The Solana Story · Module 1 · 2017 to 2019 · 35 min
Solana began in 2017 with one engineer’s question: could a blockchain be much faster if its computers could agree on the order of events without constant chatter?
What you will learn
Explain the speed problem Solana set out to solve.
Describe Proof of History in plain words.
Name the people and the company behind the first version.
The lessons
Lesson 1: The speed problem
Bitcoin and Ethereum both pay for their safety with speed. Every computer on the network has to agree on which transactions came first, and that takes messages going back and forth, so only so many transactions fit into each block.
As you saw in the Ethereum story, when many people want space on a busy network, fees go up and waits get longer. Developers were already working on fixes for this, such as layer 2 networks.
Solana took a different approach. Instead of building on top of an existing chain, it set out to make one chain fast from the start, even if that meant harder demands on the computers that run it.
Remember: Solana’s big bet is speed on the main chain itself.
Lesson 2: Anatoly Yakovenko and Proof of History
Anatoly Yakovenko was an engineer who had worked on telecom software at Qualcomm, a company that makes chips for phones. In November 2017 he published a white paper describing an idea he called Proof of History.
Think of a clock that everyone can check. If each event carries a trusted timestamp, the computers no longer need to keep asking each other what happened first, because the order is already there. Proof of History is a way of building that shared clock into the record itself.
It is not a replacement for proof of stake or proof of work. Solana uses Proof of History together with proof of stake, which is how the network agrees on which blocks to accept.
Remember: Proof of History is a shared clock built into the chain, so computers waste less time agreeing on order.
Lesson 3: Solana Labs and the first tests
In 2018 Yakovenko and a small team, including the engineer Greg Fitzgerald, founded the company that became Solana Labs. The name is a nod to Solana Beach, a surf town in California where some of the founders lived.
In 2019 the team ran public test networks, including one called Tour de SOL, where volunteers ran the software and tried to break it. A test network uses coins with no real value, so mistakes are cheap.
Early backers put money into the company and the project, and a private sale of tokens helped fund the work. As with any early project, those first investors held a lot of the supply, which is something to keep in mind when you read about price swings.
Remember: Test networks let a project learn from mistakes before real money is involved.
Key dates
When
What happened
Why it matters
November 2017
Anatoly Yakovenko publishes the Solana white paper
Introduces Proof of History, the idea behind the network
2018
Solana Labs is founded in California
The company that builds the first version of the software
2019
Public test networks run, including Tour de SOL
Volunteers test the network before it goes live
Key terms: Proof of History, timestamp, validator, test network, throughput, white paper. Open the glossary
Module quiz
4 questions. Tap an answer to see if you are right and why.
1. What problem was Solana built to ease?
It aimed to make the main chain itself fast.
2. What is Proof of History?
It acts like a shared clock so computers need less back-and-forth.
3. Who published the Solana white paper in November 2017?
Yakovenko had worked at Qualcomm.
4. Does Solana use Proof of History alone?
Proof of History is combined with proof of stake.
Do it yourself
Imagine ten friends trying to agree the order of the people in a queue without a clock. Write down how many messages you think they would need, then imagine everyone has a shared stopwatch. Write one sentence on how the stopwatch helps.
Not financial advice. This lesson is history and education only. Prices are rounded and shown only to explain how big the swings were.