Solana's origins: co-creating a "moment of epiphany" and a vision of a high-performance blockchain

By Gareth Jenkinson, CoinTelegraph, compiled by Song Xue, Golden Finance

“I literally had two cups of coffee and a beer, and at four a.m. I had a flash of inspiration,” Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko recalls thoughtfully as she leaned back in her chair.

In an interview at Solana’s annual Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam, the co-founder spoke about the late-night inspiration for a “super-optimized, as fast as possible” smart contract blockchain protocol.

“The use case I’m pursuing is a central limit order book, like how to run something like the NASDAQ on a public permissionless blockchain,” Jacovenko explains.

"I think if you have transparent data, everybody has fair and open rights, and all of that stuff runs on commodity hardware, there’s a clear win there. ”

From surfing to smart contracts

Solana’s origins are intrinsically linked to Yakovenko’s experience as a computer engineer. Jacovenco has spent most of his career at Qualcomm in San Diego with co-founder Raj Gokal, and his thoughts on the platform drew a lot of inspiration from that period of his life.

“**Solana taken from Solana beach. I lived there with my co-founder, we woke up, surfed, biked to work, and surfed again when we got home,” Yakovenko recalled.

"We learned how to do great system programming, and in 2017 I came up with the idea to create Solana. ”**

Jacovenko has been working on a side-by-the-road 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 impetus for this idea stems from a concept called time division multiple access. As Jacovenko explains, the technology has to do with how cell towers alternate transmissions based on time intervals.

Solana co-founder Yakovenko in a fireside chat at Breakpoint in Amsterdam. Source: Solana Foundation

His idea is to build a system based on a verifiable delay function technique that researchers at Stanford University have 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 breakthrough applications and use cases powered by smart contract capabilities:

"We wanted to build a highly optimized smart contract platform that could provide the benefits of trust-minimized computation without the performance issues or costs associated with alternatives. ”

**Solana’s design work took two years and was finally launched in March 2020. The platform has had great success, publicity, and support, but Jacovinko admits that there is quite a bit of luck in it. **

“I wish I could say it’s all genius, but we didn’t raise enough money to build every possible feature. Many of our competitors raised ten times as much money as we did, literally hundreds of millions of dollars,” Yakovenko said.

Solana is a green space for smart contract developers

With enough runway to build blockchain, Solana is committed to creating “the fastest thing possible.” It doesn’t include EVM support or a remote procedure call service, and there is “hardly a working browser,” but Jacovenko insists that’s part of what attracts builders.

“That’s why we sparked the imagination of developers when we launched; It’s very different from Ethereum and is uniquely built for very specific optimizations that make this blockchain run as fast as possible,” he explained.

He added that the project doesn’t sacrifice decentralization, as Solana can run with a large number of nodes. ** Carving out a niche (niche) attracted a core group of developers who spawned successful projects such as Helium, a decentralized wireless network, and Anchor, a smart contract protocol.

"They recognized something special, and they saw that we didn’t have any resources to build something else. They take responsibility for building open source code themselves. ”

The Solana ecosystem saw significant capital inflows during the 2021 crypto bull run, and its native token is SOL.

“Painful” network outage

The platform has also experienced some minor issues. The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX cryptocurrency exchange has severely damaged the ecosystem. Jacovinko admitted that he was deeply concerned about several projects that received investment from FTX and Alameda Research, as well as those that held capital on bankrupt exchanges.

Solana has also been heavily criticized for several glitches that have taken the blockchain offline. Jacovinko describes these examples as “painful for engineers” and a hard lesson to be learned:

"The number one priority is safety. And then there’s the dynamism. When you have an issue like congestion, even if you can type out the code within a week, it needs to be reviewed and tested before it can be sent to mainnet. ”

Learning from these accidents is an important part of the continued functioning of the ecosystem. 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 complete decentralization,” said Yakovenko.

As for the rivalry between Ethereum and Solana, Jacovenko said that there is healthy sharing of ideas between open source developers from both ecosystems. The main points of contention remain, there is less developer talent, and there is overlapping functionality.