BlockchainOpinionSolana
|16 min ReadSolana's Eight Year Journey From Side Project To FTX Comeback
Lucca Menezes
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
Alpha Briefing: Solana cofounder Anatoly Yakovenko tells the story of how a side project in 2017 became a high speed L1 that confirms thousands of transactions in about 400 milliseconds, survived a 97 percent crash after FTX, and is now aiming to host trillions of dollars in stablecoin and capital markets activity. Over eight volatile years, 85 percent of Solana ecosystem projects made it through the FTX shock, while Yakovenko doubled down on low latency execution, regulatory clarity and a vision of one chain swallowing traditional finance.
In a long interview with NEW ECONOMIES, Solana cofounder Anatoly Yakovenko walked through eight wild years: the late night idea that became Solana, the brutal fundraising grind, the scramble to ship a chain that actually works, the FTX collapse that many thought would kill SOL, and the new push to turn Solana into a chain that eats global finance. Chinese compiler CryptoLeo, @LeoAndCrypto, turned that conversation into a first person narrative. What emerges is a very simple story. A former Qualcomm engineer saw a timing trick, built a chain around it, almost got wrecked in the bear, but refused to quit.
Yakovenko has the energy of a founder who loves pain. He talks about eight simultaneous technical bets, chains that crashed every hour, investors pulling term sheets as ETH dropped, and an ecosystem hit directly by FTX. Yet his focus is still the same. Fast execution, real users, and a chain that can handle everything from payments to IPOs.
From Side Hustle To Solana's Core Design
Solana began as a side gig. Yakovenko and a friend were building AI related products, selling deep learning servers and using GPUs to mine crypto to pay for the hardware. One night, after coffee and beer, he asked a simple question. Why should people pay them for AI services at all. That led them into a long conversation about mining, proof of work, Satoshi consensus and why electricity matters.
Most of his career had been at Qualcomm, deep in wireless protocols, radios and phones. Your phone probably has Qualcomm chips, maybe even something he touched. That background mattered. Around four in the morning he had the key idea. Could you encode the passage of time into a data structure and use it like a protocol.
He remembered TDMA, time division multiple access, an old cellular protocol from the 1960s and 1970s. It slices time into slots and sends different data in different slots, so signals do not interfere and more information flows. To him, proof of work chains had a similar problem. Two miners producing blocks at the same time cause a fork. One block must be discarded, the network wastes work, and bandwidth is limited.
If you can force block producers to take turns, you avoid conflicts and get more out of the protocol. He did a rough calculation and concluded that throughput could be 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than Bitcoin or Ethereum at the time. That is the seed of Solana.
At the same time, smart contracts were pulling him in. Traditional systems keep money in databases watched by humans. Smart contracts flip it. The software itself holds the funds, and the code is the only authority over where they go. You cannot just run that on AWS. You need verifiability and cryptographic guarantees. In his view this was not just a new tech stack. It was a new data model for money.
Selling The Vision And Bringing The Team Together
Turning that spark into a company took more than code. The first person he had to convince was his wife, an engineer who knew he always had side projects. They already had a child. She drew a hard line. You cannot be a full time employee, a father and a part time founder. You pick one. That push turned the side hustle into a full time Solana bet.
She also brought her own lesson from early Facebook days in Colombia. In a hot market you get maybe six months when everyone knows a new product with special properties will capture 80 percent of the market. If you miss that window, you may never catch up. For Yakovenko, late 2017 felt like that window for L1 chains that could truly scale to global finance.
So he went into classic Silicon Valley grind mode. He listed every VC that might touch crypto and started booking meetings. Living in the Valley meant he could see a thousand people in a short time and repeat the pitch again and again. For any founder, he says, the job is to sell the product vision clearly. If you cannot sell, you cannot hire, you cannot raise, you cannot get users.
He also learned to treat the fund and the individual partner separately. His tactic was to sell the firm, then sell the partner personally. Even if the firm passed, a partner who believed might introduce him to other crypto-focused funds or even invest individually. That is how he ended up in hundreds of rooms with people willing to take early crypto risk.
The first big financing almost died in 2018. They had term sheets and brought in lawyers to draft documents over six weeks. Then Ethereum started sliding 10 percent a week. Some funds blew up. Early crypto investment templates were messy and fragile. Even so, some investors with more dollars on their balance sheets treated Solana as an opportunity rather than a pure crypto bet, and the round eventually closed.
Hiring was the next battle. Here his Qualcomm years paid off. Many former colleagues wanted something new. These were people with ten plus years of operating system and protocol experience. One engineer on the Solana protocol had helped define LTE specs. They understood networks, kernels, GPUs, CPUs and chips. To them he pitched Solana almost as a working vacation: you are going to leave anyway, come help build this network first.
He hired domain experts he trusted. They moved fast. In his words, on launch Solana was several blocks ahead of every competitor.
