Solana’s SOL token has risen in value this year, attracting global attention as it outperforms several other digital currencies.
Anatoly Yakovenko, Co-Founder of Solana Labs and President of the Solana Foundation, says Sam Bankman Fried establishing Project Serum on Solana was a turning point in an exclusive interview with cryptopotato.
Sam Bankman Fried (SBF), the CEO of FTX and Alameda, unveiled Project Serum in a Twitter thread in July 2020. He claimed that they chose Solana out of all the blockchains available.
In retrospect, it appears that this was a spark for Solana’s hypergrowth. Yakovenko acknowledges that it was a defining moment for his blockchain.
“For sure it was a turning point, but also for Serum. I think what it demonstrated was that you could take something very complicated, like a central limit order book that has never been done before, and ship it on this blockchain that no one ever heard of, at the time.”
The fact that people were able to do that right in a very short amount of time, about for four weeks, and actually go live and have meaningful liquidity and start like running full-style DEX.
I think that the real catalyst is that proof point. We haven’t really seen folks outside of the Solana ship, like complex projects that quickly and I don’t know if it’s just culture, or that Rust provides a better system tooling.”
When asked about future goals and advancements arising from the Serum-FTX-Solana partnership, the co-Founder responded:
“I guess how we work with FTX or how anybody I think works with FTX, is that if you have a really good idea and you just want to get it done if you talk to them and everybody’s aligned, it just happens. That’s like the magic of working with them.”
Solana uses a combination of proof-of-stake (PoS) and proof-of-history (PoH) consensus techniques to improve performance and scalability. As a result, the network claims to be able to process 50,000 transactions per second (TPS), making it the fastest blockchain in the world.
There are approximately 350 initiatives in Solana’s ecosystem including decentralized finance (DeFi) apps that provide free financial services without the need for an intermediary, non-fungible token (NFT) activities, gaming apps, and more.