Is Solana Having Its 'iPhone Moment'? The Cofounders Believe So

Solana Labs cofounders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal discussed the recent success of the blockchain they created, Solana, on my podcast, Unchained. They were almost giddy with excitement over how SOL has gone from over $1.60 at the start of the year to over $200 at the time of recording.

But beyond price, they're seeing the traction Solana has gotten. Gokal said it's "like the iPhone moment, that moment where you see the transaction propagate, you see an account balance change from one browser window to another, from your browser to your phone -- and it's just instant and there were effectively no fees. I think we're going to have more and more of those experiences that just feel really magical."

Since crypto now has so many applications that are taking off, I asked them if they saw Solana specializing in any particular areas, such as DeFi or DAOs or NFTs, and Yakovenko said, "I always have this dream of a billion people with self-custody, signing stuff. Doesn't matter what it is, doesn't matter what they're doing. I just want them to have possession of those keys, and kind of have that mental model: 'These are my magic words. I'm signing with them.' It's doing stuff in this one, shared global experience that's cryptographically controlled. That's the overall vision."

I was surprised, since it seemed like their original pitch was more about high-frequency trading. Yakovenko said, "The high-frequency finance -- this idea of a price-discovery-engine blockchain and NASDAQ speed -- that was always the obvious. That's gotta work. If that, doesn't work, then we're totally wrong."

Gokal added that "everything is finance and everything is a marketplace," and that blockchains make marketplaces more efficient, faster and cheaper. "It's still DeFi," he said, "it's just, we're learning that everything is DeFi."

One instance in which Solana was nowhere near Nasdaq speed was during the 18-hour outage that Solana experienced in September. When asked about that, Yakovenko talked about how they have been regularly stress testing the validators, but they'd never been tested live. As he watched them try to revive it on their own, his takeaway was, "We can walk away and it'll keep running forever as long as people want it to want to keep running."

Despite the bad optics of an 18-hour outage for a blockchain whose block times are supposed to be 400-milliseconds (a block time is the interval between blocks), his other takeaway was that they should be moving even faster: "The opportunity to onboard the next billion users is just so huge that this stuff might happen." He said the most important target was to "get people to use blockchains."

At the time, critics felt that the way the validators organized to revive the chain meant Solana was centralized. Neha Narula of the Digital Currency Initiative tweeted,

Yakovenko's response, "Feels like people are saying that disorganization is a requirement for decentralization."

Listen to the whole show to find out:

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(Cover photos credit: NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty Images)