Anatoly Yakovenko: Solana – Reaching for the Limits of Blockchain Performance (#312)

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 discussed 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

Links mentioned in this episode:
- Solana Website: https://bit.ly/2ChWD0T
- Proof of History: A Clock for Blockchain: https://bit.ly/32lQU4M
- The World Computer Should Be Logically Centralized - Multicoin Capital: https://bit.ly/34Aw17t
- Multicoin Capital: The Separation of Time and State - Multicoin Capital: https://bit.ly/34yY8ny
- How Solana's Proof of History is a Huge Advancement for Block Time: https://bit.ly/2oSoba5
- Tower BFT: Solana’s High Performance Implementation of PBFT: https://bit.ly/2NmpiIq

Sponsors:
- Trail of Bits: Trust the team at the forefront of blockchain security research - https://trailofbits.com
- Vaultoro: Trade gold to Bitcoin instantly and securely starting at just 1mg - http://vaultoro.com

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