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Record No. 2017-11-proof-of-history-whitepaperMilestoneUnverified

Anatoly Yakovenko's Proof of History whitepaper

Solana Labs' own history of the project says that in November 2017 Anatoly Yakovenko published a whitepaper describing Proof of History, a way for computers that do not trust each other to keep time. No copy dated November 2017 has been found. The earliest dated trace is the whitepaper repository, whose first commits on December 12, 2017 hold a draft titled "Loom: High performance blockchain", and by early February 2018 loomprotocol.com hosted a v0.8.5 PDF titled "Loom: A new architecture for a high performance blockchain".

Entities

  • Anatoly Yakovenko
  • Proof of History
  • Loom

Sources & citations (4)

  1. https://github.com/solana-labs/solana/blob/88e270723fcdb1da116afc2f74ef2c2d4c42b0c9/book/src/introduction.mdAccessed Oct 8, 2026Solana Labs docs as of 26 Nov 2018: 'In November of 2017 Anatoly Yakovenko published a whitepaper describing Proof of History'.
  2. https://github.com/solana-labs/whitepaper/commit/ce0f02c647fdd754c3697db5573f11e2e83f7e88Accessed Oct 8, 20262017-12-12 19:00 UTC, eight minutes after the repository's 'Project created' commit; the draft is titled 'Loom: High performance blockchain'.
  3. https://web.archive.org/web/20180205032811/http://loomprotocol.com/loom-whitepaper.pdfCaptured Feb 5, 2018Abstract: 'This paper proposes a Proof of History (PoH) - a proof for verifying passage of time between events.' Original: http://loomprotocol.com/loom-whitepaper.pdf
  4. https://github.com/garious/loom/commit/f0916059bc7ec5a928811ca4638c448ff2bf7b05Accessed Oct 8, 2026Author-dated 2017-11-02 19:51 UTC, Anatoly Yakovenko: an endless SHA-256 loop seeded 'AnatolyYakovenko11/2/201712pmPST'. History imported when the repo was created in Jan 2018.

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