Anatoly Yakovenko talks decentralization, developer community @ UDC 2021 (2024)

Solana Labs co-founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko is tired of the comparisons to Ethereum.

“I hate the Eth-killer thing,” he said during a virtual talk at the 2021 Upbit Developer Conference in Seoul. “I’m an open source developer… The biggest misconception that people have about open source projects is that you can kill them.”

It was just one of many questions Yakovenko answered during his half-hour appearance, where the topics ranged from Solana’s competitive advantage to who Solana Labs views as their competitors in the space.

Here are the highlights.

These quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

How Anatoly thinks of decentralization

Co-founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko:“Decentralization is a very multifaceted term. What does that mean to us? Because the use case we mostly care about is on this global network that information gets propagated to everybody at the same time.

“Literally the goal of Solana is to carry transactions as fast as news travels around the world — so speed of light through fiber. Who we’re competing with is NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange. So if some important event happens in Seoul that has importance to markets, that newswire needs to propagate to a marketplace in New York, so that trader looking at that Bloomberg terminal is gonna look at it after that speed of light delay. By the time you look at the market, that price should already be reflected on bothSerum(or markets like Serum) and the New York Stock Exchange. For that to happen, information in the network needs to be guaranteed to propagate as fast as possible.

“The only way to do this without centralization is to optimize this thing calledthe Nakamoto coefficient, which is the minimum set of nodes, up to 33%, that can propagate the data around the network, at the same time to all the nodes. That really requires more hardware, more bandwidth… there’s no other way to implement it.

“It’s not even a tradeoff. Either you have this feature, you’re able to propagate information simultaneously around the world and anyone in the world has fair access to marketplaces, or you don’t.”

How Solana and Ethereum can evolve together

Yakovenko:“I hate the Eth-killer thing. I’m an open source developer. I grew up in the time when Linux was fighting Microsoft. The big misconception that people have about open source projects is that it’s possible to kill them. Well, if there are developers that are just having fun working on this thing over the weekend, it’s impossible to kill them! There’s no way to kill Ethereum. That’s basically not something we think about.

“Our goal — and I think we’ve succeeded there — is to make Solana an open source project that people just have fun building on the weekend or in their free time — so also unkillable.”

“The second goal — and really the advantage — of what we’re working on is that we are 100% focused on making sure these order books that are running on Serum can be competitive with not Ethereum, but with the New York Stock Exchange, with NASDAQ, with the biggest retail exchanges with equities. If we can accomplish that, as a decentralized open source project —it’s justa bunch of code at GitHub! — I think that’s a veryinterestingoutcome. It’s worth trying.”

Solana as an operating system

Yakovenko:“Solana is an operating system in the general sense.Neonis an EVM virtual machine — an interpreter of EVM bytecode that runs as a Solana program. It is the same thing as running Java on Windows, on Linux, as a virtual machine. Because Solana is generic enough to be an operating system, you can do things like this. You can run EVMs and other virtual machines.”

Solana’s unique developer community

Yakovenko:“If you really look at other networks that are building competitive platforms, they are designed as a faster version of Ethereum — but not really focused on a differentiated use case that opens up a whole new thing.

“Because central order books and that level of fine print finance was really a core to what we were doing, the kind of developers that we started seeing in the Solana ecosystem specifically were folks that had like, 5+ years working at a Chicago options trading firm in C++. They’re very naturally engineers that can switch to Rust in about a weekend. They already know what they want to build, and the only place they could have built that was on Solana, using Serum, working withJump TradingorAlamedaor a liquidity provider. There was just no other place for them to go.

“We were able to open up that new set of developers to come in and kickstart the ecosystem. That was really the tip of the spear. Once you have a group of people who are coming in, having fun, building products, and launching really quickly, other use cases that you could launch on other chains but also work great on Solana are just gonna hop along and start building as well.

“...A lot of the success there builds a lot of the user-facing tools that people need for everything else. It becomes very easy to adopt to any other application — gaming and NFTs included.”

Anatoly Yakovenko talks decentralization, developer community @ UDC 2021 (2024)

FAQs

Who is Anatoly Yakovenko co-founder of Solana? ›

Anatoly Yakovenko is the co-founder of Solana and the chief executive officer of Solana Labs. He has almost two decades of experience building high-performance operating systems, including leading OS development at Qualcomm and holding engineering roles at Dropbox and Mesosphere.

