Solana is one of the most interesting altcoins in the cryptocurrency space. Its blockchain is considered the fastest among its competitors, and its projects have gained a lot of traction in recent years. Most of this can be attributed to the crypto’s co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko. As of 2023, Anatoly Yakovenko has a net worth of $200 million according to Entrepreneur.com.
Background
Anatoly was born in Ukraine when it was still a part of the Soviet Union. However, his exact birth date is not known. He has a brother who enlisted in the army to serve in Afghanistan.
At the young age of five, he developed a passion for computers. He became obsessed with programming in his youth, having studied C, his first computer language.
Sometime in the 90s, he moved to the United States in hopes of building a successful career in tech. He studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and got his degree in 2003.
Career Beginnings
While he was still a college student, Anatoly helped launch the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) business Alescere. After college, he was hired as an engineer at wireless service provider Qualcomm.
He climbed the corporate ladder and eventually got promoted to the rank of Senior Staff Engineer Manager. He worked at Qualcomm for more than 12 years.
Later on, he worked in the software development company D2iQ, initially called Mesosphere. There, he made distributed operating systems for less than a year. In 2017, he briefly worked as a software engineer for the internet publishing firm Dropbox.
Co-Founding Solana
After leaving Dropbox, Anatoly Yakovenko immediately started working on Solana. He was the one who wrote the cryptocurrency’s white paper and became CEO. It was launched to the public in 2020. The blockchain was built very differently from Bitcoin and somewhat similar to Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum.
Because of this, many media outlets considered Solana the long-term rival of Ethereum. This attracted well-known investors like Sam Bankman-Fried, Andreessen Horowitz, CoinFund, Jump Trading, Polychain Capital, and more.
Yakovenko and his team worked hard to make Solana one of the fastest-growing crypto ecosystems. It opened up to advanced projects, such as DeFi, Web3, and NFTs. Solana NFTs are sold at the open marketplace Solsea.io.
Net Worth and Earnings
Anatoly started building his wealth when he was employed as an engineer. He also earns from his own personal investments. However, it’s safe to say that most of his money today is from co-founding Solana.
Solana’s native token, SOL, had an average price of $2 in 2020 but quickly jumped to an average of $200 a year later. At the time of writing, its price has dropped considerably, but it’s still projected to be a top-performing coin in the future. Currently, Anatoly’s estimated fortune is at $200 million.
Personal Life
Though Anatoly Yakovenko is not very open about his personal life, he has happily shared details about his marriage to Laura Skelton. It is speculated that they have children, but the couple hasn’t revealed them for their own privacy.
