Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
How Crypto Is Reshaping Finance and Challenging the Status Quo with Solana Founder Anatoly Yakovenko
22 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: How is crypto reshaping the traditional finance landscape?
Crypto is eating the last big part of the world, which is finance. No human can comprehend it. The reason why America has been so successful is that we end up building things faster than anyone else. Do you think that crypto will completely replace fiat? Our government is aging. I think the Democrat leadership kind of shot themselves in the foot with crypto.
What does the future of finance look like? I'm a super optimist. I think if all our problems are money problems, we're truly blessed.
Wow.
Anatoly Yakovenko, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So you have said that crypto will win against traditional finance, but I want to know why. What is it about crypto that's better for the average person today?
The basic reason is that a lot of the kind of growth over the last, you know, I think since the 80s has been software eating the world. I think this is a Marc Andreessen line and you kind of see technology as it improves, start to automate more and more pieces of what we do with like humans and fax machines and stuff like this.
And crypto is eating the last part, I think, of the last big part of the world, which is finance. And finance has been really, really hard to replace with software because there's just so much trust baked into finance.
Like if you actually kind of go through the process, anyone that's been through the process of buying a house, you get all the work that people have done legally to make that as trustless as possible. You see that in the 800 pages of disclosures that you read. No human can comprehend it. There's just no way to consume that information and make a rational decision.
So you trust the people in the process, the brokers, the dealers, et cetera, to kind of not screw you over. And we have laws and stuff to kind of keep everyone in line. But because of that, it's really expensive.
The cool thing about blockchain and crypto is that you can start replacing some of those pieces with software and cryptography because we have mathematical guarantees that you cannot violate the cryptography portion. So you can trust that particular thing. It's still a really slow and hard process because
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Chapter 2: What advantages does crypto offer to the average person?
I've heard you talk about the current way that the financial system works is basically like a regressive tax on the entire economy. What do you mean by that? And how would crypto solve that?
Yeah, so my engineering brain, think of it as roads. If you have roads with potholes and tolls that are expensive, that's a cost that's paid by everybody in that economy. The cars wear down faster, you've got to spend more gas because the roads are inefficient, stuff like this. And when you straighten everything out and remove all the potholes, you remove that tax on the economy.
So you're paying less of that tax in every transaction that you do.
If you were going to remove the analogy and just say like, these are the beats that create the expense or the friction or whatever, like what are the actual potholes?
Yeah, basically anytime, like especially if you ever bought a house, there's always somebody that for every little fee and every person that you interact with, they charge some percentage of the sale of the house. They're doing the same amount of work no matter what, right? This is kind of that little pothole or whatever that an expensive truck full of expensive items drives over.
that's the cost that those items pay. And that cost is borne by the whole economy. So can we replace those with software? And I think the stablecoin is kind of the easiest product to understand. You have a ledger that represents money in some bank account that has been invested in treasuries.
And then you have a digital representation of that that anybody can transfer on a blockchain like Solano or Ethereum. And the cost to transfer that doesn't require you to pass those funds through some intermediary like you have with
a credit card payment that has to go through the credit card issuer visa or the transfer of whatever agent visa, then the credit card issuer, the credit issuer, the bank, then the receiving bank, then the actual merchant's account. All those little hops somebody charges a fee for.
But on a blockchain, you've kind of virtualized all of that and replaced it with software where I can send you a token. The cost to send that token is the cost to move memory around in a bunch of computers. And blockchains are excruciatingly inefficient computers, right? We're talking about like doing the same computation tens of thousands of times over and over to give you those
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Chapter 3: How does blockchain technology build trust in financial transactions?
And we sold like 150,000 of them. So it's roughly $40 million through both channels, credit cards and stablecoins. As a merchant, we had to pay a fee on the credit cards, about 2%. And we didn't have to pay that fee on the stablecoin part. And we got the stablecoin funds immediately. We were able to use them immediately.
On the credit cards, we had to wait 60 to 90 days before we actually got the funds in our bank account. So that 90 days is a cost. The 2% is a cost. And with the stablecoins, we literally had the funds and we could use them immediately to pay salaries and to go build the phones and stuff like that.
So that's a very clear example of inefficiencies that just for that one small kind of phone launch added up to several engineering salaries. That's like three people's salaries that I could have paid for.
Right. So we have essentially a system that's made before the Internet, a system that overcame trust by essentially building all this human infrastructure around it. And everybody just sort of holds their nose and goes, I'm going to trust the credit card companies or I'm going to trust the escrow or whatever to get these things through.
So assuming that we can solve the trust problem and people en masse really either become completely agnostic and the companies just integrate blockchain technology.
So you don't have to trust blockchain because you can verify it. And this is the reason why it's slowly overcoming traditional finance is that you're not replacing it with, I got to trust Joe at Bank of America and now I'm trusting Vitalik at Ethereum. No, you can verify that Ethereum or Solana work from the software itself because the software is open source. You can go download it yourself.
Now, the vast majority of people are not going to do that, but you have a business that wants to compete with those other kind of middlemen and wants to cut them out and create a service that's cheaper and faster. They can verify that Solana is open source software and they get exactly what they get out of it, what they expect.
So somebody like Circle can issue a stablecoin on top of Solana without trusting me or anyone else. And this is how that replacement of trust of humans to software ends up benefiting consumers. So we as a merchant, ironically, built the protocol initially and now I'm using it for its intended purposes, right?
