Can Peace Last Between Crypto’s Visionary Rivals?

They are Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, who were catapulted to crypto fame last year when their blockchain, Solana, became a stunning success, reaching a market cap of $33 billion and winning over investors like Andresseen Horowitz and Polychain Capital.

Remember when Steve Jobs said Bill Gates “shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas?” Then came Web 2.0 and a new clash of titans who lorded over companies of unprecedented size and power. This was when Mark Zuckerberg went to war against Tim Cook, with Facebook at one point funding a false Cook presidential campaign to undermine Apple’s supposed... See more

“Let’s actually get fully objective on, what does it mean to be decentralized?” he said. “Like I don’t really care about the philosophy part of it.…I do actually—I do care about it.” But for him, decentralization shouldn’t be an end in itself—it should be quantifiable and realistic.

They did for Ukraine, at least. When Margarita Simonyan, a Russian journalist and Putin loyalist, tweeted that Russians should be proud, Buterin had a curt response: “Go fuck yourself.” Yakovenko was quick to chime in: “Solana is gonna be an eth l2 if Vitalik keeps this up.”

Translation: The founder of Solana was telling the founder of Ethereum that he had his back. For now at least, the forefathers remained united.

Last October, an image appeared on Twitter of a crypto Mount Rushmore: a drawing of four men etched in stone, looking out onto a valley of trees. There was Dorian Nakamoto, rumored to be the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. There was the distinct, angular jawline of Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, the world’s second most ... See more

“People in tech would often go escape to Burning Man to feel the sense of what a non-zero-sum world looks and feels like,” said Solana co-founder Gokal. But in crypto, “everyone feels like there’s plenty of opportunity and plenty of value to be captured.”

A government or hacker that wanted to censor transactions on Solana, would need to control 33% of the network, which could be done by taking control of the top 21 validating nodes—a theoretically easier feat than thwarting the hundreds of thousands of computers it would take to halt Ethereum transactions. The catch is that making it so anyone can r... See more

As its profile rose, so did the voices of critics, who argued that Solana wasn’t decentralized enough. Part of the problem was that to act as a “node” on the Solana blockchain—a computer that validates transactions—you need additional hardware, costing around $3500.