After the restart the town grew into a city, and the city got strange. A games arcade popped up overnight next to a payments kiosk. Somebody opened a gallery inside a lighthouse. Somebody else built a bridge purely so their app could have a nice view.

Toly wandered the streets with Tick on his shoulder, delighted and a bit lost. He’d drawn the boxes and arrows. He hadn’t built the arcade, or the kiosk, or the bridge. Thousands of other people had.

That’s what a network like Solana really looks like. Anatoly Yakovenko wrote the whitepaper and co-founded the company that started building it, along with other people. Now there’s the Solana Foundation, independent companies, validator operators all over the world, open-source contributors and a lot of developers making apps, wallets, tools and games.

Even the validator software has more than one author. Anza, a developer company spun out of Solana Labs, maintains the Agave client, and Jump Crypto has built a separate one called Firedancer. When different teams write different software that follows the same rules, one bug is less likely to stop everybody at once. That’s a lesson straight out of the last chapter.

Mr. Croak, naturally, said he’d built the whole city. Vera asked him to name one street. He named a pond.

Every window in the city belongs to somebody building something. Tap the buildings to switch their lights on and meet whoever’s inside.

None of them had to ask the others for permission before they started. They share the same ledger, the same rules and the same clock, and quite often the same favourite café.

Once every window was lit, the city looked less like a machine and more like a lot of people who’d decided to make something together. Toly sat down on the bridge with the nice view and opened his notebook to a blank page.