In this episode, ARK’s Brett Winton and Lorenzo Valente sit down with Anatoly Yakovenko — co-founder of Solana — to explore how Solana is evolving into a high-performance, globally distributed financial infrastructure. Anatoly shares the network’s origin story, explains how Solana leverages parallel compute and hardware innovation to scale, and outlines why execution—not just settlement—is the future of crypto-based finance.
The discussion covers how Solana compares to centralized systems like NASDAQ, why monolithic architecture matters, and how innovations like Firedancer and Alpenglow will push the boundaries of decentralized coordination and real-time price discovery. They also explore tokenomics, validator incentives, and why Solana is built to handle machine-generated transaction volumes at global scale.
Anatoly offers a wide-ranging perspective on decentralization, future throughput limits, and why blockchains should eventually become invisible to end users.
Key Points From This Episode:
- 00:00:00 Why Solana exists
- 00:06:25 Time as a cryptographic primitive: Solving blockchain inefficiency with Time-Division Multiple Access (TDMA)
- 00:11:33 Why Proof of History may disappear — and what replaces it.
- 00:14:16 How cryptographic guarantees could replace 100 years of financial regulation.
- 00:20:03 Settlement vs. execution: Why all the value accrues at the execution layer.
- 00:26:29 Handling millions of transactions per second — and how Solana filters noise.
- 00:38:47 Solana vs. NASDAQ: Building a global atomic state machine for finance.
- 00:42:25 Validator incentives, staking yields, and real vs. inflationary revenue.
- 00:48:46 Firedancer, Alpenglow, and multiple concurrent proposers: What’s next for Solana.
- 00:54:52 Is quantum computing a real crypto threat? Anatoly’s timeline and optimism.
