Solana’s genesis story — Anatoly Yakovenko's vision for a high-performance blockchain
Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko recounts the “eureka moment” that birthed the blueprint for the layer one smart contract protocol aimed to be “hyper-optimized” and “fast as possible”. “I literally had two coffees and a beer, and I had this eureka moment at four in the morning," Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko recalls as he leans back thoughtfully. Speaking to Cointelegraph at the annual Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam, the co-founder recounts a late night brainwave of a “hyper-optimized, fast as possible” smart contract blockchain protocol. “The use case that I was going after was for central limit order books, like how to run something that's like the Nasdaq, but on a public permission-less blockchain ,” Yakovenko explains. “I thought that there was a clear win there if you have transparent data, everyone has fair and open rights and all this stuff is running on commodity hardware.” From surfing to smart contracts Solana’s roots are intrinsically linked to Yako...