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Solana Labs

Solana Labs: the company that wrote Solana

A development company founded in 2018 that wrote all of Solana's original code. After handing the validator client to Anza in 2024, it moved on to phones, payments and developer products.

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Who they are

Solana Labs is where Solana was born. After Anatoly Yakovenko wrote up the idea of Proof of History in 2017, he founded the company with Raj Gokal and several former Qualcomm engineers (Greg Fitzgerald, Stephen Akridge and others). Solana’s consensus, networking and execution engine were all originally written here.

People often confuse Solana Labs, the Solana Foundation and “the Solana chain”. The relationship is:

  • Solana Labs: a for-profit company and the original developer.
  • The Solana Foundation: a Swiss non-profit that manages ecosystem funds and the community (see Solana Foundation).
  • The Solana chain: an open-source network run by validators around the world, owned by no single company.

Timeline

  • February 2018: the solana-labs/solana repository was created on GitHub, and the project was renamed from Loom to Solana.
  • March 2020: Mainnet Beta launched, with Solana Labs’ client as the only validator software.
  • February 2022: launched Solana Pay, letting merchants accept stablecoins directly.
  • June 2022: announced a phone business; the Saga phone went on sale in May 2023 and the second-generation Seeker shipped in 2025 (handled by the subsidiary Solana Mobile).
  • 2023: launched products such as GameShift for game developers.
  • January 2024: the core engineering team was spun out as Anza, which took over the validator client.
  • January 2025: the original solana-labs/solana repository stopped receiving updates and was archived; Solana client development formally moved to Anza’s Agave and Jump’s Firedancer.

Its place in the Solana system

Solana Labs no longer directly decides how the chain runs. Validator software is developed by Anza, Jump and others, and protocol changes go through the public SIMD proposal process and validator votes.

But its influence is still large: co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko remains one of the most influential figures in Solana and often weighs in publicly on the technical roadmap and economic model, and Solana Mobile is one of the few attempts to combine a chain with hardware.

Controversies and risks

  • Securities status: in 2022 a class action in the US alleged that SOL was an unregistered security. When the SEC sued Binance and Coinbase in 2023 it also listed SOL as a security; those cases against the exchanges were dropped in 2025. SOL’s regulatory status still depends on laws and case law in each jurisdiction.
  • Early distribution: at genesis the team, seed and private-sale investors together received a substantial share, a long-running topic of debate around Solana.

What to watch

  1. Solana Mobile’s shipments and app store ecosystem, to see whether “chain plus phone” can produce real users.
  2. The co-founders’ public positions on protocol upgrades, inflation and similar questions, which often steer community debate.

Sources

  • Solana Labs’ website and GitHub (repository creation and archive dates from the GitHub API).
  • Solana Mobile’s website; the SEC’s suits against exchanges and their dismissal.
  • This page is an educational summary and is not investment advice.