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

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:02)
Anatoly is the CEO of a little crypto project known as Solana.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:07)
One of the fastest growing blockchains in the world.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:09)
A CEO of Solana Labs, he's driving Web3 innovation.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:13)
BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, expanded its $1.7 billion tokenized money market fund to Solana.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:21)
Why don't we all switch to Solana? Because Solana sounds like it's actually commercial, and the other guys sound like that they're antique.

**Anatoly Yakovenko** (0:27)
Everybody in the world should be a customer. Crypto will eventually win. It's inevitable.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:33)
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:45)
There he is.

**Anatoly Yakovenko** (0:47)
Oh man, thanks for having me. Thank you.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:52)
You're welcome.

**Anatoly Yakovenko** (0:53)
Thank you.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:55)
How much of a difference has David Sacks made in the first six months as crypto czar for your industry?

**Anatoly Yakovenko** (1:01)
Oh, it's been incredible. I mean, I think it's night and day. I don't know if the industry would have survived another four years of the Gensler regime.
The Genius Act, I think, is going to unlock, you know, people estimate one to $10 trillion with the stable coins that are going to be on public permissionless chains. So if you kind of look at those charts, who owns treasuries and be with China, Japan, et cetera, countries right now, I think Tether is somewhere around number five. I think within five years, the internet is going to be the largest holder of US treasuries. And it's such a scale that I think, you know, I'm an engineer. I cannot honestly comprehend how that's going to change finance, but I think it will be transformative.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:46)
Upside, downside? I mean, are there concerns there as well with that huge impact and democratization or are you kind of, you know, libertarian, let the chips fall where they may, so to speak?

**Anatoly Yakovenko** (2:00)
I think it's a huge opportunity to really accelerate American innovation and spread American finance around the world. I think we actually have the best financial system in the world. It's the most trusted, the most robust, the best regulatory environment for what it's worth as well. But it was built after World War II, before the internet. So its APIs are kind of like a fax machine based. What crypto is allowing, I think, is this new technology stack built on top of the internet that's completely western aligned. It's for transparency, it's for capitalism, but now we can actually interface western, US based finance to the rest of the world. And I think America is going to benefit primarily from this.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:46)
Similar to our media business going around the world and infecting people's consciousness.

**David Sacks** (2:51)
When you were getting Solana off the ground, how much of it was a technical and architectural vision that you had, versus maybe a set of trade-offs that you were trying to solve that ETH didn't fill or Bitcoin didn't fill, and you said, I'm just going to try and do this.

**Anatoly Yakovenko** (3:09)
I think, I can't speak for all founders, but I think founders are driven by kind of a crazy vision. They have to be a little bit insane. So my insane vision is always this idea, like imagine finance 20 to 50 years from now, the science fiction version of finance. What I imagine is a single giant ledger, a single computer for every market in the world. That means it's available in Nairobi, New York, in London, in Singapore.
And all of these things are synchronized at the round-trip time of speed of light through fiber around the world or through Elon satellites. That's 120 milliseconds. So a dollar can be in New York, in London, in Singapore, in Nairobi, in 120 milliseconds. So velocity of money, velocity of assets are as fast as physics allow. This is what nerd-pilled me on building this. It's a physics problem. It's a massive finance problem. It's a really fun engineering, low latency.

**David Sacks** (4:12)
And did you feel that you had missed it somehow?

**Anatoly Yakovenko** (4:17)
When I had my eureka moment and I did the back of the envelope calculation for design, I'm like, oh, this is a thousand times faster than ETH. And when I started talking to folks in the ETH community, they're focused on settlement. Settlement doesn't have these latency problems. You can do settlement in minutes and that's fine. So I always felt that Ethereum being the world's settlement layer, Solana is the world's execution layer. And, you know, so far, so good. Execution is where all the money's made. So I think we're on the right track. And a fast execution engine can also do settlement. That's kind of a feature.