The rise of agentic coding tools has been a sea change for software engineers across the industry — but for Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, it seems to have landed particularly hard. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Yakovenko said he’s become increasingly comfortable taking a backseat in software development tasks.
“AI has been a great force multiplier for somebody who’s an expert,” said Yakovenko, describing his experience with agentic coding after more than fifteen years developing software. “Now I can just watch Claude churning through its thing and I can almost smell when it’s going off the rails.”
“If people are in a meeting with me and I’m not paying attention,” he continued, “it’s because I’m watching Claude.”
Co-founder of the Solana cryptocurrency protocol, Yakovenko has seen immense success this year, even as many cryptocurrencies have struggled. The system announced $2.85 billion in annual revenue earlier this month, fueled largely by crypto trading platforms. Even more impressive was the Solana coin’s first exchange-traded fund (or ETF), launched the day before Yakovenko took the stage. Launched by the crypto asset manager Bitwise, the fund saw nearly $70 million of inflows in a single day.
On stage, Yakovenko attributed the success to a growing acceptance of crypto, especially from the conventional finance industry. “If you are a back-office finance person, you actually get crypto much much faster,” Yakovenko said. “Finance people deal with settlement risk all the time. They deal with banking risk all the time.”
Over the same period, cryptocurrency has drawn significant new criticism for enabling public bribery, particularly in connection with the Solana-hosted Trumpcoin. The coin has directed an estimated $350 million to the president, which critics see as a form of bribery — particularly in the wake of Trump’s high-profile pardons for Tron founder Justin Sun and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao.
But as long as Solana is an open protocol, Yakovenko has little control over the coins it hosts. “I could send you an email with a link to Trumpcoin or Fartcoin,” Yakovenko explained on stage, “and both of those are protocols, both the email and the underlying protocol that creates that market.”
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