SBF

Chapter 26Solana

Race Capital's Chris McCann tells a fun story about how the FTX team got sold on the Solana blockchain. It was an experiment that one of the FTX developers did with an app on the Solana testnet.

Solana is a superfast blockchain created by Anatoly Yakovenko, an alum of the mobile computing teams at QUALCOMM, and others. McCann invested in it in 2018, which was very early. His fund, Race Capital, also got in ahead of almost everyone else.

McCann would find FTX later and connect it to Solana. The team building this new blockchain was working out of the 500 Startups offices in San Francisco, and they had spun up an app for people to play with. It was very simple.

Testnets are versions of blockchain running without real value at stake. Usually new blockchains run a testnet for a while and invite others to try it out and look for bugs before they fire up the real one.

As McCann told it, Yakovenko had built a testing app called Break in 2020 as FTX was looking into either starting its own blockchain or building on someone else's. Break was simple. It just let a user type on a keyboard, and they could see their keystrokes get logged on the blockchain as fast as they typed.

It was a way to see that the blockchain really did run at the speed of thought.

According to a test by some fairly unbiased investors and researchers in March 2022, Solana could do 273 trades per second. Meanwhile, Ethereum, the dominant blockchain that Solana was challenging, could do maybe 18, ...