Anatoliy Yakovenko
Anatoliy Yakovenko is the founder and CEO of blockchain startup Solana Labs.
Childhood, education and early career
Anatoliy Yakovenko was born in 1980 in Ukraine. When he was only 11 years old, he emigrated to the United States with his parents.
He became interested in programming when he was a teenager. Anatoly said that he started working with blockchain, in particular, because of the collapse of the USSR — when he saw how the economy, which depended on the decisions of one party, collapsed in one day. There was also another reason: Anatoliy realized that traditional finance would be less bureaucratic and more efficient if it were made more technological and decentralized. The programmer was also impressed by the idea that blockchain could make cryptography accessible to everyone.
In 2003, Yakovenko graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in computer science and launched his first startup, which developed a service like Google Voice, a phone call management service.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Anatoly studied
Since 2016, he has been working as an engineer at Mesosphere, a data center software company, and Dropbox, a file-sharing company.
Solana
According to Yakovenko, the idea for Solana came to him at night when he was suffering from insomnia.
In 2017, the engineer published a draft version of a white paper describing the main goal of Solana: to reduce the amount of time it takes for blockchain nodes to synchronize or reach consensus. The high speed is supposed to help developers scale their decentralized applications (dApps) and ensure rapid growth of the user base.
To launch the startup, Yakovenko attracted former Qualcomm engineers Greg Fitzgerald and Stephen Ackridge, as well as former medtech executives Eric Williams and Raj Gokal. The company was named after the San Diego beach where former Qualcomm colleagues used to surf.
The Solana team
In just a year since the white paper was published, Solana has raised more than $ 20 million in venture capital investment in several private token sales. In February 2020, the public test of the Tour de SOL project was launched. A month later, the beta version of the main network was launched.
In June 2020, the Solana Foundation, a non-profit organization aimed at developing the Solana ecosystem and adopting decentralized technologies, was established to promote the development of the ecosystem. Later, more than 160 million native tokens of the SOL project and the rights to all its intellectual property were transferred to it.
In addition to its CEO Anatoliy Yakovenko, the organization’s board includes entrepreneur and investor, co-founder of Staking Facilities Wolfgang Albrecht, developer James Prestwich, representative of Multicoin Capital Mabel Jung, and Patrick Felton.
The project has attracted attention in the market among other blockchain companies. In August 2020, the decentralized Serum exchange from the FTX crypto-derivatives exchange was launched on the blockchain. In the same month, Tether launched the USDT stablecoin on Solana. Later in October, the USDC stablecoin developed by the Centre consortium was launched on the blockchain.
In May 2021, Solana Foundation launched five funds with a total of $ 100 million in assets to develop applications in China, and a month later, Solana Labs raised more than $ 300 million in a private token sale. The funding round was led by major venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital.
Despite the fact that the Solana blockchain is operating in test mode, it has several DeFi projects. 48% of the blocked funds ($ 440 million) are accounted for by Raydium’s AMM (Automated Market Maker), which copies the order book of the decentralized Serum exchange, the exchange itself ($ 279 million), and the Solfarm aggregator ($ 115 million).
Its low cost, high speed, and censorship-resistant features make it more popular among users. In addition, the best Web3 applications such as Audius, Bonfida, Grape Protocol, Squads, etc. are built on the Solana blockchain.
Solana is headquartered in San Francisco. The company currently employs 78 people.
Meeting at the company’s office in San Francisco
To speed up the system, Solana uses a proprietary algorithm called Proof of History (PoH) along with the Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm.
PoH allows you to make a record of an event before the transaction information is added to the blockchain. Thus, nodes in the Solana blockchain can create blocks without having to «coordinate» their actions with the entire network. This reduces transaction time.
Solana uses several other technologies that are designed to increase the speed of the blockchain. Among them, for example, is the Turbine protocol, which breaks all information into smaller pieces.
According to Yakovenko, their blockchain is able to operate «at the speed of light.» In addition, Solana representatives define their blockchain as «a public operating system in which everyone can participate.»
Problems of the project
Solana is still operating in a test network mode, which means that all services on its blockchain, including DeFi, are prone to failures. For example, in December 2020, there was a failure during which the network was down for 6 hours.
Since the beginning of 2022 alone, the project has faced several technical failures amid an increased load due to the volume of transactions and hacker attacks. For example, in the first half of January, the network was shut down twice due to the load.
The project suffered another attack in early February, when hackers exploited a vulnerability in the Wormhole bridge’s smart contracts and stole 120,000 wETH. At the time, it was the largest hack in DeFi’s history. As a result, the SOL rate dropped by 8% overnight.
It is worth noting that the Solana blockchain is not often used in practice, so many considerations about it are of an evaluative nature. It will be possible to understand how effectively Solana can solve the scalability problem only after the network goes live and passes the test of time.
In addition to external hacker attacks, Solana is also experiencing difficulties within the company. In July 2022, one of the blockchain startup’s investors filed a class action lawsuit against key members of the Solana ecosystem. They are accused of illegally making a profit on the SOL token, which, according to the lawsuit, is an unregistered security.
Saga smartphone
At the end of June 2022, Solana announced its own Saga smartphone. It is designed for Web3 features and is intended to facilitate work with the blockchain. It will allow for easy and fast blockchain transactions that are currently only available from laptops and PCs.
Together with Saga, Yakovenko announced Solana Mobile Stack (or SMS). This is a set of programs and services aimed at working with Web3 in a smartphone. It already includes the dApp store and the Solana Pay payment service. The list will continue to grow.
Some crypto companies like FTX and Phantom are already working on the Solana Mobile Stack. Solana has also created a separate fund that will attract developers to develop SMS.
At the presentation of the Saga smartphone in New York
Yakovenko said he likes to program in the morning, and that surfing or cycling helps him solve problems. «If I can get on my bike for two hours, I come back much fresher and with many decisions made,» he says. He, like some of the other Solana founders, also plays underwater hockey.
The startup’s co-founders say that Yakovenko is often so absorbed in his work that «it seems as if he is in another dimension.»
The engineer has made private investments in many sectors. For example, on September 2, 2021, he invested $ 3 million in Seed Round — UXD Protocol. According to Entrepreneur, Anatoliy Yakovenko’s net worth is $ 200 million.
Yakovenko has been married to Laura Skelton for almost 10 years. In many interviews, the programmer often speaks of himself as a father, but there is no information about his children online.
Together with his wife Laura in their youth