Can Peace Last Between Crypto’s Visionary Rivals?

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

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.”

“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.

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.

The coding marathon resulted in proof of history, which Yakovenko has described as a clock for the blockchain. It allowed Solana to be superfast, time-stamping transactions as they happen. Coupled with proof of stake, it creates a faster, more efficient network than Etherum’s energy-intensive proof of work.

Enter Yakovenko. Unlike Buterin, who is more a theorist and researcher than a coder, Yakovenko wants to do whatever it takes to onboard billions to crypto with a blockchain so fast it could rival traditional finance. “He doesn’t care about white papers. He doesn’t care about academia,” said Solana investor Kyle Samani, a managing partner at Multico... 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.”

Secondly, they’re connected by crypto’s transparent nature—trade secrets are scarce when founders can follow each other’s work “on chain,” watching how many transactions are occurring and which blockchains are stumbling. “These are both open-source ecosystems,” said Yakovenko of his and Buterin’s blockchains. “Because of that, there’s a lot of actu... See more