Anatoly Yakovenko

OUT NOW: Solana's Founding Story | Anatoly Yakovenko

Nov 10, 2025 · 1:06

Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder and CEO of Solana, tells the story of how his eureka moment—a calculation showing Solana could achieve 1,000 to 10,000 times more throughput than Ethereum or Bitcoin—led to a manic four days and eventually to a blockchain that processes in a single month as many transactions as Ethereum does in its lifetime. He details the brutal fundraising process, requiring 1,000 meetings to secure the first major check, and the near-catastrophic moment during Solana's biggest conference (1,600 developers, sold out) when FTX collapsed on the flight back, threatening the entire ecosystem. The episode explores Anatoly's vision for decentralized finance beyond speculation and the challenges of building a truly open on-chain financial system.

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.