Me as a merchant, I could use Circle and know exactly that I'm getting digital dollars without paying all these intermediaries.
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Chapter 4: What are the inefficiencies in the current financial system?
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But right now, stable coins is like a big deal in when you start talking politically, people are really talking about, hey, we got to get stable coins. What do you have like a pithy breakdown of what a stable coin is and why they matter so much?
Yeah, stablecoin is a bear asset, which means that it's stuff that you own. Like if you lose it, it's gone. So this is something that is very different from a bank account where you can never lose it because the bank holds your money. They owe it to you, right? You're effectively kind of lending it to the bank. But if you own a stablecoin, if you lose it, it's gone. Nobody's going to recover it.
So it's kind of like old school stock certificates that you put in your safe deposit. If it burns down, those things are gone. So that's a very different ownership model. But the reason why you can implement it now is because of cryptography and all these things that blockchains provide.
And the reason why you can lower the cost now is because since you own it, when you transfer it to somebody else, that's a peer-to-peer transaction. There's no third party transaction. So when you transfer it, you have full guarantees that you received it because of the cryptography and blockchain.
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Chapter 5: How do stablecoins function and why are they important?
So when I look at this, the sort of data idea that I see maybe years ahead of other people, just because I've the more I've researched money and finance, the more angry that I've gotten. So my background, the speed run, I told you a little bit about it, did not grow up with money, came into wealth through entrepreneurship.
In that transition, realized I knew how to make money, but I didn't understand money itself. I certainly didn't know how to invest it. And so as I started learning about that to try to help people during covid, blah, blah, blah.
You end up going down a rabbit hole of understanding that when people say money makes the world go round, they're really glossing over something that's kind of terrifying that right now, because we've created this global K-shaped economy, people can feel, but they don't necessarily understand what's driving it.
So when I think about, oh, we've got this libertarian-leaning ideology that's pushing people to put control of money back in the hands of people, I go, that is transformational because people don't understand the reason you can't make ends meet right now is precisely because bankers and politicians understand how to create an extractive system where they run deficits, print money like crazy,
use the hidden tax of inflation to confiscate wealth, and then only the people that understand asset ownership are protected. And since they all understand asset ownership, they're like, meh, I don't mind. And so the bottom essentially falls out of the world every so often, which is what we're living through right now. But my maybe overly optimistic eye is,
as we move towards a world that's built on cryptocurrency, now it's like you get to choose. Well, what currency would you like to be in? And if you go into one like a Bitcoin or something like that, that can't be inflated, now you at least have that hedge I think the big problem is people just can't build the new mental model.
So it's like the generations that grew up with fiat, they're kind of screwed. But generations that grow up where it's like, yeah, this is just how money works, they don't have to understand shadow banking and all that stuff. They can just be like, oh, I put my money in this one. It can't be inflated. Yay, now I can actually save my way to prosperity.
I don't have to invest my way to prosperity, which is the game that's being played right now. Do you think I'm overblowing it? Is that delusional? Never thought about it?
I think I'm a super optimist. I think if all our problems are money problems, we're truly blessed. Wow. Because I think money's virtual, like Bitcoin is virtual. It is just data. If you double the amount of Bitcoin in the world, the world's not any wealthier.
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Chapter 6: What challenges does crypto face in gaining mainstream adoption?
I create more Bitcoin networks. It's not marginally wealthier, but not really. As if I double the number of Teslas in the world, you can measurably say, we have more stuff now. There's more stuff per person. There's twice as many people to have fully autonomous cars. I can't kill somebody. It's all good things, right? But doubling the fiat is just a value of exchange.
It's just a super virtual thing. It sucks when we don't have contestable markets and there is middlemen that can extract that value without ever being challenged. I think that's where you start getting these hidden tax that drains the rest of the economy. The vampire squid. That part is bad. The vampire squid? This is what? I've never heard that before.
This is the meme of what to call Goldman Sachs the vampire squid or whatever. Just because there's tentacles everywhere and extracting every turn. But I think if it's contestable, if you can go and bid against their business and charge less, then... you start converge at a value that that's appropriate to whatever service they're providing. I think that that part is good.
So I think what, like how I think of store of value, I think is actually, I mean, I've gotten in trouble on Twitter for saying this, but If you look at the Intelligent Investor book, store of value or commodities, they're not investable instruments. You shouldn't actually be investing in them because they don't have any model that can show that they're going to
actually build something like create more in the future so there's no fundamentals upon which to base your investment is that exactly so what the traditional fundamental valuation is called discount cash flow so you look at the future and how much money this thing will make and think of your investment as if you're buying a hot dog stand
You're going to pay money to own this physical thing, and then you're going to sell hot dogs and the cost of materials and your profit margin should tell you how much you should invest in this particular hot dog stand over another one. It's very straightforward, right? And if the hot dog stand doesn't sell any hot dogs, it'll make zero money.
And you've just bought a stand that maybe you can eat your own hot dogs, but that's about it. Right. It's, it's pretty much useless. Um, but there's still reason I think for store value to exist.
And for the reasons that you said, there is a lot of middlemen and a lot of these inefficiencies that are run by humans throughout all the stack, whether it's banking and even like private sector or public sector, um, That is effectively like Bitcoin can be a small hedge.
And the example that I bring up is kind of unfortunate, but like just in my lifetime, you know, roughly 50 years, I've seen one superpower collapse that was really bad. My family had to go through that and flee to come to America right in 91. So just based on my priors, there's 2% chance of a superpower collapse per lifetime.
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