Solana Shoots for Speed of Light

Do things move at the speed of light on Solana? Despite a reputation for stalls and outages, that’s what Solana Labs CEO, Anatoly Yakovenko, is hoping for.

Speaking in a back and forth with Austin Federa, Head of Communications at Solana Foundation at the Solana Breakpoint event in Lisbon on Saturday, November 5, Yakovenko explained how Solana is working towards a lightening fast, secure, and scalable blockchain system.

"We’re really building something that is trying to get to consensus at the speed of light.” Yakovenko told Fedora in front of a packed crowd. “We want to synchronize the world at the speed of light, as close as physics allows.”

Yakovenko acknowledged past travails of Solana, but the emphasis of his talk with Fedora outlined the next steps Solana will take to tackle this difficult engineering quest.

Yakovenko’s highlighted several major challenges for Solana going forward during the discussion. The role of validators and the network state is at the center of these challenges, which include formal verification and dynamic pricing for storage. The validator count has doubled in the last year, and with the aim of over 20,000 validators, Solana is on a slow path to solving these challenges.

Solana Merges with Google’s Web2 World

Speed and transparency have been key talking points across the Breakpoint conference in Portugal. Another highlight during the first day of the event was the announcement that Google Cloud will become a validator to support the Solana Network.

The building of the Solana phone will also be fully integrated with Google’s open-source Android platform. The pre-orders for the Solana phone are expected in 2023.

The coalescence of Solana and big Web2 platforms does stop at Google. The network has been on a tear with major Web2 integrations lately. Other notable connections include Solana NFTs coming to Facebook and Instagram through the parent company Meta.

Solana has a long way to go to fully compete with major Web2 companies. Yakovenko believes that bringing down network latency is vital to scalability, and he acknowledged that the current state of Solana is not where the team would like to be. The tools are there, he says to Fedora, so solving the problems over the next year is doable in his mind.

“There’s nothing stopping us,” Yakovenko says in his conclusion. “It’s just a bunch of work.”

Follow the Solana social media for more updates about the weekend from Lisbon. The Solana YouTube is posting the talks soon after they happen. The Solana Conference Twitter account is also posting real-time event updates.