# Solana: How One Person's Idea Became a Billion-Dollar Blockchain
The reason why Anatoly Yakovenko decided to create Solana is quite logical — he saw that Bitcoin and early Ethereum suffer from one problem: they are slow. The former Qualcomm engineer wrote a white paper on Proof of History (PoH) in 2017 — in simple terms, it is a way to "mark time" for each transaction without all the nodes in the network guessing what time they have. Together with Greg Fitzgerald and Stephen Akridge, they launched Solana Labs, and in 2020 the platform itself went live. Since then, SOL has become one of
The reason why Anatoly Yakovenko decided to create Solana is quite logical — he saw that Bitcoin and early Ethereum suffer from one problem: they are slow. The former Qualcomm engineer wrote a white paper on Proof of History (PoH) in 2017 — in simple terms, it is a way to "mark time" for each transaction without all the nodes in the network guessing what time they have. Together with Greg Fitzgerald and Stephen Akridge, they launched Solana Labs, and in 2020 the platform itself went live. Since then, SOL has become one of
SOL-1.36%

