$SOL: Anatoly Yakovenko on How Solana Became a Leading Blockchain Over Past 18 Months

In a recent interview, Solana Labs Co-Founder Anatoly Yakovenko talked about how Solana managed — over the past 18 months — to “catapult” itself to the position of one of Ethereum’s major L1 blockchain rivals.

His comments were made during a conversation on September 21 with Ryan Selkis, Co-Founder and CEO at Messari, at Messari’s annual conference Mainnet (September 21-23, 2022) in New York City.

Yakovenko told Selkis:

“I’d 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