The portrait gallery
Chapter Ten
Portraits of the Founders
In which we meet three people who each wrote the first line of a great chapter
Every story has its characters. Blockchains were built by thousands of hands, but a few people wrote the first line of a new chapter — and then had to live with what the world wrote after it.
In this gallery hang three portraits: a stranger who has never shown their face, an engineer who gave a blockchain a clock, and the builder who helped turn that clock into a company and a community.
X — Portraits of the Founders
Satoshi Nakamoto
No one knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is — one person or several, where they lived, or whether they are still alive. What we have are their words: the nine-page whitepaper of 2008, the first Bitcoin code, and a few hundred emails and forum posts, written in careful English.
Satoshi mined the genesis block, guided the first developers, and then slowly stepped back. In April 2011 they wrote to a fellow developer that they had moved on to other things, and fell silent. The early coins thought to be theirs have never moved.
Perhaps that is the most Bitcoin thing of all: a creator who made themselves unnecessary.
95–96“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work.”
X — Portraits of the Founders
Anatoly Yakovenko
Anatoly Yakovenko was born in Ukraine and moved to the United States as a boy. He studied computer science at the University of Illinois, then spent more than a decade at Qualcomm, building operating systems and the software that makes wireless networks keep time.
That was the seed: phones and cell towers only work because everyone agrees on the clock. In November 2017 he wrote the proof of history whitepaper, and in 2018 co-founded Solana Labs. He has since pushed Solana onto phones of its own — and kept repeating the same four words.
97–98“Increase bandwidth, reduce latency.”
X — Portraits of the Founders
Raj Gokal
Raj Gokal came to Solana from the world of startups, health technology and investing. When Anatoly showed him the proof-of-history paper, he joined as co-founder and ran the company side of Solana Labs — raising money, hiring builders and telling the story to anyone who would listen.
Through the outages and the FTX winter he kept the doors open, and helped grow the ecosystem of apps, hackathons and conferences that carried Solana back. The engine was Anatoly's; much of the town that grew around it, Raj helped to build.
99–100“A beach town lent its name to a chain meant for everyone.”