Solana co-founder Yakovenko wants “consensus at the speed of light” with over 20k validators

Speaking at Solana Breakpoint, Solana Foundation Head of Communications Austin Federa kicked off with a talk about the past and future of the Solana ecosystem and introduced Solana CEO Anatoly Yakovenko. Federa spoke more broadly about the web3 industry, comparing the adoption of the Internet in 1995 with the adoption of cryptocurrencies.

evolution of web3

Federa stressed that about 12% of U.S. citizens will own some form of cryptocurrency in 2022, while a similar percentage had internet access in 1995. Looking at the similarities, it’s clear that we are truly ‘young’ in cryptography.

As Federa said during his talk, new paradigms are being developed, and terms such as NFTs and DAOs are not “sticky” terms that are expected to have long-term sustainability. There is none. The lexicon within web3 is certainly an obstacle to mainstream adoption, and it is very encouraging to hear blockchain communications heads such as Solana acknowledge this.

Removing technical and linguistic gatekeeping within crypto only helps with onboarding new users. We forget that it is essential to its success.

Federa continues its exploration of gaming, DeFi and NFTs on Solana. Federa commented that web3 is now building “actually fun games for games” instead of focusing solely on financial incentives. This evolution is at the core of Polkastarter Gaming’s Gam3 Awards in December with 13 categories across multiple blockchains. Only games that put games first are eligible for awards.

future of web3

Federa then invited Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder and CEO of Solana Foundation Labs, on stage to discuss the future of Solana. Talking about web3 use cases, Yakovenko started talking about the difference between digital ownership between he web2 and he web3.

When you buy movies or other digital assets from Amazon or Apple, “it’s not true digital ownership.” It’s just a “rental”.

Yakovenko described Solana’s mobile payment experience as an “ApplePay-like experience.” “Every mobile phone should act as a hardware wallet,” he continues. However, Yakovenko recommends continuing to have a dedicated hardware wallet for cold storage.

solana breakpoint

We then moved on to talking about the growth of the Solana network and a wrestling match with the “Trilemma Bear.” Yakovenko says that Solana’s growth is completely “cheating-free” and that the Solana Foundation is not asking anyone to turn off validators or shut down the chain.

According to Yakovenko, other blockchains “cannot do more than one thing at a time,” creating competition and simply driving up fees. However, Solana has an advantage over other chains because it can do more than one thing at a time.

Solana’s hard problem

Yakovenko said that in discussing the various programming languages ​​Solana supports, the intention was always that “Solana should be as composable as Linux.” Solving the trilemma “will be a challenge for everyone in crypto, including us”. I mentioned use.

Contains a list of “hard problems currently solved in Solana”.

  • deterministic turbine
  • Zero-copy runtime
  • Replay optimization
  • transmission scheduling
  • seed storage
  • Increased number of validators
  • automatic audit

Additionally, Yakovenko dived into the core advancements of cryptographic technology and showcased his deep technical knowledge, hailing the progress of Linux developers creating new technologies that can improve blockchains.

The ability of artificial intelligence to write “strongly typed machine code” is something Yakovenko is very excited about coming to Solana. Jacobenko called this new technology “basically science fiction when I was studying his computer science.”

The need for more “lightweight clients” was also raised by Yakovenko as “you can’t have a billion users running full nodes”. Solana Labs CEO Wright said his clients can reach the number of validators needed for mass adoption. As for the number of light clients that Solana will need in the future, he commented, “It’s going to have to be 20,000, if not 200,000.”

Conflict with web2

Yakovenko argues that “if you look at web2 traffic, it’s not uniform”, and you’re seeing big spikes in traffic, so you should average your work over a period of time. Using blockchain, specifically the Solana network, he says, “allows the actual program execution to run a full epoch behind the fork selection.”

“Solana’s soul is based on creating world historical records. We want to reduce the latency between users and the network.”

Yakovenko believes that for Solana to compete with web2, user latency must be reduced to about 50 milliseconds. He insisted that “nothing is stopping us” other than a lot of work.

In conclusion, Yakovenko revealed that the goal is to achieve “consensus at the speed of light” by increasing the number of validators participating in the network and around the world.

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