We sit down with the hottest new protocol layer in crypto today: Solana, and its cofounder Anatoly Yakovenko, who is the CEO of Solana Labs. If you listened to our Ethereum episode or follow crypto even at a cursory level, you've likely heard of Solana and its ability to scale transactions thousands of times higher than Ethereum. And, unlike other so-called "ETH killers", Solana is doing so in production today with large and real applications. We dive into the project's history coming out of the 2017-18 crypto winter, how it works and what's ahead now that they've recently raised $314m (yes that is Pi $million) from a16z and Polychain Capital, with their native SOL tokens currently trading at a market cap around $10B (!). 

Sponsors:

WorkOS: https://bit.ly/workos25
Sentry: https://bit.ly/acquiredsentry
ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredsn

More Acquired!:

• Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodes
• Join the Slack
• Subscribe to ACQ2
• Merch Store!

© Copyright 2015-2025 ACQ, LLC

Topics covered:

• Anatoly's background as a wireless engineer at Qualcomm, and how it led to a fundamental discovery of how to improve crypto system scalability
• Solana's role in the crypto protocol ecosystem and why there's a need for it (and why it can and will exist) alongside Ethereum versus "killing" it
• Starting Solana during the 2017-18 crypto winter, and how it forced them to focus just on building and shipping versus raising and posturing
• Bootstrapping adoption with the mining community (Solana's "true believers") and the early and ardent support they provided
• Where Solana falls on the Vitalik "Scalability - Security - Decentralization" trilemma, and why Solana's superpower of maintaining composability is so attractive

Links:

• Solana: https://solana.com
  • Solana on Twitter: https://twitter.com/solana
  • Solana Hackathon submissions: https://airtable.com/shriNT26cAZeDJagn/tbl5fZ4E1BBbVAttW
• FTX: https://ftx.us
• Audius: https://audius.co

 Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.