Solana Founder: Crypto Is About to Change Finance Like the Internet Changed Everything Else w/ Anatoly Yakovenko, Dave Blundin, Salim Ismail & Alexander Wissner-Gross | EP #204

Anatoly Yakovenko (0:00)

The fact that we now have stable code legislation and that people are projecting 1 trillion to 10 trillion worth of digital dollars being minted over the next five years is going to massively accelerate things.

Peter Diamandis (0:13)

Why does your company exist? And second, why we need it?

Anatoly Yakovenko (0:17)

Solana is there to really enable that 1 billion people to go fully interconnected. Bitcoin is store of value, Ethereum is settlement, Solana is execution. I just simply wasn't interested in settlement or store of value because they're not the kind of engineering problem that I'm interested in solving.

Peter Diamandis (0:33)

So is that the future, a single machine layer for all markets everywhere?

Anatoly Yakovenko (0:40)

There's no computer science academic reason why it can't exist. It's purely an engineering problem and we're on our way to solve it as fast as we can.

Peter Diamandis (0:48)

Philly, how long before this science fiction future could come into existence?

Anatoly Yakovenko (0:52)

My gut is that...

Dave Blundin (0:56)

Now, that's the Moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Peter Diamandis (1:01)

Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. Here with my Moonshot mates, Dave Blundin. Hey, Dave. Hey. Alex Wissner-Gross.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (1:08)

Hey, Peter.

Peter Diamandis (1:09)

Hey, and Salim Ismail. We have a special guest today. We're going to be diving into Solana. Anatoly Yakovenko is here, software engineer, entrepreneur, co-founder, and CEO of Solana Labs, which today is the sixth largest coin, now worth over $100 billion. Congratulations for that. We appreciate it. Yeah. 100 billion here, 100 billion there, on your way to a trillion. A bachelor's in computer science from University of Illinois, Urbane, began your career at Qualcomm. An amazing company, right? I had a chance to watch their domination. And Solana has emerged as the leader in decentralized finance and blockchain generating, what is it, 2.2 billion in annual revenues between 2024 and 25

That's extraordinary.

Dave Blundin (2:04)

It's the cool one around MIT, I can tell you that firsthand too. I'll give you some quotes later, but yes, you are known and you are cool.

Anatoly Yakovenko (2:12)

That's awesome.

Peter Diamandis (2:14)

So guys, today, I really want to hit on a few things, which is the crypto-essential Solana 101, what makes it different from Bitcoin and Ethereum. I want to dive into Solana as a use of payments, the everything coin, and then really the convergence of crypto and AI, which is going to cause this explosion in the global economy. Let me begin with a question that is on my mind, Toli, which is, given our incredible rush towards AGI, every dollar in the ecosystem is being sucked into this black hole of computronium we're building across the planet. So we've got AI, we've got agents, we have Solana, we have stable coins. What's the future of money going to look like? Do you think it's going to be recognizable in the next 10 years?

Anatoly Yakovenko (3:08)

I think the two things that I see converging is that the cost for intelligence is dropping, and markets require intelligence. And because it's not cheaper to have intelligence to analyze all the signal in the world, you can now have a lot more markets. And public permissionless blockchains like Solana allow you to create markets permissionlessly for whatever random thing is. And you kind of saw this with prediction markets and polymarket, and Kalyshev kind of taking off. But the weird kind of cool experiments like Futarki, where you have decision markets for every decision that a fund or a company can take, those can now exist. And as intelligence gets cheaper, you have more markets that are viable, and you kind of see this exponential explosion of everything being decided through market forces, which I think is, it's like the quote I made before the podcast is like, the ants are not aware of the intelligence of the anthill. I can't fit all these markets in my head or like the outcome of this, but my gut is that this is probably the most optimal direction for kind of, for society to move forward and make decisions. The more market-based it is and the more intelligence you have to make those decisions correctly and the forcing function of losing money is like a good way to course correct when you have bad intelligence. So, hopefully, it's a good thing, but beyond my, I can't fit it all in my head. It's beyond my comprehension.

Peter Diamandis (4:43)

The speed of change is awesome right now, right? I mean, I think, and Alex, we talk about this like economy 3 in the future.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (4:53)

Before we started recording, Toli and I were, I would say, sort of lamenting the sad case of Truth Terminal, the autonomous AI agent that's being forced to mint its own meme coins just in order to survive in this really harsh world for AI agents. Right now, I mean, Toli, I'd be curious. So in principle, new layer ones, including Solana, offer the premise for AI agents just to survive. Humans, for the most part, were banked. We have the ability to engage in a human economy. If you're a baby AI agent just trying to find its way in this world, and you can't open a bank account, you can't interact as a first-class citizen, what do you do?