From Soviet Union Immigrant to Blockchain Pioneer: How Solana Is Redefining the Future of High-Performance Chains

After experiencing multiple bull and bear cycles in the cryptocurrency industry, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko recently shared in an interview the technical philosophy behind this high-performance public chain, his entrepreneurial journey, and his in-depth thoughts on the industry’s future. This founder, originally from the Soviet Union and a former engineer at Qualcomm, spent 8 years turning an idea from a coffee shop into an ecosystem valued at billions of dollars.

Inspiration Sparked: From Wireless Communication Protocols to Blockchain Architecture

The birth of Solana stemmed from a seemingly simple yet profound technical insight. During his time at Qualcomm, Anatoly gained an in-depth understanding of wireless communication infrastructure. One night in late 2017, while discussing Bitcoin mining and proof-of-work mechanisms with a friend, he suddenly thought of dividing time into slices — a concept used in early cellular networks called Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA).

The core of this technical insight was to solve a fundamental problem in blockchain: when multiple validators generate blocks simultaneously, forks occur, leading to network chaos and data loss. If validators could take turns generating blocks in chronological order, conflicts could be avoided and protocol bandwidth maximized. Initial calculations suggested that this approach could yield throughput 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than Ethereum or Bitcoin at the time.

Meanwhile, Anatoly recognized the revolutionary significance of smart contract platforms — that software itself, rather than human oversight, could become the sole authority over capital flows. This was fundamentally opposed to traditional finance models monitored by humans.

Decision Moment: A Wife’s Words Changed the Course

Despite multiple entrepreneurial side ventures, the real turning point came from his family. His wife — also an engineer, who had worked at Facebook’s early competitors — made a clear demand: “Either go all-in on entrepreneurship, or give it up. You can’t juggle work, family, and side projects at the same time.”

Drawing from her experience working in Colombia, she shared a market rule: every industry has a roughly six-month golden window, during which products with certain attributes will capture 80% of the market share. Missing this window makes catching up extremely difficult.

This realization prompted Anatoly to make the entrepreneurial decision at the end of 2017. He assessed that it was the best time to build a global-level Layer 1 blockchain — an infrastructure layer capable of handling the global financial system. His advice to anyone considering entering AI or other frontier fields is: don’t wait, act immediately, or you will miss the opportunity forever.

Fundraising and Hiring: Tough but Necessary Early Tests

In the early days, Anatoly’s biggest challenge was fundraising. He listed all possible venture capital firms in Silicon Valley that might invest in crypto and held thousands of meetings himself. This process taught him how to effectively communicate his vision in 10 minutes: first understand the other party’s knowledge of cryptocurrency, avoid repetition, then quickly explain the specific problem the product solves and its impact.

In Q1 2018, as fundraising was nearing completion, Ethereum’s price dropped about 10%, and many funds went bankrupt. But Anatoly’s strategy was to keep fundraising until the funds were actually secured. He recalls a conversation with co-founder Raj at the 500 Startups office, where Raj said “I have to work my ass off,” and Anatoly’s advice was not to be fooled by promises — only count the cash in the bank account.

The second major challenge was recruiting. Fortunately, many of Anatoly’s former Qualcomm colleagues were eager to try new things. These people had over ten years of experience in operating systems, network protocols, and low-level chip development, and fully understood his vision. One engineer involved in Solana protocol development had even contributed to LTE standards. Anatoly changed his job ad to: “Anyway, you’re changing jobs, why not take Solana as a fun vacation?”

This strategy worked. These top talents quickly built the most advanced blockchain network infrastructure at that time.

The “Work Marriage” with Raj: The Art of Decision-Making

Anatoly’s collaboration with Raj was jokingly called a “work marriage” by his wife. Raj was introduced through mutual friends, with a completely different background — he had successfully founded companies before but had no technical background. This was the perfect complement.

Their decision-making process, though time-consuming, was highly efficient. They would debate repeatedly in high-pressure, fast-paced environments until all obviously bad options were eliminated, ultimately arriving at what’s called the Pareto optimal set — a decision state where all trade-offs seem roughly equal. This required mutual trust and respect, even when fiercely arguing, without damaging their relationship.

Anatoly believes that CEOs and early teams need this kind of personality trait. The shortcomings of a CEO will eventually permeate the company culture, so finding partners who can engage in deep debate based on mutual trust is crucial.

Product Strategy: Bearing Computational Risks or Going Directly to Market

In early development, Anatoly faced a key product decision: whether to pre-build all auxiliary features before launch or to first validate the core product?

In the second year of development, with only about 12 months of funding remaining (original plan was 24 months), and the product still unstable, the team decided to cut all non-core features and launch an MVP as soon as possible. This seemingly forced decision ultimately brought unexpected advantages.

In the first year, Anatoly took on eight major technical risks — implementing confirmation delays with time division multiplexing, ultra-high transaction throughput, low latency, etc. Statistically, the probability of all eight risks succeeding simultaneously was only 1/256. But because these risks were well managed, Solana developed features that set it apart from any other platform.

At that time, Ethereum used PoW, with block times around 12 seconds, and transaction confirmation waiting for at least two blocks, resulting in about 30 seconds user experience. Solana achieved finality for thousands of transactions in just 400 milliseconds, plus 1-2 seconds round-trip server latency. Users and developers were stunned by this experience difference, even though early products would crash after running for an hour.

The Pain of Finding Product-Market Fit

Defining an MVP that achieves PMF is extremely difficult. Anatoly, based on his experience with operating systems and developer platforms, made most of the right choices. But he admits the process involved countless sacrifices — supporting EVM or certain programming languages, high-level browsers, autonomous wallets, and other trade-offs.

