Record // INFRASTRUCTURE PLAYABLE TEARDOWN
ARCHITECT'S ECHO
Why is Solana fast to the point of absurdity? The answer is a bet called Proof of History.
▶ Play this teardown — operate the mechanism yourself →What happened
Solana's design begins with Proof of History (PoH), a verifiable delay function using sequential SHA-256 hashing that Anatoly Yakovenko described in a November 2017 whitepaper. PoH stamps a cryptographic, verifiable ordering of events into the ledger before consensus, so validators can agree on time without constant communication. After a series of testnets, Solana Labs launched the network's Mainnet Beta on March 16, 2020.
Why Solana remembers it
Proof of History is the foundational idea that lets Solana parallelize and pipeline transaction processing for high throughput, and the 2020 mainnet beta is the origin point of the entire ecosystem mapped here.
On the map
A primordial monolith whose hum still keeps the realm's clocks in sync.