Shipping A High Speed Chain And Finding PMF
Cofounder Raj came through a mutual friend. The match, in Yakovenko’s words, looked like a work marriage. Raj had founded and run companies but had no deep engineering background. Yakovenko could build but had no business track record. Their dynamic was intense. Under pressure, they argued hard, stripped out bad ideas and tried to get to what he calls a Pareto efficient set of options, where A, B and C all look similarly trade off optimal and only luck decides which one wins.
That culture required trust. A CEO’s personality always leaks into company culture. At an early stage every decision can trigger arguments. He admits he likes to argue and does not mind being wrong, as long as the team keeps respect intact.
They also had to decide how much to build before launch. Do you assume success and invest in secondary features that lock in adoption. Or do you spend all resources just to get a minimum viable product out the door and prove anything works. Startup books like Peter Thiel’s “Zero to One” preach the MVP, but defining the smallest product that truly validates your idea is hard in real life.
By year two of development they were almost forced to decide. They had built runway for 24 months. Now only 12 months of cash were left and the chain still was not stable. So they cut everything non essential. Features like EVM support, special languages, advanced browsers, even their own wallet stack were stripped away. The goal became simple. Ship the smallest version of a chain with ultra high throughput and low latency. Nothing else.
Technically they had taken huge risk. In year one they tried around eight different deep technical bets. If a single bet has a 50 percent chance of success, eight independent bets all working have a one in 256 chance. Problems did show up everywhere. They had to fix and refactor constantly just to get to mainnet.
But the upside was real differentiation. Ethereum then was proof of work, 12 second blocks and practical finality only after two blocks. Users waited about 30 seconds for confirmation and the chain processed 7 to 11 transactions per second. That might work for settlement but not for any serious consumer scale use case.
Solana’s early builds could confirm thousands of transactions in roughly 400 milliseconds. With network round trips, users saw one to two seconds to finality. Developers who tried it were shocked. The chain was buggy, sure. It would crash after about an hour. Yet when it ran, it felt completely different from anything else.
Getting from “it runs for an hour” to “it runs reliably” was one of the most stressful phases. They had to define the minimal product that still hit product market fit: extreme capacity, low latency and just enough tooling for developers. How much do you strip away. What do builders really care about. Their past experience with operating systems and dev platforms helped them guess right more often than not.
The next step was proving PMF in the wild. Token prices can explode without users. That is a classic crypto trap. Early Solana had little user base even as the SOL token climbed. Yakovenko’s view was simple. If the token pumps, you use that window to attract as many real users and builders as possible. If you miss it, you may never get that chance again.
Hackathons became the testing ground. The first Solana hackathon produced a lot of chaotic projects. Fun, but not yet clear hits. By the second, something changed. Teams from the first round had spent three months polishing their apps. Products started to look complete, with real business models, especially around trading and DeFi. When those teams raised capital during or after the hackathons, Yakovenko felt the shift. Now the chain had PMF in its core use cases.
From launch to that point was about a year. He calls that incredibly lucky. Most companies need many years to find PMF. Building a lasting company, he says, still takes about a decade.
FTX Shock, Builders' Grit And Solana's Survival
Then came FTX. For Solana, this was not just a market event. It was a direct hit. FTX was one of the biggest investors and partners. During the third Breakpoint conference, with about 1,600 developers and sold out tickets, everything looked fantastic. On the flight home, FTX blew up and the market crashed.
Solana itself had been born in the 2018 bear, when Ethereum was dropping 10 percent a week, so the core team had always been conservative. They did not over hire and they kept a strong treasury. The real fear was for the ecosystem.
Many Solana projects had raised from FTX and kept funds on the exchange. If that money vanished, there would be no easy way to plug the hole. Teams could simply die. A survey showed that about 85 percent of companies were okay. Around 15 percent were effectively wiped out.
One of the hardest hit was Armani’s Backpack, a wallet project. They had just raised roughly 10 million dollars and left all of it on FTX. Suddenly they were down to a few million, while planning to double their team and ship a major product. Many teams in that position would have closed shop. They did not.
Instead, Backpack doubled down. They launched the Mad Labs NFT collection and then built an exchange. Armani’s anger at FTX and desire to build something better became fuel. Mad Labs lit up the NFT market and pulled attention back to Solana for weeks. It felt like a turning point. Other teams also chose to push harder instead of quitting.
For Yakovenko, the main lesson is that building in a bull market is extremely hard in crypto. The signals are noisy. You have no idea who your true core users are or which features actually drive sustainable growth. In a bear, if you have 10 to 20 committed users and deeply understand the value you bring them, you can improve every week. Then, when the next bull comes, growth looks explosive. Those early users become your biggest evangelists and your product is tuned for a precise job.
After FTX, he spent most of his time talking with founders who were still building. The message was always the same. Keep refining the product. Check your runway. See what next year brings. Many of those teams later did very well.
