Bitcoin and Ethereum possessed a strong narrative, but the waves they made were not enough to traverse the ocean. Stories and promises will only get a project so far.

Indeed, despite the incredible growth and loyal followings of the incumbents, they had critical flaws. Network bloat, expensive gas fees, and high latency made them impractical for many applications. This left a wide gap for rivaling networks to attempt to dethrone the two kings.

Anatoly Yakovenko. The creator of Solana. He was an engineer by trade, having spent his career working on wireless technology and distributed systems.

In 2008, Anatoly was working on the BREW flip phone operating system at Qualcomm, an experience that forced him to optimize within limitations. That was also when he began his foray into crypto through Bitcoin mining.

Fast forward to 2017, Bitcoin and Ethereum were incredibly popular and offered security and decentralization, two of the core principles of crypto. However, without scalability, neither could graduate from the tiny crypto pond to the vast financial ocean of the real world.

Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin wrote: “The scalability trilemma says that there are three properties that a blockchain try to have [scalability, security, and decentralization], and that, if you stick to “simple” techniques, you can only get two of those three.” As fate would have it, Anatoly would come across something that was anything but simple.

He figured it out in October 2017. In a late night epiphany, he envisioned a new network that could operate without the current limitations of scalability.

“I had two coffees and a beer, and I was up until 4:00 AM, and I had this eureka moment that puzzle similar to proof of work using the same SHA-256 preimage-resistant hash function. Instead of running it in this massively parallel, use as much electricity as you can to find this answer as quickly as you can. You actually make that thing slow and recursive, and force it to be running in a single core on a single thread on the computer. You can force it to prove that it's taking a certain amount of time, that there's a force delay before you do an action. So I knew that I had this arrow of time.”

Moments like these mark the history of progress. Insigificant in the moment, they leave an ever-expanding wake. Anatoly left his role at Dropbox, published a whitepaper, and got to work.

He began gathering a band of like-minded individuals with technical skills and grit to create a brand new network. In December, Raj Gokal joined, followed soon after by Greg Fitzgerald and Stephen Akridge. They worked tirelessly to bring the arrow of time to life. They called it Loom.

As with the case of starting anything, naming was a struggle. Unfortunately, Loom Network already existed, a direct naming collision within the same domain. So the Loom crew started brainstorming on a new name.

In March 2018, they ultimately landed on a name that was in reference to a small beach town in Southern California where Anatoly, Greg, and Stephen had lived and surfed together. Soon, it became official, Loom was now Solana.

Money follows traction. In April 2018, investors gathered for the seed sale. Notable names include Chris McCann, Ramtin Naimi, and Edith Yeung. This was an investment that may be described as legendary in the annals of venture capital. It poured jet fuel on the fire.