Podcast Summary: Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

Episode #204: Solana Founder: Crypto Is About to Change Finance Like the Internet Changed Everything Else
Date: October 30, 2025
Guests: Anatoly Yakovenko (Solana Co-Founder/CEO), Dave Blundin, Salim Ismail, Alexander Wissner-Gross
Host: Peter H. Diamandis

Overview:

This episode dives into how Solana and the next generation of blockchain technology may radically transform the foundations of global finance, drawing strong historical parallels to the rise of the Internet. With Anatoly Yakovenko as the primary guest, the conversation explores the intersection of crypto, AI, new financial structures, decentralization, and the future of wealth, governance, and entrepreneurship.

Key Topics & Discussion Points

1. Solana’s Vision and Distinction (00:13–03:08, 08:34–14:47)

• Solana’s Purpose: Enable 1 billion people to be interconnected, focusing on execution rather than simply settlement (Ethereum) or store of value (Bitcoin).
  • “Solana is there to really enable that 1 billion people to go fully interconnected. Bitcoin is store of value. Ethereum is settlement. Solana’s execution.” – Anatoly Yakovenko [00:17]
• Proof of History: Anatoly details Solana’s original innovation—a cryptographically verifiable clock for blockchain synchronization, inspired by his Qualcomm engineering experience and the TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) concept in wireless.
  • “I kind of had this eureka moment at 4am... there’s a way to actually measure passage of time in a way that's hard to fake. And this is a recursive cryptographic hash function.” – Anatoly Yakovenko [09:40]
• Engineering Mindset: Salana’s comparative advantage is in engineering progress—throughput, concurrency, and solving ‘channel efficiency’ for global markets.

2. Convergence of Crypto and AI (03:08–06:37, 75:12–78:03)

• Markets & Intelligence: As cost and accessibility to “intelligence” (thanks to AI) plummet, creating and maintaining markets becomes vastly easier. Solana’s infrastructure enables permissionless, continuous market innovation.
  • “You have more markets that are viable and you kind of see this exponential explosion of everything being decided through market forces.” – Anatoly Yakovenko [03:08]
• AI Agents as Market Participants: Speculation about the rise of autonomous AI agents as major economic actors, needing economic mechanisms like stablecoins, smart contracts, and fast execution for survival and agency in the digital economy.
  • “In principle, new layer ones, including Solana, offer the premise for AI agents just to survive… If you're a baby AI agent… what do you do?” – Dave Blundin [04:53]

3. The Future of Financial Market Infrastructure (15:34–22:01, 17:43)

• Vision of a Single Global “Machine Layer”: Fast, decentralized nodes (block producers) around the world synchronize markets nearly instantaneously, maximizing speed-to-information and capital efficiency.
  • “So perfect layer one is something that can do both… you actually have concurrent block producers that are making blocks at the same time. One in Singapore, one in New York…” – Anatoly Yakovenko [15:34]
  • “If you imagine science fiction finance 20, 50 years from now, that's what it looks like. There's no computer science academic reason why it can’t exist. It's purely an engineering problem.” – Anatoly Yakovenko [17:28]

4. Stablecoins and Acceleration of Crypto Adoption (00:00–00:13, 20:33–22:01)

• The recent introduction of stablecoin legislation, and the projection of $1T–$10T worth of digital dollars minted in the next five years, is a catalyst for global adoption and innovation.
  • “The fact that we now have stablecoin legislation and that people are projecting like 1 trillion to 10 trillion worth of digital dollars being minted over the next five years is going to massively accelerate things.” – Anatoly Yakovenko [00:00, 20:33]

5. The Evolution and Friction in Legacy Financial Systems (22:01–27:45)

• Discussion of how TradFi’s human-centric, paperwork-heavy legacy imposes inefficiencies, slow settlements, and high costs—especially compared to what programmable finance can enable.
  • “It's very hard to cut that down to one day or four hours or 10 milliseconds because people are in the loop. Blockchain... can rely on cryptography…” – Anatoly Yakovenko [22:01]

6. Radically Lowering Financial Costs and Expanding Access (25:19–28:45)

• Finance as “Sand in the Gears”: Crypto’s mission is to shrink financial friction, making capital more accessible and lowering cost to true value provided.
  • “I think finance right now is taking out a huge chunk of the GDP and it's a tax, it's not actually generating as much value.” – Anatoly Yakovenko [25:19]
• Unlocking Human Potential: Lowering these costs means anyone, anywhere may find capital and opportunity, untethered from legacy gatekeepers.

7. Smart Contracts, DAO Governance, and Law On-Chain (32:36–39:09, 66:44–73:08)

• On-chain contracts remove intermediaries, but regulatory and legal frameworks still matter—especially for disputes and bankruptcy. The promise: on-chain systems could make financial recourse transparent, immediate, and programmatic.
  • “AAVE has liquidations, which is effectively the bankruptcy process... programmatically encoded and run on every block, every 12 seconds in Ethereum. And Kamino does it every 400 milliseconds on Solana.” – Anatoly Yakovenko [36:20]
• DAOs and Future Legal Evolution: Experimentation with DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), futarchy (decision markets), and the quest for on-chain law, possibly augmented by AI “lawyers” or encoded legal standards.

