Solana's Anatoly Yakovenko on Crypto's Next Era: Quantum, AI, and the Future of Money

The session opens by introducing Anatoly Yakovenko as a co-founder of Solana and CEO of Solana Labs. The introduction calls Solana one of the fastest-growing blockchains in the world and notes that BlackRock expanded its $1.7 billion tokenized money market fund to the chain. The opening montage closes on two confident lines: "Crypto will eventually win." and "It's inevitable."

The first question is about how much David Sacks has changed things in his first six months as the administration's crypto lead. The answer describes the change as "night and day" and frames the previous regulatory period as close to fatal for the industry.

I don't know if the industry would have survived another four years of the Gensler regime.

The discussion then turns to the Genius Act. The speaker cites estimates that it could unlock one to ten trillion dollars in stablecoins on public permissionless chains. They compare this with the list of the largest holders of U.S. Treasuries, which includes countries such as China and Japan. Tether, they say, is "somewhere around number five" today, and they predict that within five years "the Internet is going to be the largest holder of U.S. Treasuries." The speaker also limits the claim. As an engineer, they say, they cannot "honestly comprehend" how this will change finance, though they expect it to be transformative.

Asked about the downsides, the answer stays optimistic. The U.S. financial system is described as the most trusted and robust, with the best regulatory environment, but also as built after World War II and before the Internet, with APIs "kind of like a fax machine based." Crypto is presented as a new, "completely Western aligned" technology stack on top of the internet. It would connect U.S.-based finance to the rest of the world, and America would benefit most from it.

Asked whether Solana began as an architectural vision or as a set of tradeoffs that Ethereum and Bitcoin had left unsolved, the speaker says founders are "driven by kind of a crazy vision" and "have to be a little bit insane." Their vision is a science-fiction version of finance 20 to 50 years from now: "a single giant ledger, a single computer for every market in the world," available at once in Nairobi, New York, London and Singapore.