Anatoly Yakovenko #11

Co-founder of Solana

Anatoly Yakovenko & Co-founder of Solana & background` Anatoly Yakovenko & Co-founder of Solana & poster`
Anatoly Yakovenko & Co-founder of Solana
Category Tech
person-quote
I can’t imagine a world where Solana succeeds because eth2 fails.

Biography:

Anatoly Yakovenko is a Russian computer engineer and co-founder of the Solana project. He authored the Solana white paper. Growing up in the Soviet Union, he was obsessed with computers from the age of five. Yakovenko eventually moved to the United States to build his own life. 

Yakovenko studied at the University of Illinois and earned a degree in computer science despite various professors advising against it. He then moved to San Diego to start working at Qualcomm, where he led the development of operating systems. Yakovenko also led the development of distributed systems and compression at Mesosphere and Dropbox, respectively.

The Solana founder also holds two patents for high-performance operating system protocols, among his other successes in tech development.

Yakovenko’s 2021:

2021 was a key year for Solana, with the project gaining vast amounts of attention in spite of Ethereum’s glacial transition to Ethereum 2.0. Developers and engineers were likely tiring of Ethereum’s slow transaction speeds and high fees, as Solana’s SOL token jumped from an average of under $2 in 2020 to over $200 in 2021. Even so, the network did suffer from a hiccup or two… or three.

In September, Solana fell victim to a network overload while attempting to process 400,000 transactions per second. This DDoS attack occurred on the decentralized exchange Raydium and hampered the network for 18 hours. Yakovenko had to call on Solana’s validators to restart the network, which caused some to question its level of decentralization. The attack also caused the network to fork, which resulted in nodes and DApps on the network having to upgrade before restoring to full network functionality. 

While some view the attack as a weakness, Yakovenko claimed that it showed Solana’s strength, considering the network didn’t experience a shutdown and was up and running less than 24 hours later. He also considered the experience as positive for the long run, as it highlighted critical bugs the team has since addressed.

For a network that can be considered a potential “Ethereum-killer” with the ability to process an average of 65,000 transactions per second, Yakovenko views Solana as more of a complement to the world’s second-largest crypto. 

Solana held its first significant conference in November, Solana Breakpoint, which brought out dozens of excited developers claiming the project will be the one to represent Web 3.0. There, users saw Brave — the crypto-powered privacy browser with over 42 million users — partner up with Solana to offer native integration.

Solana announced it had officially become carbon neutral in December, while Michael Jordan and his son raised $10 million in seed funding to launch an athlete-focused DApp on the network in 2022.

Yakovenko’s 2022:

Yakovenko remains optimistic that for the crypto market to succeed, projects other than Solana must also succeed. He believes that there might be a project best for gaming and another for hosting art, rather than one network taking it all on. 

Official Solana documentation reveals various accepted design proposals that have yet to see implementation, such as upgrades to the current Rust development clients and a version of inter-chain transaction verification.

October 2021 concluded Solana’s Ignition Hackathon, which saw 568 projects submitted by developers aiming to earn their share of the prize pool. Some of the projects will surely develop into something greater on the Solana network.

Solana Ventures partnered with Forte and Griffin Gaming Partners to pledge $150 million in Web3 gaming innovations, so it can be expected that Solana makes more gaming-focused investments throughout the year.