Anatoly Yakovenko

Anatoly Yakovenko is an engineer and entrepreneur. He is one of the co-founders of Solana Labs.

Yakovenko was born in Ukraine and immigrated to the United States in the 1990s. The first coding language he learned was C, and in 1999, he began studying computer science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. While he was attending college, he cofounded a VOIP startup called Alescere. In 2003, Yakovenko graduated with his bachelor's degree and also closed his first company.

After graduating, Yakovenko moved to California to become an engineer at Qualcomm. He was with the company for nearly twelve years and specialized in leading the team that developed operating systems. It is said that he has worked on the development of technologies including virtual and augmented reality products, 3D cameras, and operating systems for mobile devices.

From 2016 through October 2017, Yakovenko continued working as an engineer and developing distributed systems at companies such as Mesosphere and Dropbox. At the end of 2017, he co-founded the Solana project and authored its first whitepaper, where he described proof-of-history, leading to other advancements that would set Solana apart from other blockchains. In addition to being one of the founders of Solana, Yakovenko acts as CEO of the company.

Yakovenko also holds patents that are crucial to the industry in which he works. They are both for high-performance operating system protocols. The first one was filed in 2017, and it is for techniques for general-purpose lossless data compression using a recurrent neural network. The second patent was filed in 2018 and is for lossless compression of a content item using a neural network trained on content item cohorts.