Anatoly Yakovenko
SolanaCo-Founder
QualcommFormer Engineering Manager
About
Anatoly Yakovenko co-founded Solana Labs in 2018 and is their CEO, working mainly on protocol performance and payments. The company grew out of Proof of History, a concept he described in 2017: a way to create a verifiable order of events so a network spends less effort agreeing on that order.
In the news
Solana’s 'Alpenglow' upgrade could arrive next quarter, co-founder Yakovenko says (opens in a new tab)CoinDesk · May 5, 2026
Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko is a big fan of agentic coding (opens in a new tab)TechCrunch · Oct 29, 2025
The Ukrainian-born engineer behind Solana Labs learned to code as a teen and had a ‘lightbulb’ moment about the blockchain (opens in a new tab)Fortune · Apr 14, 2022
Notable experience
Co-Founder
Apr 2018 – Present
Software Engineer
May 2017 – Oct 2017
Mesosphere
Software Engineer
Jul 2016 – Apr 2017
Senior Staff Engineer Manager
Dec 2003 – Jul 2016
Alescere
Co Founder
Jan 2001 – Dec 2003
Education
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (opens in a new tab)
Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science
1999 – 2003
