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

The rise of agentic coding tools has been a sea change for software engineers across the industry — but for Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana Labs, it seems especially daunting. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Yakovenko said he’s increasingly comfortable taking a back seat to software development tasks.

“AI has been a great force multiplier for an expert,” Yakovenko said, describing his experience with agentic coding after more than fifteen years of software development. “Now I can just watch Claude churning through its thing and I can almost smell it when it’s 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.”

Co-founder of the Solana cryptocurrency protocol, Yakovenko has seen a lot of success this year, even as many cryptocurrencies have struggled. The system announced Annual revenue is $2.85 billion Earlier this month, the crypto trading platform was largely fueled by Even more impressive was Solana Coin’s first exchange-traded fund (or ETF), which launched the day before Yakovenko took the stage. Launched by crypto asset manager Bitwise, the fund saw About $70 million in inflow in one day

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

During the same period, cryptocurrencies have drawn significant new criticism for enabling public bribery, particularly with the Solana-hosted TrumpCoin. Mudra gave instructions Approximately $350 million to the PresidentWhat the critics see A form of bribery – especially in light of Trump’s high-profile pardon for Tron founder Justin Sun and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao.

But as long as Solana is an open protocol, Yakovenko has little control over the coins it hosts. “I can send you an email with a link to Trumpcoin or Fertcoin,” Yakovenko explained on stage, “and those are both protocols, the email and the underlying protocol that make up that market.”