Benzinga - by Shanthi Rexaline, Benzinga Editor.
SOL (CRYPTO: SOL), the native coin of decentralized blockchain platform Solana, has taken part in the recent crypto rally, and the token currently trades at its highest level since late-December 2021. The crypto is celebrating its fourth year anniversary on Saturday, and to commemorate the special occasion, here’s a primer on the platform.
The Origin: In November 2017, Solana’s co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko published a white paper describing the proof-of-history, a technique for keeping time between computers that do not trust one another. Armed with the experience in distributed systems he acquired during his tenure at Qualcomm, Mesosphere and Dropbox, he worked toward simplifying synchronization that could make the network “blazing fast” bound only by network bandwidth.
He managed to synchronize computers that didn’t trust each other, resulting in a significantly faster cluster.
Yakovenko began to code for the application in C programming language, and his colleague at Qualcomm Greg Fitzgerald advised him to implement the project in the Rust programming language. On Feb. 13, 2018, Fitzgerald began prototyping the first open-source implementation of his friend’s white paper, and the project was published on GitHub under the name “Silk.” The first release rolled out on Feb. 28, 2018 and demonstrated that 10,000 signed transactions could be verified and processed in just over half a second. Another Qualccomm cohort, Stephen Akridge, demonstrated that the throughput could be massively improved by offloading signature verification to graphics processors.
The trio joined hands to co-found a company, which was then called Loom. Later, they renamed the company as Solana Labs in order to avoid confusion with the Ethereum-based project “Loom Network.” The name “Solana” was chosen to give credit to Solana Beach, a small beach town, north of San Diego, where Yakovenko, Fitzgerald and Akridge lived for three years while working for Qualcomm. On March 28, 2018, the trio created the Solana GitHub organization and renamed “Silk” to “Solana.”
In June 2018, the team scaled up the technology to run on cloud-based networks, and on July 19, published a 50-node, permissioned, public testnet consistently supporting bursts of 250,000 transactions per second.
The company raised over $20 million in multiple token sale between mid-2018 and July 2019. After raising $1.76 million in a public token auction on CoinList, Solana launched the Mainnet Beta in March 2020. The beta version featured transaction capabilities and smart contract support but did not include staking reward at that time.
The Launch: Solana was launched in March 2020 — a trying time when the world was grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic. The first block was created on March 16.
Reminiscing on the event, Raj Gokal, a co-founder who joined Solana Labs at the end of 2017, said in a post on X, “On March 16, 2020, lockdowns were spreading financial panic globally. that day the Dow dropped 12.9%, bigger than any day in the great depression. every founder we talked to, across all of tech, not just crypto, cancelled their launch.”
“There were only a few dozen people who thought solana's design could work at scale, and they had the courage to push past the fear. they had one overriding motivation,” he said.