The price, though, was brutal. SOL dropped about 97 percent from its peak. The market consensus was that Solana was dead. That is when having a cofounder who thrives in crisis matters. Under tight constraints you must act fast, and clear decisions are easier. Solana Labs could not throw money at problems. They focused on unblocking builders, helping them get to PMF and removing friction, even when they could not fund them.
Yakovenko says he was shocked by Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. On the surface Sam looked like a classic MIT quant nerd. The idea that they ended in total collapse still feels unbelievable to him.
Regulation, Stablecoins And The Next Wave Of Growth
On the security side, he thinks engineering driven hacks are down sharply. There is less raw experimentation with smart contracts. Many patterns, such as constant product AMMs, bonding curves and lending protocols, are now understood and commoditized. You do not need to take huge engineering risk to deploy yet another version.
Tooling is better too. Formal verification, stronger testing and deeper knowledge of attack vectors all help. Anytime you see a surge of smart contract innovation you will see more risk. Today, as new financial systems go live on chain, their risk is lower largely because they reuse proven components.
He sees most of the real blowups in the last cycle as regulatory arbitrage problems. When rules are too strict in a major market, licenses take years, and costs are high, projects migrate to looser jurisdictions and fragile banking rails. That combination creates beautiful but dangerous structures that can fail in ugly ways.
Now the landscape is shifting. In his view, the United States is still behind. Japan, France and the United Kingdom already have clear crypto laws that make it easier to build. Japan might be the best example. Many smart people in a developed economy are building crypto there, which is why FTX Japan could be so strong even as the parent failed. The market is smaller than America, but the rules are cleaner.
In the US, a new stablecoin bill, the Genius Act, and a calmer SEC make starting in crypto easier than before. Stablecoins are the wedge. Congress has given issuers a framework to reach PMF. For many financial services, a well regulated dollar stablecoin is already a better funding interface than traditional banks. Even if you built every fintech product on top of banks, he argues, it still would not beat what stablecoins can offer.
People expect 10 trillion dollars of stablecoins to be issued in the next 5 to 10 years. Current issuance is around 250 billion dollars, and the translator notes it has actually already passed 300 billion. That is tens of times of growth ahead. All that liquidity will flood into every corner of finance.
If you are a founder who cares about fintech, his advice is simple. Build around stablecoins. Either integrate and manage the existing ones, or launch specialized stablecoins for particular uses.
Anatoly's Endgame: One Chain Eating Global Finance
Yakovenko’s long term vision for Solana is aggressive. There is no technical reason, he says, that Solana cannot process payments, trades, contracts, IPOs and almost every other financial operation on a single execution engine and single chain. The job now is pure engineering. Optimize, polish and harden the system so it can move dollars faster, support IPOs and settle transactions all over the world.
If that system exists and truly has PMF, the cost of finance falls toward the physical cost of running the hardware. It becomes the endgame of “software eats the world” applied to finance.
Solana’s ecosystem has advantages. The network is older than many rivals, has grown rapidly and is still expanding. Competition will be fierce. He is not sure the world will converge on a Google scale chain that handles 99 percent of important transactions. Some countries with strict firewalls and unique regulatory structures may insist on their own chains. Many players will also try to take a slice of the market.
Even Google is launching its own chain. Fintech firms that sit between retail users and platforms will play a huge role, steering flows and integrating services. The exact shape of that consolidation is not clear yet. Yakovenko’s conviction is simple though. Solana can be the platform at the center of it.
His favorite future scenario is what he calls a “from zero Linux IPO.” A founder in the US or Silicon Valley should be able to list a company faster, at lower cost and with minimal legal overhead. They would use on chain, immutable smart contracts as the core of the offering. Those contracts would be referenced directly in the S1 filing with the SEC and would govern a direct listing on a commercial, public blockchain.
In that model a founder can list equity directly on chain. The cap table lives on the ledger as the single source of truth. The public can access the stock at any stage of the company’s life without paying investment banks. Fees and incentives that usually go to banks could instead reward AMMs for providing liquidity.
He believes this would transform how companies access capital and how the public accesses early stage growth. He ties it back to his own story. He left the Soviet Union for the United States in 1982, just as the internet and companies like Microsoft and Amazon were emerging. Those firms built the future and today are trillion dollar giants. In the 1990s ordinary people could buy Amazon stock. That, to him, is a key part of the American value proposition.
Now, he notes, the number of US public companies and IPOs is at or near lows not seen since the 1970s. If we give founders tools to go public cheaply, quickly and with minimal legal friction, the entire landscape changes.
In his words, this is a kind of sci fi future where everyone on earth can access financial services at near light speed and at the lowest possible cost. For him, building Solana toward that outcome is one of the coolest projects he could ever work on.
CryptoLeo, who compiled and translated the interview, ends on a simple note. In eight years Solana has gone from concept to action, through peaks, crashes and a rebirth. To him, Yakovenko and his cofounders look like real crypto builders. They have advanced tech, understand operations and risk, survived crisis and still have huge conviction. For a self declared SOL “bodyguard,” the story only makes the fire burn hotter.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.