Can Peace Last Between Crypto’s Visionary Rivals?

“People in tech would often go escape to Burning Man to feel the sense of what a non-zero-sum world looks and feels like,” said Solana co-founder Gokal. But in crypto, “everyone feels like there’s plenty of opportunity and plenty of value to be captured.”

The coding marathon resulted in proof of history, which Yakovenko has described as a clock for the blockchain. It allowed Solana to be superfast, time-stamping transactions as they happen. Coupled with proof of stake, it creates a faster, more efficient network than Etherum’s energy-intensive proof of work.

Last October, an image appeared on Twitter of a crypto Mount Rushmore: a drawing of four men etched in stone, looking out onto a valley of trees. There was Dorian Nakamoto, rumored to be the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. There was the distinct, angular jawline of Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, the world’s second most ... See more

They did for Ukraine, at least. When Margarita Simonyan, a Russian journalist and Putin loyalist, tweeted that Russians should be proud, Buterin had a curt response: “Go fuck yourself.” Yakovenko was quick to chime in: “Solana is gonna be an eth l2 if Vitalik keeps this up.”

They are Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, who were catapulted to crypto fame last year when their blockchain, Solana, became a stunning success, reaching a market cap of $33 billion and winning over investors like Andresseen Horowitz and Polychain Capital.

The rivalry between the Ethereum and the Solana proponents has all the makings of the classic, cutthroat battles that defined the internet before Web3. The dot-com gold rush (that is, Web 1.0) gave birth to the kind of feuds that make journalists salivate.

As its profile rose, so did the voices of critics, who argued that Solana wasn’t decentralized enough. Part of the problem was that to act as a “node” on the Solana blockchain—a computer that validates transactions—you need additional hardware, costing around $3500.

Secondly, they’re connected by crypto’s transparent nature—trade secrets are scarce when founders can follow each other’s work “on chain,” watching how many transactions are occurring and which blockchains are stumbling. “These are both open-source ecosystems,” said Yakovenko of his and Buterin’s blockchains. “Because of that, there’s a lot of actu... See more

“Let’s actually get fully objective on, what does it mean to be decentralized?” he said. “Like I don’t really care about the philosophy part of it.…I do actually—I do care about it.” But for him, decentralization shouldn’t be an end in itself—it should be quantifiable and realistic.