Crypto 2023: Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko is bullish on stakes

by Arthur · November 7, 2022

Looking ahead, Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko sees potential for growth in the blockchain-based gaming realm next year.

“What I really want to see, and this is already happening, is just more and more small creators, like artists who have a full-time job can go full-time to be a creator,” Yakovenko said Fortune. “There are new business models that have much stronger guarantees for creative rights and income.”

For him, this interest goes beyond non-fungible tokens that represent images and has more to do with the creation of digital assets that “really go into game development, how you manifest games, how you create new storylines, new IP,” Yakovenko said.

Blockchain-based gaming has received a lot of attention and multi-billion dollar investment, but the space has not yet seen much success. Recently, blockchain-based game studios have cut staff and restructured in the midst of Crypto Winter.

Still, Yakovenko remains bullish.

“I would really love to see a vision of the metaverse where it’s all protocol-based, millions of small-time creators who are all able to do it full-time because they’re contributing to this one giant economy without any extractive, massive fees on the platform,” he said .

As for Solana’s future in particular, some are predicting that it will be known as the “NFT chain” in a multi-chain world – and Yakovenko agrees.

While Solana was originally built to be “a blockchain at NASDAQ speed,” Yakovenko said, the NFT use case is “kind of obvious in retrospect. All the technology you build for finance means the network has to be as cheap, fast and reliable as possible.”

However, Solana has had reliability issues, with recent outages and downtime. During the Solana Breakpoint conference in recent days, Yakovenko addressed these obstacles, saying that solutions have emerged. He cited further development and decentralization on the network to help with reliability, and mentioned the Firedancer validator, which is being built by Jump Crypto.

Solana announced a number of partnerships through the Breakpoint conference. On Saturday, e.g. Google Cloud announced that it runs a block-producing Solana validator to “participate in and validate the network,” and Metas Instagram announced it introduces Solana NFTs on its platform.

“I think some of the adoption that we’re seeing in crypto right now that is more consumer-oriented is definitely coming from the creators who are able to make NFTs and other digital art,” Yakovenko said. “And it seems like it’s growing.”