From Childhood to Adulthood: The Ongoing Developmental Phase of Solana
A Deep Dive into Solana's Journey
Are you ready to embark on a journey through the revolutionary world of blockchain technology? Let me take you back in time to a period when blockchain technology was diverse, with networks competing to solve problems inherent in the ecosystem. And then, a new kid on the block appeared, a promising contender with a mission to leave a memorable mark on the terrain of decentralized innovation. That kid is none other than Solana!
Solana, like every child, faced a multitude of challenges in its infancy. Such as performance bottlenecks, and the road was paved with obstacles. But like any resilient child, Solana persevered, and each challenge served as a stepping stone to growth and development.
As the days passed, Solana grew up to become the talk of the town, attracting attention from developers, investors, and the broader blockchain community. Its ecosystem flourished, giving rise to a diverse array of decentralized applications, innovative projects, and vibrant communities.
Today, Solana is a force to be reckoned with, a full-fledged adult in the blockchain space, brimming with innovation and progress. Its journey from childhood to adulthood is a testament to the power of perseverance, ingenuity, and collaboration in driving technological advancement.
Join me as we deeply dive into the past, present, and future of this notable blockchain platform, exploring its developmental phases and discovering how it conquered its predecessors in decentralized finance. From unlocking the potential of Web3 applications to pushing the boundaries of what's possible, Solana remains at the forefront of blockchain innovation, inspiring the younger generation to dream big and reach for the stars.
The Pregnancy
Anatoly Yakovenko, who was once an engineer at Qualcomm published a whitepaper In November 2017, describing Proof of History
as a sequence of computation that can provide a way to cryptographically verify the passage of time between two events. It uses a cryptographically secure function written so that output cannot be predicted from the input, and must be completely executed to generate the output.
This idea was born out of the challenges faced by its competitors, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, to scale beyond 15 transactions per second globally. This is despite centralized payment systems such as Visa requiring peaks of 65,000 transactions per second (tps).
In a stroke of brilliance reminiscent of light piercing the darkness, Anatoly uncovered the key to synchronizing computers and unlocking a new realm of possibilities. Drawing inspiration from the early days of radio, where the chaos of simultaneous transmissions created disruptive static, Anatoly devised a solution. Radio engineers had ingeniously synchronized clocks at each station to coordinate transmission times, resolving the interference which was tailored down to the description of Proof of History in his whitepaper.
With this knowledge, Anatoly realized he held the power to revolutionize blockchain technology. Invested with decades of research in distributed systems, his vision exceeded the boundaries of traditional thinking. The result? A groundbreaking cluster poised to propel blockchain forward at an outstanding pace – not just tenfold, not a hundredfold, but a staggering ten thousandfold increase in speed from the outset!
Anatoly's journey mirrored a timeless tale of innovation, where inspiration met realization in a symphony of creativity. With his creation, blockchain surged into unknown territory, indicating a new era of technological advancement and possibility.
In Anatoly's hands, the ordinary became extraordinary, and the future of blockchain shone with the promise of boundless potential. With his visionary cluster leading the charge, the world braced itself for the dawn of a new era in blockchain technology.
Anatoly who had been eaten up with curiosity and obsession for Crypto, went as far as purchasing an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) for Bitcoin mining but later realized the company had already mined with it during his early days in the cryptocurrency space, which he stated in an interview with Laura Shin on the Unchained Podcast.
The Young Child Solana
After pregnancy, what's expected is delivery, right? 😜, Yes 🎉, you are expected to see a baby afterwards. In the same way, Anatoly had gotten the key to the actualization of his goal, The next phase is implementation.
The question in your mind is how he brought this baby to life. Anatoly began his implementation in a private codebase using C programming language which he later migrated the project into Rust programming language within two weeks, a counsel he had gotten from his former co-worker from Qualcomm whose name is Greg Fitzgerald.
After staging a successful migration, and syncing the world's transactions onto a scalable blockchain, Anatoly Yakovenko proudly delivered a revolutionary project, named the LOOM Project. As the saying goes, "One person can give birth, but it takes a community to nurture a child." Anatoly, demonstrating thoughtful decision-making, reached out to his former colleagues at Qualcomm to form the founding team for this project. Notably, four out of five co-founders (now Solana), boast of completing an Ironman triathlon, contributing to an environment of remarkable intensity and efficiency. This becomes crucial as they navigate the competitive landscape of the crypto space, where projects abound. Despite its humble beginnings, this 'child' has now matured into a billion-dollar entity.
