Anatoly Yakovenko: The Soul of Solana 🌊
The man who gave blockchain a clock it could trust.
Anatoly Yakovenko was irritated.
It was 2017. News broke that the Bitcoin conference would stop accepting Bitcoin payments because transaction fees had spiked to $60-70 per transaction.
The world's premier cryptocurrency gathering couldn't actually use cryptocurrency.
So he did what any frustrated engineer would do. He went to Café Soleil in San Francisco, ordered two coffees and a beer, and stayed up until 4 AM wondering why Bitcoin was so slow.
Somewhere between his second espresso and the last sips of beer, Yakovenko had what he calls his "Eureka moment". A way to encode the passage of time as a data structure.
He didn't know it had a name (Verifiable Delay Function), so he couldn't Google it. He thought he had invented something completely new.
And in a way, he had.
When Solana launched in 2020, it could process 65,000 transactions per second. Today, the blockchain that Yakovenko built in his garage is worth over $50 billion at its peak.
Your Solution to Regulated Token Finance
Vision Chain is Bitpanda’s new Ethereum-based L2, built for tokenising real-world assets like stocks, commodities, and fiat in full compliance with European regulations BitpandaThe Daily Hodl.
It’s more than another rollup. It’s the foundation for real-world finance on-chain:
Fast, low-cost Ethereum Layer-2 with institutional-grade control
On-chain KYC and token-level policies for regulated issuance
Designed for banks, FinTechs, developers, asset managers and everyday users alike Bitpanda
If you think Web3 isn’t usable without structure, Vision Chain is here to prove otherwise.
👉See what true compliance on-chain looks like
The Making of a Systems Thinker
Yakovenko's journey to blockchain began with an early immigration story. Born in Ukraine in 1981, he came to the United States with his family in the early 1990s, as part of the wave of Eastern European immigrants seeking opportunity in America's tech boom.
As a teenager, he gravitated toward the C programming language, fascinated by the precision and power of low-level systems programming. "There was this magical possibility of writing a piece of code that just solves some incredible problem for the world," he later reflected about those early programming days during the dot-com era.
At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Yakovenko studied computer science while launching his first startup in the early 2000s: Alescere, a Voice over Internet Protocol system for small businesses. The company failed, but it gave him crucial experience with real-time networking protocols.
In 2003, fresh from his startup experience, Yakovenko joined Qualcomm in San Diego. What started as a standard engineering role evolved into a 13-year journey through the company's most challenging technical problems.
He worked on everything from QChat's Push-to-Talk servers to the BREW mobile operating system, eventually becoming Senior Staff Engineer Manager. He also optimised how different processors communicate with each other. Yakovenko became an expert at "safely extending OS services and protection domains to auxiliary processors", essentially figuring out how to make different parts of a computer system work together without slowing each other down.
His patent portfolio from this period reads like a blueprint for his later blockchain work: "Exposing host operating system services to an auxiliary processor" and "Extending protection domains to co-processors." His work focused on minimising overhead and improving coordination efficiency between distributed components.
"I started thinking about how we solve scaling for these kinds of problems at Qualcomm with wireless protocols, and that's what really got me to go deep down the rabbit hole," he says.
The cellular tower technology he worked on used something called time division multiple access, a method for coordinating multiple signals by carefully managing timing. In 2017, after more than a decade at Qualcomm, Yakovenko started working at Dropbox on compression and distributed systems. But it was his side project that changed everything.
He and Stephen Akridge, a GPU lead at Qualcomm, were building hardware for deep learning and mining cryptocurrency in the background to offset costs. It was supposed to be about machine learning, not blockchain innovation.
But as Yakovenko watched their mining setup coordinate with thousands of other computers, one question kept nagging at him: why was proof-of-work so inefficient?
Bitcoin fees had spiked to $60-70 per transaction. The network that was supposed to be peer-to-peer electronic cash couldn't handle basic payments. The Bitcoin conference triggered him further.
