Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs and blockchain expert, reveals the dramatic resilience of Solana following the FTX collapse. He emphasizes that this crisis acted like a 'band-aid rip' for the ecosystem, prompting necessary improvements. Yakovenko discusses regulatory challenges faced by U.S. crypto entrepreneurs, the migration of talent abroad, and Solana's promising innovations in decentralized finance. He shares insights into the future of finance on blockchain and the anticipated launch of the FireDancer technology, hinting at a revolutionary shift.
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question_answer ANECDOTE
FTX Collapse Impact
Solana's ecosystem faced uncertainty after FTX's collapse, with SOL plunging 67%.
Anatoly Yakovenko focused on reassuring founders, many of whom had their runway on FTX, to persevere.
insights INSIGHT
FTX Collapse as a Cleansing Event
FTX's collapse, while initially painful, ultimately strengthened Solana by removing less committed participants.
This allowed the core community of developers who genuinely valued the technology to thrive.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Initial Impression of SBF
Anatoly Yakovenko initially perceived Sam Bankman-Fried as a "super genius."
He later realized FTX's internal strategies were opaque and seemingly self-serving.
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Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze
Laura Shin
The Cryptopians delves into the story of idealists, technologists, and opportunists fighting to bring cryptocurrency to the masses. The book focuses on the founding of Ethereum by Vitalik Buterin and the subsequent crypto fever it created. It introduces readers to larger-than-life characters such as Buterin, Charles Hoskinson, and Joe Lubin, highlighting the personal and professional conflicts that shaped the early days of Ethereum. The narrative explores the booms, busts, and internecine wars within the crypto world, revealing it as a deeply personal struggle to influence the coming revolution in money, culture, and power.
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Solana’s native token SOL has been one of the best-performing cryptos of the year, up more than 500% so far, but you wouldn’t have guessed that would be the case given how closely tied the blockchain was to FTX, which held huge amounts of SOL and was a big supporter of the platform. The blockchain also experienced numerous outages in 2022. But Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana’s co-founder, says the discipline imposed by FTX’s collapse, as well as improvements to the technology, have made Solana stronger.
On this episode of Unchained, Yakovenko talks about the impact of FTX’s collapse, his early impressions of Sam Bankman-Fried, the SEC’s designation of SOL as a security, how entrepreneurs are leaving the U.S. because of the regulatory risk, SOL’s share of the stablecoin market, and why he thinks it’s inevitable that finance will eventually run on something like Solana.
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