Anatoly Yakovenko
Anatoly Yakovenko, also known as Toly Yakovenko, is a Ukrainian-born software engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded the Solana blockchain. Born in 1979 or 1980, he moved to the United States as a child in the early 1990s and learned to program as a teenager. He earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Yakovenko spent more than ten years at Qualcomm, working on wireless and distributed systems. Around 2016 he worked at Mesosphere and also at Dropbox. In 2017 he began outlining Proof of History (PoH), a method to order events in a blockchain to speed up consensus while keeping decentralization and security. He co-founded Solana Labs with other engineers, and the project was later renamed Solana.
Solana aims to solve the blockchain trilemma of throughput, decentralization, and security by combining proof-of-stake with PoH to streamline the timing and ordering of transactions, enabling faster, decentralized validation.
In 2022 a class-action lawsuit was filed in federal court naming Yakovenko and Kyle Samani over token offerings and disclosures. In 2024 the court denied a motion to compel arbitration and noted that the plaintiffs had voluntarily dismissed their claims against Yakovenko and the Solana Foundation without prejudice; the suit continued against the other defendants.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 09:42 (CET).