Written by: Pix
Compiled by: 1912212.eth, Foresight News
On an ordinary evening, with two cups of coffee and a beer, Toly Yakovenko's fate quietly turned. Today, his startup Solana is worth $80 billion. Behind this glamorous and beautiful, there is a little-known story waiting for us to explore carefully.
Toly first learned about cryptocurrencies in 2010 when he tried to mine Bitcoin, but just when he thought he had found a better way — he got scammed…
Years later, while developing a deep learning project with GPUs, he decided to mine ETH to offset operational costs. When the price of ETH continued to soar, he finally realized that cryptocurrency was far from a joke.
A few weeks later, the gears of fate began to turn...
Toly and his friends were discussing blockchain in a cafe. After two beers and a cup of coffee, Toly couldn't fall asleep.
That’s when he got inspired…
He came up with the idea of using timestamps as the basis for blockchain consensus, which is what we now know as Proof-of-History.
Thus, Solana was born.
Fun fact: It was named after a place where he and his friends surfed.
In February 2018, Toly and another co-founder released the white paper and the first Solana testnet. In the next two years, they received $20 million in funding and launched the mainnet beta (2020)
Public chains are growing rapidly...
In March 2021, the first NFTs (KREECHURES) were launched on Solana. With the lowest transaction costs, Solana has become the preferred public chain for new NFTs and protocols. All of this has helped Solana form one of the strongest communities in the entire crypto space.
Since then, Solana has experienced outages and even the collapse of FTX. But it survived and now:
TVL ranked 3rd
Market capitalization: $80 billion
NFT transaction volume ranked 2nd
47 million monthly active wallets
None of this was possible without Toly’s efforts that night, which were fueled by two cups of coffee and a beer.