That's when the Café Soleil moment happened.
The Proof of History Breakthrough
Picture this: 10,000 people trying to agree on what happened when. Everyone's shouting over each other. It's utter chaos.
That's basically how Bitcoin worked. But Bitcoin's problem goes deeper than just noise.
Bitcoin creates new blocks every 10 minutes which is a careful balance between security and speed. Go faster, and you risk the network splitting into competing versions. Go slower, and transactions take forever. This 10-minute timing means Bitcoin can only handle about 7 transactions per second.
For comparison, Visa handles about 24,000 transactions per second on average.
The real issue was that in a distributed system with thousands of computers worldwide, there's no central clock. Each computer's clock runs slightly differently. Network messages take time to travel. Events can appear to happen in different orders depending on where you're sitting.
Thousands of Bitcoin computers spend most of their time arguing about basic questions: "Did this transaction happen before that one?" "What time did this block get created?" "Which version of the blockchain is correct?"
The more computers joined, the more arguing there was.
Yakovenko had an idea. What if you didn't need to argue about time?
What if the blockchain had its own built-in clock that nobody could fake? Every transaction would get an automatic timestamp that everyone could verify independently.
Instead of thousands of computers constantly messaging each other to agree on timing, they could each look at the same unfakeable clock and immediately know the order of events.
No more endless back-and-forth messages. Just a cryptographic stopwatch that kept perfect time.
He called it Proof of History.
Replace arguing with computing. Instead of thousands of conversations about timing, just check the clock. Simple.
Building Solana
Armed with this breakthrough, Yakovenko co-founded Solana Labs in 2018 with Greg Fitzgerald (another Qualcomm veteran) and Raj Gokal. The name came from their frequent surfing sessions at Solana Beach in California.
The co-founders would wake up, surf, bike to work, then head back to the beach after coding all day.
They were building during the 2018-2019 crypto winter, when funding was scarce and enthusiasm had dried up. But Yakovenko saw this as an advantage. They could focus on engineering without hype and pressure.
"It was like the meteor strike that killed the dinosaurs. It was definitely crypto winter, and you saw a lot of teams fall apart. We were always somewhat conservative, we never raised a ton of money, we only had about two years of runway, so we were always like 'we gotta build this thing as fast as we can and really focus on the key product that we think is gonna make a difference.'” he recalls.
The team built more than just Proof of History. They created an entire ecosystem of innovations to support high throughput:
Sealevel: A parallel smart contract runtime that lets the blockchain run multiple transactions simultaneously by pre-declaring which accounts they'll touch.
Turbine: A BitTorrent-inspired system for spreading transaction data across the network using erasure coding and randomised, stake-weighted trees.
Gulf Stream: A mempool-less transaction forwarding system that sends transactions to future leaders before they even start producing blocks.
Cloudbreak: A horizontal account storage system designed for high-concurrency access.
Each innovation tackled a different bottleneck. Together, they created something unprecedented. A blockchain that got faster as it got bigger.
March 16, 2020. The world was falling apart. Stock markets crashed, countries locked down, and startups everywhere were dying. That's the day Yakovenko chose to launch Solana. Within months, it became clear he'd picked the perfect moment to introduce the fastest blockchain the world had ever seen.
By the end of 2020, Solana had processed 8.3 billion transactions, created 54 million blocks, and attracted over 100 project integrations across DeFi, gaming, and Web3. The validator set had grown to over 300 nodes globally, which was impressive for a network less than a year old.
Developers were building applications that would have been impossible on slower blockchains. High-frequency trading systems, real-time games, and social media platforms all became feasible for the first time in blockchain history.
The Outage Years
Success brought new challenges. Solana's high throughput made it a target for the kind of adversarial traffic that revealed systemic weaknesses.
September 14, 2021: A surge of transactions during a Grape IDO caused the network to fork, leading to a 17-hour outage.
May 1, 2022: Automated NFT "blind mint" bots crashed consensus, taking the network offline for 7-8 hours.
