Innovation Uber Alles at Solana

Yakovenko on top form

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has never been one to mince his words.

His recent statements on the future of the high-performance blockchain network and its native SOL token are no exception.

In a recent social media post outlining his plans for the network, he said that any stagnation in development would spell the end for Solana.

“To not die requires to always be useful. So the primary goal of protocol changes should be to solve a dev or user problem. That doesn’t mean solve every problem, in fact, saying no to most problems is necessary,” he wrote on X.

Solana has made its name on low costs, speed and scalability – precisely the elements that have sparked massive institutional interest of late.

Despite this, Yakovenko insists that Solana cannot afford to relax for a minute when it comes to innovations that align with developer and user requirements.

Yakovenko is only too aware that the SOL to USD price too often languishes in the red and maintains that the move towards black hinges on satisfying developer and user needs.

More means more

One of Yakovenko’s great beliefs is that the protocol cannot rely on single groups or individuals for its survival.

In his view, there should be multiple developers and users both earning from and ploughing back into the open-source protocol.

“It needs to be so materially useful to humans and used by so many devs that are gainfully employed from the value of the transactions on solana, that the devs have spare LLM token credits to upstream improvements to this common open source protocol,” he stated in the post.

He has even put forward that Solana should evolve beyond its founding organisations to inject fresh ideas into the ecosystem.

Such a move will also encourage broader user participation.

His statements also zeroed in on governance mechanisms that should directly fund development work. In this way decisions at the top would align with the eventual technical implementation.

Proof is in the pudding

As forthright as Yakovenko may be in his messaging, Solana’s achievements in 2025 do give a lot of credibility to his thinking.

Compared to the previous year, Solana block space grew some 25% to further enhance user experience and lower fees in the process.

In addition, the network welcomed new teams of decentralised finance (DeFi) specialists who succeeded in turning it into a high-throughput financial platform.

Such was Solana’s impact that the entire crypto industry started mulling the possibility of establishing a type of “decentralised NASDAQ”.

It was moonshot thinking based on measurable outcomes – just the way Yakovenko likes to proceed.

There’s always a next

Solana will soon unleash its Alpenglow consensus upgrade, which is expected to greatly improve reliability and reduce transaction finalisation times from twelve seconds to one.

Analysts see this as a key moment for Solana as it increasingly enters the domain of high-stakes financial activity associated with traditional institutions.

Even then, Yakovenko is unlikely to rest on his laurels.

As he reminded his followers on X: “You should always count on there being a next version of solana.”