Who is the new CEO of Solana? ›

Anatoly Yakovenko - Solana | LinkedIn.

Who is the founder of Solana Foundation? ›

Anatoly Yakovenko - Founder & CEO @ Solana - Crunchbase Person Profile.

What is the career of Anatoly Yakovenko? ›

Anatoly Yakovenko is the CEO and Co-founder of Solana. Prior to Solana, he was the team leader for developing operating systems at Qualcomm, distributed systems at Mesosphere, and compression at Dropbox (service).

Is Anatoly Yakovenko Russian or Ukrainian? ›

Born in Ukraine and raised in the United States, Yakovenko made his way from traditional industry to the blockchain industry. Yakovenko holds a strong position in the crypto landscape as he introduced the Solana network to the blockchain industry.

How much is Solana co-founder worth? ›

As of 2023, Anatoly Yakovenko had a net worth of approximately $69 million. However, this has since multiplied, with his net worth now closer to $500 million. The precise total is unknown, however, most publications cite Yakovenko's net worth of around $460 million as of May 2024.

Who runs Solana now? ›

Solana is a blockchain platform designed to host decentralized, scalable applications. Founded in 2017, it is an open-source project currently run by the Solana Foundation based in Geneva, while the blockchain was built by San Francisco-based Solana Labs.

Who is the ownership of Solana? ›

Founded by Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana is a high-performance blockchain designed for decentralized applications and crypto-currencies.

Who has invested in Solana? ›

Investors that Invested in Companies in This Hub
Organization/Person NameLocation
TechstarsBoulder, Colorado, United States
500 GlobalSan Francisco, California, United States
SOSVPrinceton, New Jersey, United States
Sequoia CapitalMenlo Park, California, United States
1 more row

Who coded Solana? ›

Named after a small Southern Californian coastal city, Solana is the brainchild of software developer Anatoly Yakovenko. Yakovenko first proposed this innovative blockchain in 2017, and Solana launched in March 2020. Today SOL has become popular crypto, ranking as the 11th largest coin by total market capitalization.

Who funded Solana? ›

Their latest funding was raised on Dec 5, 2023 from a Undisclosed round. Solana is funded by 48 investors. Cynegetic Investment Management and JellyC are the most recent investors.

Is Solana based in Switzerland? ›

Solana Foundation is a not-for-profit venture capital firm based in Geneva, Switzerland. The firm seeks to invest in the blockchain sector.

Why Solana will win? ›

Solana is a strong investment opportunity because of its innovative blockchain technology, fast transaction speeds and increasing adoption.

Why is Solana so successful? ›

Solana offers faster transactions and lower fees, which has made it popular for DeFi and NFTs. However, Ethereum has a longer track record, greater decentralisation, more value locked on the platform and a larger developer community.

Where is Anatoly Yakovenko from? ›

Anatoly Yakovenko was a kid when he came to the U.S. from Ukraine in the early 1990s. As a teenager, he was enamored with programming, having learned C, his first coding language.

Who is the co-founder of Solana Raj? ›

Raj Gokal is the co-founder of Solana and president of Solana Labs. He also serves on the board of the Solana Foundation.

Who was Solana created by? ›

Named after a small Southern Californian coastal city, Solana is the brainchild of software developer Anatoly Yakovenko. Yakovenko first proposed this innovative blockchain in 2017, and Solana launched in March 2020.

Who is the founder of Phantom Solana? ›

The founders of Phantom are Brandon Millman, Chris Kalani and Francesco Agosti.

Top Articles
Latest Posts
Recommended Articles
Article information

Author: Allyn Kozey

Last Updated:

Views: 5671

Rating: 4.2 / 5 (63 voted)

Reviews: 94% of readers found this page helpful

Author information

Name: Allyn Kozey

Birthday: 1993-12-21

Address: Suite 454 40343 Larson Union, Port Melia, TX 16164

Phone: +2456904400762

Job: Investor Administrator

Hobby: Sketching, Puzzles, Pet, Mountaineering, Skydiving, Dowsing, Sports

Introduction: My name is Allyn Kozey, I am a outstanding, colorful, adventurous, encouraging, zealous, tender, helpful person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.