Solana: The Dark Ages
Every major shift in technology starts with a realization: what we built isn’t enough. By 2016, it was clear to crypto natives that despite the promises of decentralization, financial freedom, and a fancy, user-owned internet, blockchains weren’t scalable.
As concerns around scalability grew, Ethereum’s creator, Vitalik Buterin, coined the term Blockchain Trilemma to explain the fundamental compromise between decentralization, security, and scalability. Improving one came at the cost of another, making it nearly impossible to achieve all three at once.
Source: chainlink
So early blockchain designs made their choices:
Bitcoin and Ethereum prioritized decentralization and security at the expense of scalability. But as demand grew, so did the strain on both networks.
During the ICO boom of 2017, Ethereum started buckling under the weight of its growth. People started to complain. The network saw a massive surge in activity, which caused gas fees to spike and transactions to slow down.
CryptoKitties, one of the first viral Ethereum gaming dApps, clogged the network so badly that transactions took hours to go through unless users paid extremely high fees.
In the words of Bryce Bladon, co-founder of CryptoKitties,
“Although we wouldn’t have pursued the CryptoKitties project if we didn’t want it to be a success, we did not expect it to catch fire quite like it did. All signs were great. We thought we’d caught all the bugs and issues. We were expecting to have to deal with things like scaling at some point. We did not expect it to be in the first week…”
It wasn’t just Ethereum that faced these problems. Bitcoin, too, was struggling to scale its transactions. It became clear that overcoming these challenges would require rethinking the mechanisms these networks used to reach consensus.
In blockchain, a consensus mechanism is a set of rules and methods a blockchain uses to agree on the state of the system.
For Bitcoin, this ‘agreement’ is achieved through a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism, where miners solve complex, energy-intensive cryptographic puzzles to validate transactions and secure the network.
However, as Bitcoin’s popularity grew, the number of transactions trumped the network’s processing ability. This led to slower transaction validation times and higher fees. The rise in mining activity also led to greater energy consumption, as more miners competed to solve increasingly difficult puzzles, requiring even more computational power.
Another reason for these limitations is Bitcoin’s fixed block size, which is currently a little over 1.5 MB and can handle only about 7 transactions per second.
Ethereum, which initially used the same PoS consensus mechanism as Bitcoin, transitioned to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) in 2022 through an event called The Merge. Unlike PoW, where miners compete to solve puzzles, PoS selects validators based on the amount of ETH they stake as collateral.
The move to PoS drastically reduced Ethereum’s energy consumption by 99.95% but didn’t fully solve its scalability problems, as the network can handle only around 14 transactions per second.
Post-merge, Ethereum’s energy use shrank to the size of a raspberry. Source: Coindesk
Layer-2 (L2) solutions were introduced to address the scalability issues of L1 blockchains (like Bitcoin and Ethereum), but they aren’t very user-friendly.
L2s are scaling solutions built on top of Ethereum that process transactions off-chain while still relying on Ethereum for security.
With L2s, you have to bridge assets, switch networks, and deal with fragmented liquidity across multiple rollups (a type of Layer-2 scaling solution). This creates a poor user experience for both everyday users and developers alike.
Moreover, L2 gas fees are still quite high, often cheaper than Ethereum’s base layer, but still costly for micropayments.
The Guy Who Saw Differently
Anatoly Yakovenko wasn’t your typical crypto founder. He wasn’t some Wall Street guy or Bitcoin maxi. He was just an engineer who knew something most developers didn’t: how to make blockchains move faster.
As previously stated, a blockchain processes transactions once its nodes validate, agree on, and finalize them through a consensus mechanism. But that constant back-and-forth to reach an agreement was what slowed things down.
Then, in 2017, Anatoly had a realization:
If nodes spent less time agreeing on the order of transactions, transactions would be faster and cheaper.
So, he built a cryptographic ‘clock’ that lets nodes verify time and order without constant communication and called it Proof of History (PoH).
Did it work, though?
References
Chroman, K., Decker, C., Eyal, I., & Gencer, A. E. (2016). On scaling decentralized blockchains: A position paper. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292782219_On_Scaling_Decentralized_Blockchains_A_Position_Paper
Cointelegraph. (2024, April 2). History of crypto: The ICO boom and Ethereum’s evolution. Cointelegraph. https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-ico-boom-history-crypto
Ethereum Foundation. (2024, July). The Merge. Ethereum.org. https://ethereum.org/en/roadmap/merge/
Evie. (2025, February 8). Ethereum gas fees drop to record low amid reduced activity. The Currency Analytics. https://thecurrencyanalytics.com/altcoins/ethereum-gas-fees-drop-to-record-low-amid-reduced-activity-159464
Hashmani, M., Khan, D., & Low, J. T. (2021). Systematic literature review of challenges in blockchain scalability. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355297166_Systematic_Literature_Review_of_Challenges_in_Blockchain_Scalability
Hertig, A. (2017, May 10). Ethereum’s double-edged sword: Will a rising price hurt users? CoinDesk. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2017/05/10/ethereums-double-edged-sword-will-a-rising-price-hurt-users
Hertig, A. (2017, December 7). Cat fight? Ethereum users clash over CryptoKitties. CoinDesk. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2017/12/07/cat-fight-ethereum-users-clash-over-cryptokitties
Malwa, S. (2025, February 4). Ethereum raises gas limits for first time since 2021, boosting ETH appeal. CoinDesk. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/02/04/ethereum-raises-gas-limits-for-first-time-since-2021-boosting-eth-appeal
Messari. Analyzing TPS and fee revenue across blockchains. Messari. Retrieved February 13, 2025, from https://messari.io/copilot/share/analyzing-tps-and-fee-revenue-across-blockchains-0ae5513d-5791-420a-bcbd-cb8221be268d
@George_harrap. (2025, January 29). [Tweet]. X. https://x.com/George_harrap/status/1751965785969365479
YCharts. Bitcoin average block size. YCharts. Retrieved February 13, 2025, from https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_block_size
I was deep in a late-night research spiral in my tiny room. One tab turned into twenty, each one pulling me further into Solana’s tech, people, and purpose.
What was so broken about blockchain that it needed something as radical as Solana?
Turns out, everything.
Now, I’m telling that story, piece by piece, for Solana fanboys and fangirls like me.
#1 Solana: The Dark Ages was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.