ANATOLY Yakovenko is the founder of Solana, a blockchain designed to host decentralized, scalable applications and in 2022 saw Michael Jordan and his son launch an athlete-focused DApp on the network.
But what is the story behind the blockchain pioneer and what’s his net worth?
Who is Anatoly Yakovenko?
Anatoly Yakovenko was born in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s.
Yakovenko became fascinated with programming and learnt C, his first coding language, at a young age before moving to the US.
He graduated from the University of Illinois in 2003 with a degree in computer science.
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The dot-com boom was then in full swing and “there was this magical possibility of writing a piece of code that just solves some incredible problem for the world and becoming the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates”, Yakovenko said.
He moved to California and co-founded Alescere, a voice over internet protocol.
He then moved to Qualcomm to become a software engineer where he spent 13 years, working on virtual and augmented reality products, 3D cameras, and operating systems for mobile devices, before moving to Mesosphere in 2016.
He then moved to Dropbox.
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Yakovenko was an early adopter of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and in 2013 quickly recognized the potential of blockchain technology to revolutionize the way we transfer and store data.
In 2018, Yakovenko recruited his former Qualcomm colleagues Greg Fitzgerald, Stephen Akridge, and three others and co-founded a company called Loom.
However, an Ethereum-based project had a similar name so the company rebranded to Solana, after the small beach town near San Diego where the co-founders lived when they worked for Qualcomm.
Solana is much faster and has lower transaction fees than rival blockchains like Ethereum.
SOL, the native cryptocurrency for Solana soared almost 12,000 per cent in 2021 and at one point commanded a market capitalization of over $65 billion, making it the fifth-largest cryptocurrency.
But thanks to Sam Bankman-Fried touting Solana as the most underrated cryptocurrency that summer, the token crashed following the collapse of FTX in November 2022.
What is Anatoly Yakovenko’s net worth?
Anatoly Yakovenko is believed to be worth $200 million but at one point was a billionaire.
Yakovenko’s net worth is all attributed to Solana, which currently has a market capitalisation of around $10 billion.
Yakovenko has a large supply of SOL, however, sold at least 50 per cent of his portfolio in 2021.