May 31, 2022: A bug in offline transaction processing caused a 4.5-hour outage.
October 1, 2022: A misconfiguration bug led to 6 hours of downtime.
Critics pointed to these incidents as proof that Solana had sacrificed decentralisation for speed. The blockchain's monolithic design meant that when things broke, they broke spectacularly.
The team responded with systematic improvements. Better deduplication, improved nonce handling, fixes for fork-choice bugs, and the introduction of protocols like QUIC for better network reliability.
November 2022. Solana faced its biggest test when FTX collapsed.
Sam Bankman-Fried had been one of Solana's most prominent supporters, and when his exchange went down in flames, panic spread. Investors assumed anything connected to FTX would fail, too. Solana's token price crashed as people rushed to sell.
The Solana community didn't wait around for someone else to fix things.
FTX had been controlling a popular trading platform called Serum that many Solana users relied on. When FTX collapsed, that platform was essentially orphaned. Nobody knew what would happen to it.
Within hours, Solana's developers and community members took action. They copied all the code from Serum and created their own version called OpenBook, completely independent from FTX.
The technical term is "forking", creating a new version that works exactly the same but without the problematic ownership.
Throughout the entire crisis, Solana itself never stopped working.
While prices crashed and panic spread, the blockchain kept processing transactions. No downtime. No technical failures.
Unlike traditional companies that can be destroyed when their CEO gets arrested, Solana had become bigger than any single person or company backing it. The technology and community could survive on their own.
The Vision Forward
At 44, Yakovenko has built something remarkable while maintaining the peculiar combination of engineering pragmatism and crypto idealism that defines successful blockchain founders.
He advocates for what he calls "sensible rules", like lawmakers should try using the technology before regulating it.
Oddly enough, despite wanting crypto-friendly policies, he opposed Trump's idea for a government crypto reserve. Too centralised, he argued, which is the kind of principled stance that makes you wonder if he's really cut out for politics. He'd rather see innovation flourish organically than have bureaucrats control digital money, even if those bureaucrats happen to like his particular blockchain.
His ultimate vision is to transform Solana into the backbone of global finance, where information travels as fast as news itself.
Even as Solana competes directly with Ethereum in what crypto people call "the blockchain wars," Yakovenko rejects tribal thinking. Different blockchains can coexist and complement each other rather than fight each other to their death, he insists, which is a refreshingly mature perspective in an industry where people regularly predict that competing protocols will "go to zero" based on minor technical differences.
Yakovenko has built one of the world's most powerful distributed computers using an insight that seems obvious in retrospect but stumped everyone else.
Turning time itself into a blockchain data structure.
With an estimated net worth between $500 million and $800 million, he's achieved the kind of financial success that lets him focus on building rather than wealth accumulation.
But the validation is starting to arrive in the form that matters most in finance: other people's money. Four publicly traded companies now hold over $591 million worth of Solana tokens in their corporate treasuries, with Upexi leading the pack at 1.9 million SOL tokens accumulated in just four months. SOL Strategies has taken a more methodical dollar-cost averaging approach. Classover Holdings announced plans for a potential $500 million Solana investment, while Trump's proposed US Strategic Crypto Reserve includes Solana alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum as strategic assets. When publicly traded companies start treating your blockchain tokens like Treasury bills, you've probably built something that matters.
The institutional adoption suggests that Yakovenko's vision of Solana as global financial infrastructure might not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Asset managers from Franklin Templeton to Fidelity are filing for Solana spot ETFs, and companies are choosing SOL for treasury reserves using the same logic that led them to hold BTC or ETH: it's a store of value that might also power the future financial system.
If that frustrating night at Café Soleil really did produce the breakthrough that makes money move at light speed, the corporate treasurers are starting to notice.
That’s it about the Solana creator, see ya next week with another profile.
Until then …stay obsessed.
Thejaswini
Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 200,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌
📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.
Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.