Anatoly Yakovenko: The soul of Solana

Written by: Thejaswini M A

Compiled by: Block unicorn

Foreword

Anatoly Yako Bunko is very angry.

It was 2017, and it was rumored that Bitcoin Congress would stop accepting Bitcoin payments as the fee per transaction had skyrocketed to $60-$70.

The world's premier crypto event is uneven available.

So he did what any frustrated engineer would do. He came to Café Soleil in San Francisco, ordered two coffees and a bottle of beer, and stayed up until 4 a.m., thinking about why Bitcoin was so slow.

In between drinking the second shot of espresso and the last sip of beer, Yakovinko suddenly had an idea, which he called an "epiphany moment". It occurred to him that he had an idea of a way to encode the passage of time into a data structure.

He didn't know that the function had a name (verifiable delay function), so he couldn't Google it. He thought he had invented something completely new.

In a sense, he did.

When Solana launched in 2020, it could process 65,000 transactions per second. Today, the blockchain built by Acowenco in its garage has a market capitalization of more than $50 billion at its peak.

Growth Path of a Systems Thinker

Subcovinko's blockchain journey began with an early immigration story. Born in Ukraine in 1981, he came to the United States with his family in the early 1990s to join a wave of Eastern European immigrants seeking opportunities from the American tech boom.

As a teenager, he became fascinated by the C language, fascinated by the precision and power of programming the underlying systems. "It's amazing how much a piece of code can solve a major problem in the world," he later recalls of his early programming days during the dot-com bubble era.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he studied computer science in the sub-liberal arts and founded his first startup, Alescere, a VoIP system for small businesses in the early 2000s. The company failed, but allowed him to gain valuable experience with real-time network protocols.

In 2003, Qualcomm joined Qualcomm in San Diego, fresh out of his startup experience. He started as a casual engineer and spent 13 years tackling the company's most challenging technical challenges.

He worked on projects ranging from QChat's push-to-talk server to BREW's mobile operating system, eventually becoming a senior engineer manager. He also optimizes the way the different processors communicate. Sub-Liberal Arts has become an expert in "extending operating system services and domain security to coprocessors", in simple terms, figuring out how to make different parts of a computer system work together without slowing down each other.

The patent portfolio of this period was like a blueprint for his later blockchain work: "exposing host OS services to coprocessors" and "extending the protection domain to coprocessors." His work focuses on minimizing overhead and improving the efficiency of coordination between distributed components.

"I started thinking about how we could solve this kind of scaling problem with wireless protocols at Qualcomm, and it led me to explore this area in depth," he said.

The cell tower technology he was involved in used a method called time-division multiple access to coordinate multiple signals by precisely managing time. In 2017, after more than a decade at Qualcomm, Qualcomm began working on compression and distributed systems at Dropbox. But what really changed everything was his side hustle.

He worked with Qualcomm's GPU lead Stephen Acridge to build hardware for deep learning and cryptocurrency mining to offset costs. This was originally about machine learning, not blockchain innovation.

But as Subcowenco observed their mining rigs coordinating with thousands of other computers, a question persistently haunted him: Why is proof-of-work so inefficient?

Bitcoin's transaction fees have skyrocketed to $60-$70 per transaction. This network, which is supposed to be peer-to-peer electronic cash, cannot even process basic payments. Bitcoin Conference further stimulated him.

That's when the moment of Café Soleil happened.

Proof of a historical breakthrough

Picture this: 10,000 people trying to agree on a time when something happened, everyone shouting at each other, and chaos ensued.

This is basically how Bitcoin works. But Bitcoin's problems are much more than noise.

Bitcoin creates a new block every 10 minutes, a careful balance between security and speed. Too fast, the network can split into competing versions; Too slow and transactions take too long. This 10-minute cadence means that Bitcoin can only process about 7 transactions per second.

In comparison, Visa processes about 24,000 transactions per second on average.

real problem is that in a distributed system with thousands of computers around the world, there is no central clock. The clock runs slightly differently on each computer. Network message transmission takes time. The sequence of events appears to be different depending on the position of the observer.

Thousands of Bitcoin computers spend most of their time arguing about basic questions: "Did this transaction happen before that transaction?" "When was this block created?" "Which version of blockchain is correct?"

The more computers join, the more intense the debate.

Sub-Liberal Arts has an idea: what if there is no need for argument time?

What if the blockchain had a built-in clock that couldn't be forged? Each transaction is automatically given a timestamp that everyone can verify independently.

Instead of thousands of computers constantly messaging each other to agree on time, they can instantly know the sequence of events by looking at the same unforgeable clock.

No more endless back-and-forth messages, just an encrypted stopwatch that keeps the perfect time.

He called it "Proof of History".

Replace arguments with calculations. No more thousands of conversations about time, just look at the clock. Simple and straightforward.

Building Solana

With this breakthrough, Yakovenko co-founded Solana Labs in 2018 with Greg Fitzgerald (another Qualcomm veteran) and Raj Gokar. The name comes from their frequent surfing experience at Solana Beach in California.

Co-founders would wake up in the morning to surf, bike to work, and head back to the beach after a long day of coding.

They built their projects during the crypto winter of 2018-2019, when funds were scarce and enthusiasm faded. But sub-Liberal Arts sees this as an advantage. They can focus on engineering without facing hype and pressure.

"It was like a meteorite impact that killed a dinosaur. It's really a crypto winter, and you see a lot of teams breaking up. We've always been conservative, we've never raised a lot of money, and we've only had about two years to grow, so we're always thinking, 'We have to get this done as quickly as possible and really focus on the key products that we think will make a difference.'" He recalled.

