The history of Solana is a blip in the history of humanity, but may prove to mark the beginning of a philosophical, social, and financial renaissance. In November 2017, Anatoly Yakovenko drops the Proof-of-History whitepaper, detailing an approach to timekeeping in an adversarial network using verifiable delay functions, a technology researched at Stanford University. The whitepaper included eight key innovations that would make Solana the most performant blockchain with broad adoption.
Anatoly, who we’ll refer to as Toly from now on, is an experienced computer engineer who held roles at Qualcomm and Dropbox. Armed with expertise in computer networking and communications, Toly would set out to change the blockchain space in the name of speed.
At the time, Bitcoin and Ethereum were the dominant L1 blockchains and struggled to process significant number of transactions. It was clear to Toly that there needed to be higher bandwidth and transaction throughput if blockchain were to change the financial system. Dreaming of a global super server database, Toly posited a new way to keep time on-chain. He envisioned a global supercomputer that could even run NASDAQ central limit order books (CLOBs) and secure the financial system with near instantaneous settlement and decentralization.
Written in C++ then rewritten in Rust, the project was named, Loom. Unfortunately, this name was already taken and Toly, along with co-founder Raj Gokal, renamed the project to Solana, after the beautiful beach in San Diego where Toly used to surf with his friends during his time at Qualcomm.
On July 19th 2018, the Solana testnet launches with a network of 50 nodes, capable of processing 250,000 TPS, and was soon upgraded to 150 nodes on a gigabit network, handling 200,000 TPS with a max of 500,000 TPS.
With the success of the testnet, Toly and the Solana team are able to raise a Series A funding round of $20M led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital. One of the early investors and supporters was Sam Bankman-Fried of Alameda Research and FTX. Sam had worked in finance before at Jane Street and understood the need for a high performant blockchain.
Solana’s Mainnet Beta would be launched in March 2020. Like COVID-19 pandemic, Solana grew and spread like wildfire. Excitement grew as Toly the Timekeeper saw his project flourish in the bull market, reaching an all-time high price of over $260. The euphoria experienced in DeFi Summer (Summer 2020) was unlike any other and builders and users alike were just starting to discover the buttery-smooth user-experience only possible on Solana. Eager to transact on-chain for de minimis fees, usage grew, and building accelerated.
The start of 2022 saw the release of Solana Pay, a payment method with real-world utility for merchants and customers. In addition, it would be a renaissance for builders who saw what was possible on the network that made it unique and unlocked new business models that were not possible on other chains. Helium, which had a custom L1 blockchain for their wireless network, agreed to migrate to Solana as they saw a public solution that wouldn’t involve reinventing the wheel.
Near the end of 2022, a black swan event struck. In just a few days on Crypto Twitter, FTX would file for bankruptcy and declare itself insolvent after a bank run. As customer funds from FTX were illegally taken to support poor trading in Alameda Research, many altcoins saw large drawdowns and the entire crypto industry felt the effects as the second largest exchange crumbled. Alameda’s holding of nearly $1 billion in Solana
In the aftermath of FTX which had a large holding of SOL, the community watched the price dip to a low of $8, as critics called for the death and end of the network. It was also at this time that the exchange Robinhood forcibly liquidated customer positions in SOL and delisted the token from the exchange. In these dark times, it was the developers, founders, and builders that kept the community together. With the launch of the Bonk memecoin and Mad Lads NFT, people had promising signs that there would be light at the end of the tunnel if they could hold through.
Builders kept building and the Solana Mobile team would release the Saga mobile phone which was received mildly and had a limited run of 20,000 units. The goal of the phone was to start disrupting the iOS/Android duopoly in application markets, lowering costs for developers and in-app transactions for native decentralized applications. The phone would go on to win the “Worst Phone of 2023” award by tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee. This would all change when the team at Bonk announced that they would be airdropping to Saga Genesis NFT holders, which comes with the phone, at an amount that was worth more than the phone itself, causing the phone to sell out overnight.
Three notable outages hit the network, one in September 2021, May 2022, and October 2022. Each one bringing the network down for hours at a time, drawing criticism for its imperfect uptime. But that did not phase the community nor Toly the Timekeeper in learning, fixing, and building the most resilient and performant blockchain.
“It wasn’t even that long”, he said. (dramatization)
These outages were treated as growing pains by the community, as they worked to promote further decentralization and optimization in the performant chain.
Eyes would be on the Solana ecosystem in Q4 as Jito Labs, who developed the Jito-Solana validator client, airdropped a large liquidity injection, rewarding users who staked with Jito. This prompts a conversation on two other validator clients being developed: Sig using the Zig programming language, and Firedancer, a complete rewrite of the validator client in C++ by the Jump Crypto team.
As tailwinds began to come together, the market rallied with SOL gaining over 1000% to close out the difficult year. Headed into 2024, the community remains optimistic as ever as price strength, world-class projects, content, and network activity are coming together in a Bitcoin halving cycle.
Toly the Timekeeper, Father of the Clockchain, continues to inspire and drive development forward on the Solana blockchain. Armed with a network and a dream, Solana brings together global free-thinkers who recognize the potential of the global state machine.
References
https://docs.solana.com/history
https://solanacompass.com/solana/solanas-history-when-was-sol-launched
https://cointelegraph.com/news/solana-genesis-story-powering-nasdaq-on-public-blockchain