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Anatoly Yakovenko: Solana - Reaching for the Limits of Blockchain Performance

Nov 6, 2019

Solana, a web-scale blockchain project, aims to achieve high throughput and scalability by targeting performance bottlenecks. Topics discussed include Solana's innovative proof-of-history, parallelized smart contract execution, and its upcoming testnets. The chapter descriptions cover Solana's unique approach, concerns about the blockchain space, Anatoly Yakovenko's journey, the design mismatch between Bitcoin and hardware, and optimizations in Solana's blockchain system.

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Introduction

00:00 • 3min

Approaches to High Performance Blockchain

02:32 • 7min

Highlights from a Conference and Concerns About Blockchain Enthusiasm

09:39 • 7min

Anatoly Yakovenko's Journey into Blockchain and Solana

16:21 • 3min

The Evolution of Technology at Qualcomm and Mobile Phones

19:31 • 3min

Design Mismatch: Bitcoin vs. Hardware

22:01 • 19min

Optimizations and Interoperability in Solana

40:46 • 31min

Optimizing Shout to 56 Hash Function

01:11:22 • 26min

The vision of a world computer on which anyone can deploy smart contracts has captured our imagination since the publication of the Ethereum whitepaper. But while Ethereum demonstrated the viability of the concept, its shortcomings in terms of capacity and throughput prevent it from realizing the vision. Today, throughput has become a major bottleneck for widescale adoption of decentralized technologies.

Many projects have set out to deliver where Ethereum 1.0 falls short. Most projects, including Ethereum 2.0, aim to create some kind of sharded network with many interoperable chains. Solana may be the only project that went the other way. Through identifying every performance bottleneck for a single blockchain and developing novel ways of removing them, they target to achieve throughput of 50,000 tps.

We were joined by Solana creator and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko to discuss Solana's approach to building a web-scale blockchain. We covered some of their novel ideas including proof-of-history and parallelizing smart contract execution.

Topics covered in this episode:

The performance-obssessed engineering background of the Solana team
The arguments against sharding for scalability
The value of a shared sense of time in a distributed system
How Solana's Proof-of-History creates a global clock for the network
How Solana uses GPUs to parallelize smart contract execution
How value could be accrued for the native token if transaction throughput is abundant
Solana's upcoming Tour de Sol testnets and launch timeline

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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/312