Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko on Crypto's Next Era: Quantum, AI, and the Future of Money
Summary
- Yakovenko sees U.S. stablecoin legislation as a catalyst that could turn crypto into global financial infrastructure. He says the GENIUS Act could unlock an estimated $1 trillion–$10 trillion of stablecoins on public, permissionless chains and predicts that within five years “the internet is going to be the largest holder of U.S. Treasuries.” He noted that Tether was already somewhere around number five among Treasury holders.
- Solana’s differentiation is execution speed, not simply another settlement rail. Yakovenko’s back-of-the-envelope calculation suggested a design “1,000 times faster than ETH,” supporting his division of labor: “Ethereum [is] the world’s settlement layer, while Solana is the world’s execution layer.”
- Regulation, rather than engineering, is now the principal constraint on tokenized securities and globally accessible markets. Once regulators permit public-key cryptography to manage and transfer assets, Yakovenko argues, anything could move between Nasdaq and Solana: “the genie’s out of the bottle.”
- Creator coins could support a crypto-native media model, but regulatory clarity is needed to connect tokens to economic rights. Yakovenko imagines a crypto-native TikTok and says projects such as Clanosaur could eventually associate copyright and revenue with their characters; today, regulation prevents a clear link between a creator’s success and a coin’s value.
- Real-world assets are needed if DeFi is to become a risk-management system rather than one correlated crypto trade. Yakovenko points to real estate, bonds, insurance and other uncorrelated assets as potential hedges because “the only free lunch in finance is uncorrelated assets.”
- Yakovenko assigns a striking 50/50 probability to a quantum breakthrough within five years and wants Bitcoin migration preparations accelerated. After the host defined a breakthrough as being able to run Shor’s algorithm, he agreed; his trigger is Google and Apple adopting quantum-resistant cryptography.
- Yakovenko expects Bitcoin to survive even major concentration shocks, provided acquisition remains open and global. When asked about one holder reaching 20%–30%, he warned of painful risk for holders if entities collapsed but said Bitcoin could survive. On payments, the host contrasted Visa and Mastercard’s roughly 10-basis-point margins with banks’ roughly 2%; Yakovenko replied, “Long stablecoin, short banks,” then declined to endorse it as financial advice.
Deep dive
1. Yakovenko’s stablecoin thesis turns the internet into a Treasury buyer
Yakovenko called the policy change during crypto czar David Sacks’s first six months “night and day,” adding that he did not know whether the industry could have survived another four years of the “Gensler regime.”
His GENIUS Act thesis: it could unlock an estimated $1 trillion–$10 trillion of stablecoins on public, permissionless chains. Looking at Treasury ownership, he noted China, Japan and other countries, with Tether “somewhere around number five”; he predicted that within five years the internet would become the largest holder of U.S. Treasuries.
America’s financial system remains the most trusted and robust, he argued, but its pre-internet interfaces are “kind of like a fax-machine-based” system. Crypto supplies a transparent, capitalist and Western-aligned internet layer for interfacing U.S. finance with the rest of the world.
2. Solana targets execution and can also handle settlement
Yakovenko’s “science-fiction version of finance” is one giant ledger serving Nairobi, New York, London and Singapore, with dollars and assets moving at the physical limit of fiber—or through satellites—roughly 120 milliseconds around the world.
His back-of-the-envelope Eureka calculation suggested a design “1,000 times faster than ETH.” When he spoke to the ETH community, he found its members focused on settlement, where minutes can suffice; he frames Ethereum as the world’s settlement layer and Solana as the world’s execution layer, while noting that a fast execution engine can also settle.
Memecoins and NFTs took off, he said in part, because anyone can create markets for anything while regulation was slow to catch up. His intended targets were stocks, bonds, Treasuries and other real-world assets.
Incumbents nevertheless have a route in. Solana is “like an email standard” whose operators do not report to Yakovenko; if it succeeds, Nasdaq could make more money by running a node and integrating directly, while regulated firms handle U.S. customers and Solana provides global availability.
3. Regulation, not code, gates creator economics and useful DeFi
Mass adoption may require learned intuition, not perfect abstraction. Yakovenko recalled arriving from the USSR in 1992, when his parents could not understand a web link; as stablecoins proliferate into corporate back offices, users will similarly learn why secret keys, hardware and trusted displays matter.
A crypto-native TikTok could use a different monetization mechanism from advertising, which Yakovenko said creates incentives for spam and duplication. People already watch particular creators and buy associated coins, but regulatory clarity is needed to tie creator success clearly to a coin’s value and provide appropriate legal protection.
His example was Clanosaur, a project featuring cute animated dinosaurs that raised funding by creating a collective set of characters. Yakovenko said it would be valuable if those dinosaurs could eventually have copyright and revenue association, but that this is not yet possible.
The Clarity Act matters because, describing his own experience, Yakovenko said, “We raised a seed round” of about $14 million and that he had to spend $2 million of it on lawyer fees to launch a token in the United States—more than 10% of his runway. The legislation, he said, aims to reduce that cost and make U.S. launches easier. His broader DeFi case is for real estate, bonds, insurance and other uncorrelated real-world assets; the host supplied oil as a commodities example.
4. Quantum risk is concrete; the AI-crypto fit remains speculative
After the host defined a quantum breakthrough as being able to run Shor’s algorithm, Yakovenko agreed and gave a 50/50 chance of one occurring within five years. His recommendation: prepare Bitcoin’s move to a quantum-resistant signature scheme and “speed things up.”
Google and Apple adopting quantum-resistant stacks would be his migration signal because consumer support would effectively be solved. The threat requires engineering work, but quantum could also become “as big a wealth creator as AI if we pull it off.”
On AI plus crypto, Yakovenko resisted an easy story: both may become ubiquitous, yet their valuable intersection is “really, really hard to pinpoint.” Distributed compute has not beaten colocated, traditionally financed data centers; his more speculative bet is an agent or creator personality that can be bought into with tokens and use them to pay for GPUs.
5. Bitcoin survives shocks; the host targets bank margins
When the host asked about a holder reaching 20%–30% of Bitcoin, Yakovenko said it could survive such shocks if acquisition remained an open, global competition and ownership was not restricted. He also warned of painful risk for people who own Bitcoin if concentrated entities collapsed.
Bitcoin’s defense is simplicity: proof of work is a “masterpiece,” and its narrow settlement design makes an unexpected rollback extremely difficult. Solana is necessarily more complicated because “the outcome we’re striving for is hyperperformance.”
The host favored transparent ownership as protection from state-sponsored “wrench attacks”; Yakovenko maintained that privacy is a right. His preferred defense is Western enforcement of property rights as foundational to wealth creation.
Yakovenko did not offer a price prediction for ETH’s revival, though he praised Vitalik as an amazing engineer with a strong, different vision. On payments, the host argued that Visa and Mastercard are technology companies with roughly 10-basis-point margins, while issuing and acquiring banks at roughly 2% are more disruptible; he suggested stablecoin transfers could bypass them. Yakovenko replied, “Long stablecoin, short banks,” then declined to comment when the host framed it as an investment call.