In late 2017, a former Qualcomm engineer named Anatoly Yakovenko was sitting in an all-night diner in San Francisco, drinking too much coffee and sketching out a whitepaper. The idea that came to him that night would become Proof of History — a verifiable delay function that lets a blockchain agree on time without agreeing on state first. It was the missing piece that would let a chain run at 50,000 transactions per second instead of 15.
Yakovenko had spent over a decade at Qualcomm working on wireless protocols. He understood hardware. He believed blockchains were being built by people who had never touched a datacenter. His cofounders — Greg Fitzgerald, Raj Gokal, Eric Williams, Stephen Akridge — joined him at a tiny startup first called Loom, later renamed Solana after a beach town north of San Diego where they used to surf.
The first testnet launched in 2018. Mainnet Beta went live on March 16, 2020, at the exact moment COVID-19 was crashing global markets. SOL traded under a dollar for months. Nobody cared. Then 2021 happened: Sam Bankman-Fried discovered Solana, FTX pumped it, Serum launched on it, and SOL rallied from $1.50 to $260 in twelve months. Anatoly became the reluctant face of the “Ethereum killer” narrative he had never asked for.
What makes Yakovenko unusual among crypto founders is that he actually posts on Twitter like an engineer instead of a prophet. He admits when the network is down. He makes jokes about validators. He ships. When FTX collapsed in November 2022 and most people wrote Solana off as a zombie chain, Yakovenko kept his head down and kept shipping. Two years later the network was processing more real transactions per day than every other L1 combined. The beach-town chain had survived its own founder’s biggest backer going to prison.
Leave a Reply