“I literally had two coffees and a beer, and I had this eureka moment at four in the morning,” Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko recalls as he leans back thoughtfully.
Speaking to Cointelegraph at Solana’s annual Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam, the co-founder recounts a late-night brainwave of a “hyper-optimized, fast as possible” smart contract blockchain protocol.
“The use case that I was going after was for central limit order books, like how to run something that’s like the Nasdaq, but on a public permissionless blockchain,” Yakovenko explains.
“I thought that there was a clear win there if you have transparent data, everyone has fair and open rights, and all this stuff is running on commodity hardware.”
From surfing to smart contracts
Solana’s roots are intrinsically linked to Yakovenko’s journey as a computer engineer. Having spent the majority of his career at Qualcomm in San Diego alongside co-founder Raj Gokal, Yakovenko’s idea for the platform carries plenty of inspiration from that period of his life.
“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 reflects.
“We learned how to do awesome systems programming out there and 2017 is when I kind of had the inception idea for Solana.”
Yakovenko had been tinkering on a side project, building deep learning hardware, deploying graphics processing units and mining cryptocurrencies to test out the project. This paved the way for the genesis of the platform.
The impetus for the idea stemmed from a concept known as time division multiple access. As Yakovenko explains, the technology is tied to how cellular towers alternate transmissions based on time intervals.
His idea was to build a system based on technology that Stanford University researchers had been working on called a verifiable delay function. Yakovenko jokes that he thought he discovered something truly novel, which prompted him to begin working on a smart contract layer platform:
“The intuition that I had was that once you have a way to track time in a decentralized way on a public permissionless blockchain, you could use similar optimizations that Qualcomm did for cellular networks.”
Inspired by the advent of smart contract functionality pioneered by Ethereum, Yakovenko and his partners set out to develop…
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