In a recent interview, Solana Labs Co-Founder Anatoly Yakovenko talked about how Solana managed \u2014 over the past 18 months \u2014 to \u201ccatapult\u201d itself to the position of one of Ethereum\u2019s major L1 blockchain rivals.<\/p>\n
His comments were made during a conversation on September 21 with\u00a0Ryan Selkis, Co-Founder and CEO at\u00a0Messari, at Messari\u2019s annual conference\u00a0Mainnet\u00a0(September 21-23, 2022) in New York City.<\/p>\n
Yakovenko told Selkis:<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d love to say that it was like brilliant strategy, but it was really I think a function of necessity. We never had a ton of runway. There are always like 20 months or lower. So 12 engineers, a very scrapy team, over two years, we built the bare minimum to prove that a fast blockchain that has parallel execution is possible. That meant no EVM support, no Ethereum-like features.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cWe literally just could demo, look, this thing could run something like zero. And that was it. And that was the right thing to do because devs saw a new technology that gave them new capabilities and they were curious and engineers are naturally curious. And that allowed us to build a small ecosystem of folks\u2026 eating glass was like our mantra at the time. <\/em><\/p>\n \u201cNow, it\u2019s more like surfing glass, but at that time I was really really rough. The only developer tool we got that we gave people was basically equivalent to a Linux system call. So it was very very low level programming, but it was cheap and fast and a new primitive for parallel execution and that that was really what allowed us to differentiate and build our own community.<\/em>\u201c<\/p>\n https:\/\/youtube.com\/watch?v=WuWI-vtzi4c%3Fstart%3D703%26feature%3Doembed<\/p>\n Yakovenko also talked about Saga, which is\u00a0a new mobile phone introduced on 23 June 2022 that is being developed as the result of a collaboration between Solana Mobile, a subsidiary of Solana Labs, and OSOM.<\/p>\n As he was showing a Sega phone prototype to Selkis, Yakovenko said:<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s awesome\u2026.This is built by an amazing OEM: OSOM. Jason Keats is the founder. He was the architect of iPad Pro. He\u2019s like an amazing hardware engineer\u2026 He loves materials and hardware and making a beautiful device and we\u2019re working on the crypto software part of it, the Solana Mobile Stack. <\/em><\/p>\n \u201cAnd this all came about because there are two things happening in crypto. Applications are getting more sophisticated and they\u2019re dealing with much more complex media and interactions, and self-custody is still dangerous and sucks.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cAnd when you look at your phone, you kind of feel like, \u2018why isn\u2019t this my hardware wallet?\u2019 Why are we storing seed phrases inside the application that\u2019s doing all these very complicated things? So that was part one, and part two is [that] decentralisation is enabling true real-world digital assets. That\u2019s just never been done before. When you buy a movie from Amazon \u2014 buy to own \u2014 actually all that content you\u2019re renting it from Amazon for that 20 bucks forever and it may disappears sometime in the future\u2026 So they own the content at the end of the day. <\/em><\/p>\n