A bigger challenge was the signal distortion in the crypto space. During bull markets, token prices surge, masking real issues — you don’t know who the core users are, or what features truly matter. Solana initially had few users, but the rising SOL price created a critical window — to leverage this timing to accumulate real user cases.

At the first hackathon, the entries were uneven. By the second, Anatoly finally saw “we found the right direction.” The entries from the first hackathon, after three months of polishing, presented highly mature, complete applications aligned with finance and DeFi visions. The second hackathon’s projects showed a huge leap: quality, usability, business models, and fundraising capabilities all advanced significantly.

Watching these participants secure funding during the hackathon, Anatoly realized a milestone: Solana finally achieved product-market fit — the core business, with a path to profitability. Reaching this stage within a year of product launch was quite fortunate. Most companies take years to find their optimal PMF point.

From Peak to Abyss: FTX Crisis and Ecosystem Resilience

The prosperity suddenly collapsed. Solana’s third Breakpoint conference attracted 1,600 developers, tickets sold out, but on the return flight, news of FTX’s bankruptcy broke. It was one of the worst lows in the industry — Solana’s biggest investor and partner disappeared overnight, the market plummeted, and SOL’s price eventually fell 97%.

But Solana was prepared. Thanks to cautious operations during the 2018 bear market, never overhiring, the company had ample funds for development. Investigations showed that 85% of Solana ecosystem projects survived, only 15% completely collapsed.

A notable case was Backpack. This wallet project had just completed a $10 million funding round, but all funds were trapped on FTX. Despite severe losses, the team doubled down, launching Mad Labs NFT series and building a trading platform. Founder Armani’s anger at FTX transformed into a determination to build a better exchange. The two-week Mad Labs frenzy resembled a bull market revival, inspiring the entire ecosystem to rally.

Anatoly’s biggest lesson from this was: building a company during a bull market is extremely difficult. The signals are heavily distorted — you don’t know who the core users are. But in a bear market, if you have 10 to 20 loyal users using your product weekly, continuously optimizing, you will see explosive growth when the bull returns. These users become the best promoters, and the product is highly optimized for specific scenarios.

Many Solana ecosystem founders said at the time: “We will keep optimizing the product, have enough funds, see you next year.” All these companies eventually succeeded and performed outstandingly.

The Future of Crypto Under a Rebuilt Regulatory Framework

Anatoly observed that the frequency of hacking attacks has significantly decreased, mainly because of reduced innovation in smart contracts — many use cases have been explored. Bonding Curves, AMMs, lending protocols, etc., have been commoditized, removing the need for massive engineering risks.

Whenever there’s a surge of innovation in smart contracts, it’s accompanied by high risks. But now, with better formal verification tools, testing frameworks, and deeper understanding of attack vectors, deployment risks have greatly decreased.

Regulation is another key factor. Overly strict regulation leads to high costs and long delays, causing projects to move offshore to more lenient jurisdictions, often exploiting imperfect banking infrastructure, which ultimately leads to various issues. Many failures in the last economic cycle stemmed from this.

Now, the US has stablecoin-related legislation, the SEC’s attitude has improved, and the entrepreneurial environment has greatly improved. But the US still lags behind. Japan, France, and the UK have already enacted crypto-related laws — Japan may be the best, with a comprehensive legal framework for cryptocurrencies. FTX Japan succeeded as a result, leading the market, despite Japan’s relatively small size.

Solana’s Ultimate Vision: The Global Financial Settlement Layer

From an engineering perspective, there are no technical obstacles preventing Solana from becoming a unified execution engine for payments, trading, contracts, IPOs, and all other business activities. This would accelerate the velocity of US dollar circulation and enable real-time settlement of any transaction worldwide.

If this system achieves PMF and is widely adopted, you will witness financial costs reduced to the lowest level comparable to physical costs — the final state where software dominates the financial world.

But realizing this vision faces fierce competition. Anatoly is unsure whether a blockchain giant like Google will emerge to handle 99% of critical transactions. The main reason is that some countries will develop their own blockchains with unique regulatory systems; everyone wants a piece of the pie, even Google has launched its own chain.

What he truly hopes to see is a model he calls “Linux IPO from zero” — companies can go public quickly through tamper-proof on-chain smart contracts, at extremely low cost. Founders can directly list on a public, commercialized blockchain, with the equity structure becoming a true source, accessible to the public at any time, without paying investment banks.

This would drastically change how companies raise funds and how the public engages with early-stage companies. The core of the American Dream is free markets. When I came from the Soviet Union to the US in 1982, the internet was just emerging, and companies like Microsoft and Amazon were building the future. Now, these giants are worth trillions, but the number of US-listed companies may be the fewest since the 1970s. If tools can be provided to enable founders to IPO at the lowest cost and fastest speed, it will greatly reshape the entire industry landscape.

Stablecoin Era: The Main Driver for the Next Decade

Anatoly sees that cryptocurrencies are being effectively adopted by Wall Street and global institutions. Stablecoins are the main factor driving institutional adoption. The US stablecoin legislation has created a framework for issuing stablecoins, which surpasses any traditional banking capital interface.

The industry expects that within 5 to 10 years, $10 trillion worth of stablecoins will be issued. Currently, stablecoin issuance is about $300 billion, with enormous growth potential. These liquidity funds will flow into all financial sectors.

If you are a founder passionate about fintech, it’s recommended to build around stablecoins — whether integrating with existing stablecoins or issuing your own for specific use cases. This will be the most important direction for the crypto industry in the next decade.

Anatoly’s entrepreneurial journey and thoughts demonstrate what a true blockchain builder looks like: combining advanced technology, operational wisdom, risk mitigation, having survived crises unscathed, and full of confidence and execution in future visions. In the cyclical volatility of the crypto market, such perspective and resolve are especially valuable.