Anatoly Yakovenko: The Man Behind Solana

Born in 1981 in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, Anatoly Yakovenko grew up in a society where the concept of decentralization could incite outrage among the ruling party. This backdrop might have been crucial in seeding the early thoughts of what would eventually become Solana.

His fascination with technology led him to delve into computers. Anatoly became proficient in the C programming language and learned to code on Linux. After moving to the United States at age 10, he attended an American school and later earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Despite the dot-com crash leading many web development companies into bankruptcy, Anatoly Yakovenko remained committed to his computer science studies. Even amid his professors' advice to avoid the field, his perseverance during those unstable times laid the groundwork for navigating Solana through the challenges of 2021-2022.

Career at Qualcomm

During his studies, Anatoly Yakovenko co-founded Alescere, a startup focused on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. He led the development of SIP and RTP protocols and server components for VoIP systems designed for small businesses.

After about three years at Alescere, Anatoly joined tech giant Qualcomm, ranked as the 68th largest company at the time of writing, where he remained for a long tenure of 12 years. At Qualcomm, Yakovenko managed a team of ten people, developing mobile devices and software stacks for Qualcomm chipsets and pioneering solutions in augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and 3D technologies.

After leaving Qualcomm in 2016, Yakovenko spent a year working as an engineer at Mesosphere and Dropbox before Solana came into his life.

The Creation of Solana

Anatoly Yakovenko first became acquainted with cryptocurrencies in 2010. It is rumored that he attempted to scale up a Bitcoin mining farm and later experimented with Ethereum following its launch in 2015, though these ventures did not pan out. Nevertheless, it seems destiny had a unique path in store for him—the creation of his own blockchain.

Yakovenko thoroughly investigated the strengths and shortcomings of the crypto industry. The scalability issues and slow transaction processing speeds of the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains motivated him to collaborate with former Qualcomm colleagues to develop Solana.

Interesting fact: The Solana blockchain is named after the popular beach in California, Solana Beach.

Solana comes from Solana Beach. Me and my co-founders lived there, we’d wake up, we’d surf, bike to work, go back home and surf again,

Yakovenko explained in an interview with Cointelegraph.

Solana's development commenced at the end of 2017. Daniel Albert, CEO of the Solana Foundation, shared at a Kyiv conference that Solana spent two years in the conceptual phase before the first validators were set up in a garage in 2019, embodying the spirit of a true Silicon Valley startup.

Daniel Albert on the origins of Solana. Source: youtube.com

Rejecting the traditional blockchain consensus algorithms like Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake, Anatoly Yakovenko introduced an innovative method known as Proof-of-History (PoH). This concept was inspired by Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), a technique Yakovenko studied while at Qualcomm, and the Verifiable Delay Function (VDF), proposed by MIT graduates.

Moreover, Solana pioneered parallel execution, a significant innovation that enabled the network to process up to 60,000 transactions per second, in contrast to Ethereum's capacity of just 12 TPS.

Stand by Solana!

In 2021, Solana faced a significant challenge when the network halted while trying to process 400,000 transactions. The blockchain couldn’t withstand the load, resulting in an 18-hour outage. This incident compelled Anatoly Yakovenko to order a network restart by the validators, sparking debates about Solana's decentralization.

Although some viewed this incident as a vulnerability, Anatoly Yakovenko contended that it actually showcased Solana’s resilience (a perspective one would expect from the project's CEO). He believed that such trials helped the team pinpoint and fix critical network errors.

As Solana grew in popularity, it continued to encounter occasional disruptions. For example, there was a 19-hour outage in February 2023 and a 30-minute downtime a year later.

Community meme after numerous Solana outages. Source: x.com

Anatoly Yakovenko approached these issues with a constructive attitude, searching for positives, calming the community, and communicating about the blockchain's operational adjustments. Unexpectedly, the real challenges stemmed from SBF, the former head of the scam FTX exchange.

Solana was closely linked with FTX's subsidiary, Alameda Research, and held 41 million SOL in the exchange’s wallets, a substantial part of the company’s assets. Thus, when FTX went bankrupt in December 2022, Solana suffered a significant blow.

Before these events, SOL was traded at around $30, but after the collapse of FTX, it dropped to $8. Despite the grim forecasts, Anatoly Yakovenko remained optimistic. He actively engaged in interviews, supported the developer community, and strategized on regaining user trust. 

As of August 2024, 1 SOL is worth $144, ranking Solana as the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market cap. It also ranks third for TVL second for daily active users.

Anatoly Yakovenko in 2024

On November 12, 2013, Anatoly Yakovenko married Laura Skelton. They currently live in the San Francisco Bay Area and likely have at least one child, a detail inferred from Yakovenko's references to his roles as a husband and father in interviews.

Yakovenko continues to spearhead developments at Solana. For example, in June this year, his team launched Actions and Blinks—innovative solutions designed to streamline interactions with the Solana blockchain.