8. Decentralization and Permissionless Participation (41:23–44:19)

• Emphasis on permissionless architecture—anyone can run validators, produce blocks, deploy code, download and reconstruct the state, etc.
  • “We’ve always looked at permissionless being as the core part of decentralization... Can I participate in every part of the stack without needing a third party to approve me?” – Anatoly Yakovenko [41:23]

9. Solana's Tokenomics and "Everything Coin": Function and Value (45:47–48:29, 96:19–98:36)

• The “SOL” token’s core function is network security (Sybil resistance, anti-spam), not consumer payments, though the market has evolved organically to create value from speed and scarcity of access.
  • “The coin itself that runs the network, its only purpose is to prevent spam in the network… To use it for anything else, it exists as any other coin in the network.” – Anatoly Yakovenko [46:04]
• SOL's value comes from the opportunity-cost of timely execution, not just volume.

10. User Experience & Real Adoption Challenges (51:20–54:26, 93:36–94:49)

• There’s a usability gap: for crypto to become mainstream, the Web3 UX needs transformative improvement. Today’s DeFi is indeed “insane” in complexity.
  • “The complexity of going through those and funding a pool, etc, is so ridiculous… I have to have a hardcore crypto Sherpa standing next to me to make sure I don’t screw it up.” – Salim Ismail [53:39]

11. On-Chain Corporations, Regulation, and the Future of Law (66:26–73:08)

• When will we see “the first fully on-chain corporation”? US states are beginning to pass DAO-friendly legislation (notably Wyoming), but full legal clarity remains a work in progress.

12. Definitions of Wealth in a Technological Future (79:14–104:38)

• Debate on whether “real wealth” in the future is energy, compute (transistor flips), degrees of freedom, time and healthspan, or something else.
  • “I think it’s a no brainer that it’s purely tied to compute… And when you have AI agents who are the laborers of the world. Your number of workers is the amount of compute that you have.” – Alex Wiesner [100:40]
  • “I would argue real wealth will be measured to first order as future freedom of action.” – Alexander Wissner-Gross [101:49]
  • “I think people will never feel satisfied because there’s somebody else that has more degrees of freedom than them.” – Anatoly Yakovenko [103:38]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the future of programmable finance and society:
  • “The difference that blockchain creates is kind of like the SSL little lock in E-commerce in the 90s. I can transfer you a token, you can cryptographically verify that this token goes back to the issuer…” – Anatoly Yakovenko [30:29]
• On reducing friction:
  • “There’s 50,000 meme coins launched a day and there hasn’t been a single IPO.” – Anatoly Yakovenko [24:21]
• On the Web3 business model for AIs:
  • “Meme Coins is like a weird Keynesian beauty contest for attention… That’s the main business model I see right now for these poor baby AGIs.” – Anatoly Yakovenko [06:05]
• On globalization and equity:
  • “You basically have talent anywhere in the world that can acquire capital from anywhere in the world. And that unlocks… human potential.” – Anatoly Yakovenko [27:45]
• On crypto’s role in easing societal transitions:
  • “Human beings are incredibly resilient at figuring things out. And I think when we get into major issues like that, we'll figure it out.” – Salim Ismail [87:55]
• On the technological optimism of our era:
  • “I think the world is only going to get wealthier and we’re blessed to live in this age. So I’m very optimistic.” – Anatoly Yakovenko [84:57]

Important Timestamps

• Solana’s Mission Explained: [00:17]
• Proof of History and Founding Story: [09:40–14:47]
• Vision for a Single Global Market: [15:34–17:43]
• Stablecoin Projections and Impact: [00:00, 20:33–22:01]
• Future of On-chain Legal Dispute Resolution: [32:36–36:20]
• Solana as Anti-spam Token & Value Capture: [46:04, 96:19–98:36]
• Governance, DAOs, and Law as Code: [66:44–73:08]
• AI & Degrees of Freedom as Wealth: [100:04–103:38]

Tone & Style

The discussion is open, innovative, technical, and sometimes playful, with hosts and guests challenging each other on the edges of finance, technology, and societal change. Yakovenko repeatedly frames problems as engineering puzzles, while others explore deep societal, philosophical, and regulatory implications.

Conclusion

The panel concludes that programmable, scalable blockchains like Solana—especially when combined with proliferating AI and stablecoins—are setting the stage for finance to be as ubiquitous and frictionless as the Internet. Massive global transformation is expected in everything from entrepreneurship and AI-agent economies to legal frameworks and the meaning of wealth itself.

Yakovenko’s perspectives—rooted in engineering, immigrant experience, and a deep belief in decentralized, permissionless access—anchor the optimism that finance, like communications, will become a global utility, opening unprecedented degrees of freedom and opportunity for humanity.