Solana is a leading open-source blockchain protocol known for its lightning-fast speed. It is capable of handling 50,000 transactions per second (TPS).
With a growing ecosystem hosting around 500 dApps, Solana's low average transaction cost of $0.00025 and block finality of 429 milliseconds have attracted developers seeking scalability and cost-efficiency. But have you ever think of how Solana came into existence, how does it evolved into 5 largest ecosystem in the crypto world.
Well let’s dive a little into the Solana story.
It all started in 2016-17 with Anatoly Yakovenko. Anatoly Yakovenko is a super-smart engineer who spent a long time at a company called Qualcomm, working on special tech that lets lots of phones talk over the same line. After Qualcomm, he worked at a couple of other tech places, making computer systems work better and faster.
In 2017, when everyone was getting excited about cryptocurrencies, Anatoly had a lightbulb moment. He realized that the problems with cryptocurrencies were kind of like the ones he used to solve with phone signals. So, he decided to quit his job and make his own cryptocurrency system.
He wrote down all his ideas in what's called a whitepaper and called it "“Solana: A new architecture for a high-performance blockchain." Then he tried to find people who would give him money to build it. It was a tough time because there were lots of other people trying to do similar things, and some of them had a lot of money and attention.
Even though some people were interested in his project at first, they all changed their minds when the cryptocurrency market started to go down. But Anatoly didn't care about getting rich; he just loved making cool new things. So he kept working on Solana with a few partners. Raj Gokal, who knew a lot about health technology, joined Anatoly to help run the business side of things.
Raj and Anatoly
Then, two of Anatoly's old friends from Qualcomm, Greg and Stephen, came to help turn all the ideas into a real thing you could use. They decided to use a programming language called Rust because it was really good for this kind of work, and they found a way to make everything run super fast using GPUs.
Solana’s Early Team
At first, they called their project "Loom," but there was another cryptocurrency thing with the same name, so they changed it to "Solana." They picked that name because it reminded them of Solana Beach in San Diego, where they used to have fun surfing together when they weren't working.
Although i have mentioned some of the technological innovations earlier, i am just going to add a few to it:
Solana has raised over $339.4 million.
Here are Solana’s funding rounds with notable investors like a16z, Polychain Capital, Multicoin Capital, CMS Holdings, Jump Trading, Tiger Global, Sino Global Capital, and Placeholder.VC.