Solana's birthday! If only I had bought the SOL four years ago

Solana turned four years old in March. Now is a good time to reflect on the history of this project. SOL used to cost only a few cents, but now it costs more than $200 to buy a token. That represents a growth of over 19,000% in four years, not bad!

From seaside town to billion dollar business

Solana is a blockchain technology that enables instant transactions. It all started in 2017 on the initiative of Anatoly Yakovenko, a techie with experience at Qualcomm, Mesosphere, and Dropbox.
He developed a new way to synchronize computers. The proof-of-history concept allows transactions to be verified without requiring computers to trust each other.
Yakovenko started programming in C, but switched to the Rust programming language on the advice of his colleague Greg Fitzgerald. Together with Stephen Akridge, another Qualcomm employee, he founded Loom (later renamed Solana Labs).
The name Solana is an homage to the seaside town they lived in while working at Qualcomm.

At Solana, a second is an eternity

In February 2018, the first version of the Solana blockchain, dubbed "Silk," was published on GitHub. The blockchain was already capable of processing 10,000 transactions per second. In June 2018, the technology was adapted to a cloud network, and in July 2018, a test network with 50 nodes was launched. This network could already process 250,000 transactions per second.
In 2018-2019, Solana Labs raised more than 20 million dollars in various investment rounds. In March 2020, the company launched Mainnet Beta, a beta version of the blockchain with support for transactions and smart contracts.
Since then, SOL, the Solana token, has become extremely popular. The high number of transactions per second and low cost have made Solana popular with NFT collectors. SOL's price peaked in November 2021. For a very short time, SOL was worth $259.
Over the past four years, Solana has experienced many ups, but also many downs. For example, Solana has been tied to FTX for a long time, and the blockchain has suffered many setbacks.