Solana: A New Architecture for a High Performance Blockchain

One of the slowest parts of reaching consensus on a decentralized network is simply agreeing on the order in which transactions happened, since there's no central clock everyone can trust. Yakovenko's insight was to build a verifiable, decentralized clock directly into the protocol — Proof of History — so that nodes could cryptographically prove that a certain amount of time had passed and events happened in a specific order, without needing to constantly communicate back and forth with each other just to agree on timing. This dramatically cuts the communication overhead that normally limits how fast a blockchain can process transactions.