## Solana: How One Person's Idea Became a Billion-Dollar Blockchain

The reason why Anatoly Yakovenko decided to create Solana is quite logical — he saw that Bitcoin and early Ethereum suffer from one problem: they are slow. The former Qualcomm engineer wrote a white paper on Proof of History (PoH) in 2017 — in simple terms, it is a way to "mark time" for each transaction without all the nodes in the network guessing what time they have. Together with Greg Fitzgerald and Stephen Akridge, they launched Solana Labs, and in 2020 the platform itself went live. Since then, SOL has become one of the most popular altcoins.

## Why is Solana so fast? Analyzing the technical details

The egg in this is not just PoH. It is a combo of several technologies that work together:

**Proof of History (PoH)** — the foundation of everything. Instead of nodes arguing about the exact time each transaction occurred, PoH creates an independent sequence of events. It's like if the match referees didn't watch live but then reviewed the recording and already knew who scored when.

**Tower BFT** — an improved consensus algorithm ( Byzantine Fault Tolerance ). It uses these timestamps from PoH to help the network reach consensus faster. This is generally faster than in Bitcoin, where each node must tell all others "yes, I agree."

**Turbine** is a technology for breaking large blocks of data into smaller packets that travel across the network in parallel. Instead of sending one large box, you send 100 small ones at the same time – it gets there faster.

**Gulf Stream** — warns who will be the leader of the next block. This reduces the waiting time for transaction inclusion.

**Cloudbreak + Sealevel** — one handles data, the other executes smart contracts in parallel. Without them, everything would be stalled.

Result: Solana can process thousands of transactions per second, unlike 7 in Bitcoin. But there is a trade-off - the network is more centralized because the technical requirements are higher.