“I literally had two cups of coffee and a beer, and I had this eureka moment at four in the morning,” Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko recalled, leaning back in his chair wistfully. road.
In an interview with Cointelegraph at Solana’s annual Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam, the co-founder described the “super-optimized, as fast as possible” smart contract blockchain protocol that he came up with late at night.
“The use case I’m pursuing is a central limit order book, like how to run something like Nasdaq on a public, permissionless blockchain,” Yakovenko explained.
“I think if you have transparent data, fair and open rights for everyone, and all of these things run on commodity hardware, there’s a clear win there.”
From surfing to smart contracts
Solana’s roots are intrinsically tied to Yakovenko’s experience as a computer engineer. Yakovenko spent most of his career at Qualcomm in San Diego with co-founder Raj Gokal, and his ideas for the platform drew a lot of inspiration from that period of his life.
“Solana is from Solana Beach. My co-founder and I lived there, and we would wake up, surf, ride our bikes to work, come home and surf again,” Yakovenko recalls.
“We learned how to do great systems programming, and in 2017 I came up with the idea for Solana.”
Yakovenko has been tinkering with a side project, building deep learning hardware, deploying graphics processing units and mining cryptocurrency to test the project. This paved the way for the birth of the platform.
The power of ideas blocked From the concept of time division multiple access. As Yakovenko explained, the technology has to do with how cell towers alternate transmissions based on time intervals.
His idea was to build a system based on a verifiable delay function technique that researchers at Stanford University had been working on. Yakovenko joked that he thought he had discovered something truly novel, which prompted him to start developing a smart contract layer platform:
“My gut feeling is that once you have a way to track time in a decentralized way on a public permissionless blockchain, you can use similar optimizations that Qualcomm has done for cellular networks.”
Inspired by the smart contract capabilities pioneered by Ethereum, Yakovenko and his partners set out to develop groundbreaking applications and use cases powered by smart contract capabilities:
“We want to build a highly optimized smart contract platform that provides the benefits of trust-minimized computing but without the performance issues or costs associated with alternatives.”
Solana was two years in the making and finally launched in March 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was sweeping the world. The platform has received huge success, publicity and support, but Yakovenko admits there was a fair amount of luck involved.
“I wish I could say it was all genius, but we didn’t raise enough money to build out all the features possible. Many of our competitors raised ten times the amount we did, literally hundreds of millions of dollars,” says Jaco Liberal Arts said.
Solana is a green space for smart contract developers
With plenty of runway to build a dedicated blockchain, Solana is committed to creating “the fastest thing possible.” It doesn’t include Ethereum virtual machine support or remote procedure call services, and there’s “barely a functioning browser,” but Yakovenko insists that’s part of what attracts builders.
“That’s what sparked the imagination of developers when we launched; it’s very different from Ethereum and uniquely built for very specific optimizations to make this thing as fast as possible,” he explained.
The co-founder added that the project did not sacrifice decentralization, as Solana can run with a large number of nodes.Carving out a niche attracted a core group of developers who spawned successful projects such as the decentralized wireless network Helium and the smart contract protocol anchor.
“They recognized something special, and they saw that we didn’t have any resources to build anything else. They took it upon themselves to build the open source code.”
The Solana ecosystem saw massive capital inflows during the 2021 cryptocurrency bull run, with its native token Solana (SOL) reaching an all-time high of around $250 in November of that year.
‘Painful’ internet outage
The platform has also experienced some hiccups. The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX cryptocurrency exchange severely damaged the ecosystem. As Cointelegraph previously reported, Yakovenko admitted that he was deeply concerned about several projects receiving investment from FTX and Alameda Research, as well as those holding capital on bankrupt exchanges.
Solana has also been heavily criticized for several glitches that took the blockchain offline. Yakovenko describes these instances as “painful for engineers” and hard lessons to be learned:
“The first priority is security. Then there’s vitality. When you have a problem like congestion, even if you can knock out the code in a week, it needs to be reviewed and tested before it can be sent to the mainnet.”
Learning from these accidents is a critical part of the continued functioning of ecosystems. It also prompted the Solana Foundation to form a team to build a second validator client.
“The only major smart contract network with multiple clients is Ethereum. In my opinion, this is one of the steps that must be taken to achieve full decentralization,” Yakovenko said.
As for the competition between Ethereum and Solana, Yakovenko said there is a healthy sharing of ideas between open source developers from both ecosystems. The main arguments remain, less developer talent and overlapping functionality.
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