A $100 BILLION blockchain exists because its founder drank two coffees and a beer, then couldn't sleep. > In 2017, Anatoly Yakovenko had spent nearly 13 years working at Qualcomm, making mobile systems faster. > He was now exploring crypto and building deep-learning hardware with a friend. > To help cover the cost of their GPUs, they started mining cryptocurrency. > Then one night, Anatoly had two coffees and a beer. > He stayed awake until 4 AM thinking about one problem: > What if a blockchain could prove the passage of time without constantly asking other computers what time it was? > That idea became Proof of History, the technology that helps Solana order transactions efficiently. > Anatoly believed he'd stumbled onto something completely new. > He later discovered that researchers had already explored related concepts called verifiable delay functions. > But he saw how to apply the idea to build a much faster blockchain. > He left his old career behind and started working on Solana. > He convinced friends with expertise in GPU programming and compilers to join him. > They spent roughly two years building before Solana launched in March 2020. > It wasn't an overnight success. > The team had raised less money than many competitors and launched with a deliberately narrow focus: make blockchain transactions as fast as possible. > Then the ecosystem grew. > Developers started building on Solana. Its token took off during the 2021 bull market, and the network became one of crypto's biggest ecosystems. > In January 2025, $SOL hit an all-time high above $290, pushing its market capitalization past $100 BILLION > All from an idea that came to a tired engineer at 4 AM after two coffees and a beer. Sometimes the difference between a random sleepless night and a billion-dollar idea is what you decide to do the next morning.