Joining Solana, A Blockchain Rebuilt for Scale.

I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined Solana to help their amazing team grow an amazing community supporting a truly ambitious project.

Last week I joined a phenomenal team at Solana. It is an ambitious project for the blockchain.

In January I took a break from working in the industry. Something wasn’t lining up. Something was off. There were all these promises but the use cases and users just weren’t there. It felt like the twilight zone. If we were to succeed as an industry we would have to change a few things (speed of the network being the obvious main one).

As a designer; I always try to make sure the problem is labeled correctly for a solution to take hold. One thing became super clear: the speed of Ethereum is broken, and it isn’t fixable. 15 transactions per second (TPS)won’t scale. If we want real world use, we need real world speeds. Solana currently is at 50,000 TPS and can can scale that exponentially because they looked at the same problem in a very different way.

Enter Proof of History:

Solana is a company that is creating a trustless, distributed, cryptographic protocol built on the back of a verifiable delay function. What does this mean? We’re building a new blockchain with a data structure that encodes the passage of time as data. We call this Proof of History (PoH).

PoH gives us a sense of trustless time and message ordering before consensus. This drastically reduces messaging overhead between nodes in the network and solves many of the existing scalability problems that other blockchain protocols face.

Additionally, it allows us to build a high-throughput blockchain that doesn’t rely on shards, partitions, side chains, multi chains, etc. As a result of this new system architecture, Solana’s new PoH blockchain will allow up to 710,000 transactions per second on a 1 gigabit network.

So what does this mean? You get a secure, decentralized, and truly fast solution. This is what developers have been waiting for. I overheard something at the office on the first day:

So we are basically building globally distributed supercomputer faster than the NASDAQ database that can’t be shut down?

Take a look at the Github, the website, and join me for the ride.