I spent 13 years at Qualcomm working on systems that process millions of operations per second. Then I looked at blockchain doing 15 transactions per second and thought — this is embarrassingly slow. I knew how to fix it.
Proof of History was my "shower thought" moment. If you give validators a cryptographic clock, they don't have to wait for each other. They can process transactions in parallel. Simple idea, brutal to implement.
Solana went down seven times in 2022. Each outage was painful and embarrassing. But we fixed the problems, improved the network, and came back stronger. The people who declared Solana dead were wrong — they confused growing pains for a death rattle.
When FTX collapsed and SOL went from $260 to $8, I thought — either we're dead or this is the greatest buying opportunity ever. The technology hadn't changed. Only the price had.
We named it after Solana Beach because that's where we surfed. Naming your blockchain after a surf spot is either charming or ridiculous. I'll let the market cap decide.