Document 01 Research

What Solana was built on

Qualcomm engineers, a clock called Proof of History, and the four words Solana still uses to judge every change.

Updated 2026-10-02 · live figures are in the hub

Solana began as one engineer's answer to an old problem in distributed systems: how computers that do not trust each other can agree on the time. This page follows that idea from the 2017 whitepaper to the 2020 launch, and to the slogan its engineers still use.

Engineers from Qualcomm

Solana Labs' history of its codebase says Anatoly Yakovenko designed distributed systems at Qualcomm, Mesosphere and Dropbox, and learned there that a reliable clock makes network synchronization simple, leaving a network bound only by bandwidth 1. Fortune put his time at Qualcomm at nearly 13 years, ending in 2016 2. Two former Qualcomm colleagues shaped the early code: Greg Fitzgerald, an LLVM compiler engineer, got him to port his C prototype to Rust, and Stephen Akridge moved signature verification onto graphics processors 1.

Cellular networks use Time Division Multiple Access, in which a tower splits each radio channel into time slots and so acts as a clock that every phone follows 3. Yakovenko told Cointelegraph in 2023 that once a public blockchain could keep time in a decentralized way, the optimizations Qualcomm built for cellular networks would apply to it 4. In June 2020 he wrote that anyone working on scaling should treat the Shannon-Hartley theorem, which sets the capacity of a communication channel, as a daily mantra, because proof-of-stake networks are limited by bandwidth 5.

Proof of History

Yakovenko has said the idea came at four in the morning in 2017, after two coffees and a beer 4. In November 2017 he published the whitepaper describing Proof of History 1. His April 2018 explainer opens with the problem: "One of the most difficult problems in distributed systems is agreement on time" 6.

The mechanism is a SHA-256 hash run in a loop, each output fed back in as the next input, with the count recorded along the way. The loop can only run on one thread, so the count between two entries shows that real time passed, and data mixed into the chain changes every hash after it, which fixes its order 7. Because every validator keeps this clock itself, the leader order for a whole epoch can be set in advance, and leaders rotate without validators exchanging messages 3.

The project was first called Loom, the name on an archived February 2018 copy of the paper 18. The current version projects up to 710,000 transactions per second on a 1 gigabit per second network 7.

The company and the name

Fitzgerald began the first open-source implementation, called Silk, on 13 February 2018. His first release, on 28 February, processed 10,000 signed transactions in just over half a second 1. Yakovenko recruited Fitzgerald, Akridge and three others as co-founders of a company, also called Loom 1. Fortune also names Raj Gokal, who came from a healthcare startup, and Eric Williams as co-founders 2.

An unrelated Ethereum project, Loom Network, caused confusion, so the team renamed itself after Solana Beach, the town north of San Diego where Yakovenko, Fitzgerald and Akridge lived and surfed during their Qualcomm years. The Solana GitHub organization was created on 28 March 2018 1.

The 2019 list of innovations

Yakovenko's July 2019 essay on the technologies behind the design first went out as seven innovations, as its web address and an August 2019 copy show 39. That copy has Pipeline VM and Replicators where today's text has Sealevel and Archivers, and no separate entry for pipelining 9. The current version lists eight 3:

  1. Proof of History: a hash chain used as a clock before consensus.
  2. Tower BFT: PBFT-style consensus that uses that clock for its vote timeouts.
  3. Turbine: block propagation in erasure-coded packets fanned out across validators.
  4. Gulf Stream: forwarding transactions straight to upcoming leaders, with no mempool.
  5. Sealevel: parallel execution of transactions that touch different state.
  6. Pipelining: a transaction processing unit with each stage on different hardware.
  7. Cloudbreak: an accounts database spread across SSDs.
  8. Archivers: nodes meant to store and prove pieces of ledger history.

The essay assumed a block roughly every 800 ms 3.

Increase bandwidth, reduce latency

The phrase is most associated with Yakovenko, but the earliest Solana use that X search returns is a 30 December 2023 post by @pokerchessman saying the SOL roadmap needed nothing beyond increasing bandwidth and reducing latency 10. Yakovenko quoted the post on 7 August 2024 (UTC), repeating the phrase, and hours later joked that IBRL was a new Myers-Briggs type 1112.

The thinking is older than the slogan. In October 2023 he posted a Solana alignment chart with one test for any release: whether it reduces latency and increases throughput 13. In August 2026 the Solana Foundation described IBRL as the simple engineering objective its performance roadmap moves around 14. The feature gates that shorten Solana's slot time even have addresses beginning with iBRL 15.

As an engineering goal, bandwidth is how much work the network can accept, execute and propagate per second: compute units per block, bytes per transaction, how fast blocks reach every validator. Latency is the time from signing a transaction to a result that can be relied on: slot length, confirmation, finality. By the 2023 test, a release is aligned when it improves both 13.

Mainnet Beta, March 2020

Mainnet Beta's genesis block is timestamped 16 March 2020 at 14:29 UTC, and Solana's review of 2020 confirms the network was initialized that March 1617. The genesis configuration set 64 ticks of 6.25 ms per slot, a 400 ms slot, at 12,500 hashes per tick, with 500 million SOL in supply. It delegated stake to four validators, 500,000 SOL each, and left every other stake account undelegated 16. By the end of 2020 the network had more than 300 active validators 17.

Sources

  1. Solana Labs, "History" (codebase docs): whitepaper date, founders, Silk, Loom, the name
  2. Fortune profile, April 2022: 13 years at Qualcomm, Gokal and Williams
  3. Yakovenko, "8 Innovations that Make Solana the First Web-Scale Blockchain", July 2019: TDMA, leader schedule, the list, 800 ms
  4. Cointelegraph interview, November 2023: the Qualcomm intuition, coffees and a beer
  5. Yakovenko on X, 12 June 2020: Shannon-Hartley as a daily mantra
  6. Yakovenko on Medium, 19 April 2018: the quoted line
  7. Solana whitepaper v0.8.13: the hash loop, 710,000 transactions per second
  8. Loom whitepaper v0.8.5, archived February 2018: the Loom name
  9. August 2019 copy of the "7 Innovations" post: the original seven
  10. @pokerchessman on X, 30 December 2023: earliest use found
  11. Yakovenko on X, 7 August 2024: quotes that post
  12. Yakovenko on X, 8 August 2024: IBRL as a Myers-Briggs type
  13. Yakovenko on X, 16 October 2023: the alignment chart
  14. Solana Foundation, August 2026: IBRL as the engineering objective
  15. SIMD-0525: feature gate addresses beginning with iBRL
  16. Mainnet Beta genesis file: launch time, slot settings, supply, validators
  17. Solana, "Year In Review 2020": March 2020 start, validators by year end