The Teen Solana
In 2018, Loom Child grew to become a great, child who grew up in the community of Ethereum, creating confusion among its admirers who felt as if Loom and Ethereum were siblings. The Loom parents decided they needed a new name for it and they renamed it SOLANA, a name after a small beach town in San Diego called Solana Beach, where Anatoly, Greg and Stephen lived for three years as they worked for Qualcomm. On March 28th, the team created the Solana GitHub organization and renamed Greg's prototype Silk to Solana.
The Adult Solana
Anatoly raised this project with a pretty conventional seed. He raised a little over 3 million dollars in exchange for roughly 16 of the total amount of SOL tokens. This deal now stands as one of the best investments of all time since the investors have made close to a one million per cent return in just a few years.
The pace of progress in the crypto industry has been remarkable in the past few years. Anatoly, who had previously raised three million dollars, went on to raise an additional 20 million dollars in three subsequent funding rounds. All of his investors have since profited handsomely. However, despite this success, there were still some challenges along the way.
As a person enters adulthood, they face various challenges, expectations, and remarkable events that shape their future. Similarly, Solana's journey also coincided with this phase. In 2018, the crypto market experienced a significant downturn, with Bitcoin's price dropping by more than 65%. This led to some investors pulling out their funds for their planned investments in Solana at the last minute. However, the bear market helped weed out speculators and those looking to make quick profits. The Solana team persevered, and despite the market conditions, they remained focused on building great software. They spent two years working diligently, prioritizing reliability, knowing that an unstable blockchain would not be accepted, no matter how fast it was. When they first launched their test-net with 40 validators, it immediately crashed and took several hours to restore. However, they continued their efforts and were eventually able to launch the beta version of the Solana main net in March 2020.
Solana has emerged as one of the top five cryptocurrencies in the market not just because of its bull run, but also due to its community developers who have helped the project foster a vibrant community. One of the major goals of Solana is to encourage users to own and control their assets by building a high-quality self-custody User-Experience (UX) that makes it easy for people who own Solana to be fully in charge of their assets. This approach is in contrast to leaving assets in the hands of Centralized Exchange (CEX) platforms such as Binance. To achieve this goal, Solana has created Phantom, the most popular wallet for Solana, which provides users with a seamless, self-custody experience.
Then again, apart from speed, Solana is known for low fees compared to other Self-custody wallets which have helped Solana stake a claim in the Non-Fungible Token(NFT) marketplace such as Digital Eyes with new projects launching every day that is it costing next to nothing to mint NFTs.
"I'm still Standing"
As adults keep growing everyday, so do exploring and gaining new knowledge which makes room for improvement, in a nutshell, this phase is characterized by "GROWTH". Despite the earlier challenges Solana had faced and overcome, it's obvious Solana is here to stay just like its predecessors. Solana has showcased a trustable way to their users assuring them that they are here to stay with different opportunities lineup for their users.
For a start, Solana came up with hackathons, introducing and giving room for developers to build incredible projects in the Solana ecosystem. The first hackathon had one thousand participants, the second had over three thousand participants and the third hackathon had over thirteen thousand participants. These hackathons have recorded over 400 different Solana-related projects and more are still coming, some of these projects include a Gaming Project called Star Atlas, Music Service called Audius, Mango Markets(MNGO) a decentralized Finance(DeFi) protocol and many more.
Anatoly, in an interview with a16zcrypto, stated that to boost cryptocurrency adoption and make it accessible to more people, They're tackling current bottlenecks. One bold move they're making is launching their phone. Traditional business models clash with cryptocurrency since they rely on centralized control. For example, platforms like Apple's App Store charge hefty fees and control content distribution. With NFTs, ownership is decentralized, disrupting this model. By launching this phone and crypto-based app store, they aim to provide an alternative where developers can thrive without excessive fees. This could lead to a shift in developers' revenue, prompting major companies to take crypto seriously and adopt self-custody practices, opening new opportunities. According to him, these phones are scheduled for shipping on April 20th.
He also added that Solana's approach to blockchain scalability, focusing on validator performance and high bandwidth, is superior to the data availability sampling approach used by Ethereum. He argued Solana's method is more cost-effective, secure, and efficient, and allows for a larger number of users. He acknowledged the existence of other architectures and believed different approaches would coexist, with Solana playing a major role. He also highlights the importance of developer adoption and share strategy for fostering a strong developer ecosystem through hackathons.
Solana is not complacent when it comes to innovation. Rather than waiting for users to come to them, they are actively reaching out to developers even in Africa and Asia, providing them with both a vibrant community and financial resources to support their initiatives through hackathons. This outreach has helped Solana expand its user base.
With these, it is best to believe that Solana is here to stay and not backing down.
Learn more on Solana
Interview with Laura Shin
Interview with a16zcrypto
More resource here
Thanks for staying till the end of the journey 😊
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