How Solana Survived When Most Other Coins Fell | Anatoly Yakovenko Story
Nov 9, 2025 · 54:31
Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder and CEO of Solana, recounts how a eureka moment after two coffees and a beer led to encoding passage of time as a data structure, enabling 1,000 to 10,000 times more throughput than Ethereum or Bitcoin. He describes the grueling process of taking 1,000 meetings to secure funding, surviving the FTX collapse that wiped 97% of Solana's value, and how ecosystem teams like Backpack turned anger into momentum. Yakovenko explains that Solana now processes in a single month as many transactions as Ethereum’s entire lifetime, at fees under 0.2 cents. His long-term vision is a single on-chain system handling payments, trading, IPOs, and global finance atomically at the speed of light, reducing costs to the physics minimum. He predicts stablecoins will drive a 10x increase in digital dollars and that on-chain IPOs could democratize capital access for founders.
