Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko is a big fan of agentic coding

The rise of agent coding tools has been a fundamental shift for software engineers across the industry — but for Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, it seems to have landed especially hard. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Yakovenko said he’s increasingly comfortable taking a backseat to software development work.

“Artificial intelligence has been a great force multiplier for someone who is an expert,” Yakovenko said, describing his experience with representational coding after more than 15 years of software development. “Now I can just watch Claude shuffle through his thing and I can almost smell it 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.”

The co-founder of the Solana cryptocurrency protocol, Yakovenko has seen tremendous success this year even as many cryptocurrencies have struggled. The system announced $2.85 billion in annual revenue earlier this month, which is largely powered by cryptocurrency trading platforms. Even more impressive was the first Solana currency exchange (or ETF), launched the day before Yakovenko took the stage. The fund was launched by crypto asset manager Bitwise inflows of nearly $70 million in a single day.

On stage, Yakovenko attributed the success to the growing acceptance of crypto, especially by the conventional financial industry. “If you’re a back-office finance person, you actually get into crypto much, much faster,” Yakovenko said. “Financial people deal with settlement risk all the time. They deal with banking risk all the time.”

At the same time, cryptocurrencies have drawn significant new criticism for the potential for public bribery, particularly in relation to Solana-hosted Trumpcoin. The coin has staged about $350 million to the presidentwhich critics regard as a form of bribery — especially in the wake of Trump’s high-profile pardons of Tron founder Justin Sun and Founder of Binance Changpeng Zhao.

But while 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, “both are protocols, both the email and the underlying protocol that creates this market.”