ethereum didn't include virtual machine support or remote procedure call services and “barely had a working browser,” but Yakovenko says that's part of what attracted developers.
That's what sparked the developers' imaginations when we started; It was very different from Ethereum and was built specifically for a specific optimization, which would make things happen as quickly as possible for humans.
Co-founder Solana says the engineering didn't sacrifice decentralization because it can handle large numbers of nodes. Outsourcing has attracted a core group of developers that have spawned successful projects such as the decentralized wireless network Helium and the smart contract protocol Anchor.
“They knew something unique, and they saw that we didn't have the resources to build anything else. They took it upon themselves to build open source code.”
The Solana ecosystem saw significant capital inflows during the cryptocurrency bull market of 2021, with native Solana (SOL) reaching a record high of around $250 in November of that year.
A “gut-opening” network outage
The forum has endured its fair share of hiccups. The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX cryptocurrency exchange hit the ecosystem hard. As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Yakovenko admitted that he is deeply concerned about several projects that have received investments from FTX and Alameda Research and have capitalized on the bankruptcy exchange.
Solana has also faced heavy criticism for several outages that have taken the blockchain offline. Yakovenko described these instances as “gut-wrenching for an engineer” and painful lessons to learn:
“The first priority is security. Then it's liveability. When you have a problem like congestion, even if you can destroy the code in a week, it needs to be audited and tested to send to minenet.”
Learning from these failures is a vital part of the ecosystem's continued functioning. He also led the Solana Foundation to assemble a team to build a second authentication client.
Another major smart contract network with more than one client is Ethereum. Yakovenko is one of those steps to reach full decentralization.
On the speculating competition between Ethereum and Solana, Yakovenko says there is a healthy sharing of ideas between open source developers from both ecosystems. A smaller developer talent pool and overlapping features remain the main points of contention.
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