$SOL: Anatoly Yakovenko on How Solana Became a Leading Blockchain Over Past 18 Months

In a recent interview, Solana Labs Co-Founder Anatoly Yakovenko talked about how Solana managed — over the past 18 months — to “catapult” itself to the position of one of Ethereum’s major L1 blockchain rivals.

His comments were made during a conversation on September 21 with Ryan Selkis, Co-Founder and CEO at Messari, at Messari’s annual conference Mainnet (September 21-23, 2022) in New York City.

Yakovenko told Selkis:

“I’d love to say that it was like brilliant strategy, but it was really I think a function of necessity. We never had a ton of runway. There are always like 20 months or lower. So 12 engineers, a very scrapy team, over two years, we built the bare minimum to prove that a fast blockchain that has parallel execution is possible. That meant no EVM support, no Ethereum-like features.

“We literally just could demo, look, this thing could run something like zero. And that was it. And that was the right thing to do because devs saw a new technology that gave them new capabilities and they were curious and engineers are naturally curious. And that allowed us to build a small ecosystem of folks… eating glass was like our mantra at the time.

“Now, it’s more like surfing glass, but at that time I was really really rough. The only developer tool we got that we gave people was basically equivalent to a Linux system call. So it was very very low level programming, but it was cheap and fast and a new primitive for parallel execution and that that was really what allowed us to differentiate and build our own community.“