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

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Previously titled “Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko on Crypto's Next Era: Quantum, AI, and the Future of Money” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 6, 2026

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg 25 min 3 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 28 days ago
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

Who is Anatoly Yakovenko and how did Solana become a leading blockchain?

Jason Calacanis 0:02
Anatoly is the CEO of a little crypto project known as Solana.
Unknown 0:07
One of the fastest growing blockchains in the world.
Chamath Palihapitiya 0:09
As CEO of Solana Labs, he's driving Web3 innovation. BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, expanded its $1.7 billion tokenized money market fund to Solana.
Unknown 0:21
Why don't we all switch to Solana? I mean, 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.
Unknown 0:33
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.
Anatoly Yakovenko 0:45
There he is. Oh man, thanks for having me. You're doing it. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you.
Jason Calacanis 0:55
How much of a difference has David Sachs 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 ten trillion dollars worth of 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 U.S. 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.
Jason Calacanis 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.

How did US political shifts (Trump vs. Biden) influence the crypto‑stablecoin boom and U.S. Treasuries?

Anatoly Yakovenko 2:45
Not
Jason Calacanis 2:46
dissimilar to our media business going around
Anatoly Yakovenko 2:48
the
Jason Calacanis 2:48
world and infecting people's
Chamath Palihapitiya 2:51
consciousness. 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, you know, I can't speak for all founders, but, you know, I think founders are driven by kind of 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, you know, through Elon satellites. That's 120 milliseconds. So a dollar can be in New York, in London, in Singapore, in Nairobi in 120 milliseconds.
Anatoly Yakovenko 3:55
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. And did you
Chamath Palihapitiya 4:12
feel that
Anatoly Yakovenko 4:13
you
Chamath Palihapitiya 4:13
had missed it somehow?
Anatoly Yakovenko 4:15
When I had my kind of 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.

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