One ordinary evening, after two cups of coffee and a beer, the gears of Toly Yakovenko’s destiny quietly turned. Today, his venture, Solana, boasts a market value of $80 billion. Behind this glittering success lies an untold story waiting to be discovered.
In 2010, Toly first learned about cryptocurrencies. He tried mining Bitcoin, but just when he thought he had found a better way—he was scammed…
Years later, while developing deep learning projects with GPUs, he decided to mine ETH to offset operational costs. As ETH prices soared, he realized that cryptocurrencies were no joke.
A few weeks later, the gears of fate began to turn…
Toly and his friends were discussing blockchain in a café. After two beers and a coffee, Toly couldn’t sleep.
That’s when inspiration struck…
He conceived the idea of using timestamps as the basis for blockchain consensus, now known as Proof-of-History.
Thus, Solana was born.
Interestingly, its name comes from a place where he and his friends used to surf.
In February 2018, Toly and another co-founder released the white paper and Solana’s first testnet. Over the next two years, they secured $20 million in funding and launched the mainnet beta (2020).
The blockchain quickly grew…
In March 2021, the first NFTs (KREECHURES) launched on Solana. With the lowest transaction costs, Solana became the preferred blockchain for new NFTs and protocols. All this helped Solana build one of the strongest communities in the crypto space.
Since then, Solana has endured outages and even the FTX collapse. But it has persevered, and now:
- Ranks 3rd in TVL
- Has a market cap of $80 billion
- Ranks 2nd in NFT transaction volume
- Has 47 million monthly active wallets
All this can be traced back to Toly’s efforts that night, driven by two cups of coffee and a beer.
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