Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko: A Trustless Clock To Rethink Time

Host Tom Shaughnessy talks to Anatoly Yakovenko, Founder of Solana. They discuss how to make blockchain technology faster, its use cases, and how to accrue value in this space. They also discuss the philosophy behind where blockchain, math, and time intersect.

Key Points

1. Processing speed has less to do with hardware than software; it’s the software that currently does not take full advantage of the processing speed some hardware is capable of.
2. Solana is almost like a hardware in itself because other blockchains can run on it if they require the speed and the scale.
3. Technology like Solana allows software to become more flexible.

Quotes

• “There’s a constant trade-off between performance, security, and decentralization.” –Anatoly Yakovenko

• “Imagine in 1996 if someone told you that the internet was going to become 3 billion people and we’re just going to connect them and get them to share pictures of their cats, and that’s going to be worth half a trillion dollars.” –Anatoly Yakovenko

• “I think what we’ll see is the projects that will succeed the most are the ones that can cannibalize everybody else. That can actually lift pieces out and start integrating them as fast as possible.” –Anatoly Yakovenko

Episode Highlights

• Solana is a high-performance blockchain that Anatoly believes is the fastest computing possible.
• Hardware is going to keep getting faster and faster.
• Most blockchain tech right now works through synchronization, meaning all of the computers worldwide need to talk to each other and synchronize before moving onto the next step.
• With Solana, each node of the blockchain can run time by itself and timestamp messages with high TPS and without having to be in contact with each other.
• There are very few collisions, but when there are, they are able to solve them with consensus.
• It’s essentially a global computer synchronized within 400 milliseconds.
• Solana is focused on scaling without sharding their layer one blockchains.
• Anatoly believes DeFi will need hundreds of millions of users before it accrues real value.
• If blockchains have the need, they will come to Solana; why would someone who’s achieved success building on Ethereum pack up and move to a different platform? But if eventually, Ethereum becomes too slow, then they may have a reason to switch to Solana.
• One major misconception about Solana is that it’s a single node when really it’s a single virtual clock that is recomputed across many nodes.
• Another misconception is that validators are too expensive to run on Solana.
• You can deploy a 1,000 TPS droplet for $5/month.
• Hardware is flexible; you only have to pay for what you use.
• Anatoly predicts that the projects that will succeed the most will be the ones that can take the best pieces of other projects and integrate them faster than others.
• To Anatoly, Solana is an engine of price discovery as a high-performance blockchain.
• Solana can do up to 30,000 price updates per second.