The team has not only built proof of history, but also created a comprehensive ecosystem of innovations that support high throughput:

Sealevel: A parallel smart contract runtime that allows the blockchain to run multiple transactions simultaneously by pre-declaring the accounts involved in the transaction.

Turbine: A BitTorrent-inspired system that uses erasure coding and random weighted trees to propagate transaction data across the network.

Gulf Stream: A mempool-less transaction forwarding system that sends transactions to future leaders before blocks are generated.

Cloudbreak: A horizontal account storage system designed for high concurrency access.

Each innovation targets a different bottleneck. Together, they create something unprecedented: a blockchain that gets faster as it scales.

On March 16, 2020, the world was in chaos. Stock markets crashed, countries locked down, and startups went bankrupt. SubcoWenco chose to launch Solana on this day. Within a few months, it turned out to be the perfect time to launch the world's fastest blockchain.

By the end of 2020, Solana had processed 8.3 billion transactions, created 54 million blocks, and attracted the integration of over 100 projects in the DeFi, gaming, and Web3 sectors. Validator nodes have expanded to over 300 worldwide, which is impressive for a network that is less than a year old.

Developers are starting to build applications that are not possible on slower blockchains. High-frequency trading systems, real-time gaming, and social media platforms are possible for the first time in blockchain history.

The success of the hiatus

brought new challenges. Solana's high throughput has made it a target for adversarial traffic, exposing its systemic weaknesses.

September 14, 2021: A surge in transactions during the Grape IDO led to a network fork with a 17-hour downtime.

May 1, 2022: NFT "blind minting" bots caused consensus to collapse, and the network was offline for 7-8 hours.

May 31, 2022: An error in offline transaction processing caused a 4.5-hour downtime.

1, 2022: A misconfiguration caused a 6-hour downtime.

Critics point out that these incidents are proof that Solana sacrifices decentralization for speed. Its monolithic design means that if something goes wrong, the consequences will be serious.

The team responded with systematic improvements: better deduplication, improved random number handling, fixing fork selection errors, and introducing the QUIC protocol to improve network reliability.

In November 2022, Solana faced its biggest test – the FTX collapse.

Sam Bankman-Fried was once one of Solana's most prominent supporters. Panic quickly spread when his exchange FTX collapsed. Investors thought anything related to FTX would fail, and Solana's token price plummeted in response, with people rushing to sell.

The Solana community is not sitting idly by waiting for someone else to fix the problem.

FTX controls a popular trading platform, Serum, which many Solana users rely on. When FTX collapsed, the platform was effectively orphaned, and no one knew its fate.

Within hours, Solana's developers and community members acted quickly. They copied all of Serum's code, creating a completely independent version of FTX called OpenBook.

The technical term is called "fork", which is the creation of a new version with the same functionality but without problematic ownership.

Throughout the crisis, Solana itself never stopped running.

Despite the price crash and panic spreading, the blockchain continues to process transactions. There is no downtime. No technical glitches.

Unlike traditional companies that can collapse due to the arrest of their CEO, Solana has surpassed any individual or company backing it. This technology and community can survive on their own.

Vision

44-year-old Yako Wenco has crafted remarkable achievements while maintaining a unique blend of engineering pragmatism and crypto idealism that is a hallmark of a successful blockchain founder.

He advocated for "reasonable rules," such as lawmakers should try to use the technology before regulating it.

Oddly enough, despite wanting crypto-friendly policies, he opposed Trump's proposed government crypto reserve plan. He believes this is too centralized, and this principled position raises doubts about his suitability for politics. He would rather see innovation flourish naturally than let bureaucrats control digital currencies, even if they happen to like his blockchain.

His ultimate vision is to transform Solana into a pillar of global finance, allowing information to travel as fast as news.

While Solana and Ethereum compete directly in the so-called "blockchain wars," Yakovenko rejects tribal thinking. He insisted that different blockchains can coexist and complement each other, not just live and die. This mature perspective is refreshing in the crypto industry, where it is common to predict that competing protocols will "zero in" due to subtle technical differences.

Using an insight that seemed obvious in hindsight but had not been deciphered before, SubcoLiberal Arts has built one of the world's most powerful distributed computers – turning time itself into a blockchain data structure.

His personal net worth is estimated to be between $500 million and $800 million, and his financial success has allowed him to focus on building rather than building wealth.

But this recognition is beginning to take the most important form in finance: other people's money. Currently, the four publicly traded companies hold over $591 million worth of Solana tokens in their corporate vaults, led by Upexi, which has accumulated 1.9 million SOL tokens in just four months. SOL Strategies has adopted a more systematic dollar-cost averaging approach. Classover Holdings has announced plans to invest $500 million in Solana, while Trump's proposed U.S. strategic cryptocurrency reserve lists Solana as a strategic asset alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum. When public companies start treating your blockchain tokens like Treasury bonds, you may have built something really important.

Institutional adoption suggests that Ayakowenco's vision of Solana as a global financial infrastructure may not be far off. Asset managers such as Franklin Templeton and Fidelity are applying for Solana spot ETFs, and the logic for businesses to choose SOL as a treasury reserve is the same as holding BTC or ETH: it is a store of value while potentially powering the future financial system.

If that gloomy night at Café Soleil really contributed to the breakthrough that made money flow at the speed of light, the head of corporate finance has already begun to take notice.