The rise of agent coding tools was a game-changer for software engineers across the industry. But things seemed especially tough for Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Yakovenko said he has become increasingly comfortable putting software development tasks on the back burner.
After more than 15 years of software development, Yakovenko says of his experience with agent coding: “Now you can see Claude stirring that thing around, and you can almost smell when it's going off the rails.”
“If people are having meetings with me and I'm not paying attention, it's because I'm looking at Claude,” he continued.
Yakovenko, co-founder of the Solana cryptocurrency protocol, has achieved great success this year while many cryptocurrencies have struggled. Earlier this month, the system announced annual revenue of $2.85 billion, primarily from its crypto trading platform. Even more impressive was Solanacoin's first exchange-traded fund (ETF), which was launched the day before Yakovenko took the stage. The fund, launched by crypto asset management company Bitwise, received nearly $70 million in inflows in one day.
Yakovenko said on stage that the success was due to the growing acceptance of cryptocurrencies, especially within the traditional financial industry. “If you are a back-office finance person, you can actually get your hands on crypto much faster,” Yakovenko said. “Financial actors are always dealing with payment risk. They're always dealing with banking risk.”
Around the same time, cryptocurrencies have generated significant new criticism for enabling public bribery, particularly in relation to Trumpcoin hosted by Solana. The coin funnels an estimated $350 million to the president, which critics see as a form of bribery, especially in the wake of President Trump's high-profile pardons for Tron founder Justin Sun and Binance founder Changpeng Chao.
But as long as Solana is an open protocol, Yakovenko has little control over the coins it hosts. “You can also send an email with a link to Trumpcoin or Fatcoin, and those are both protocols, both the email and the underlying protocol that creates that market,” Yakovenko explained on stage.
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