Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has declared that blockchain protocols should perpetually “iterate” to outlive.
In a January 17 publish on the social media platform X, Yakovenko argued {that a} community’s longevity is strictly tied to its skill to iterate.
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Yakovenko Outlines AI-Pushed Future for Solana
He posited that for a blockchain to keep away from obsolescence, it mustn’t ever cease altering to suit the shifting necessities of its builders and customers.
“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.
Yakovenko outlined a future the place Solana doesn’t depend on any single particular person or core engineering group to drive these iterations. As a substitute, he argued that protocol upgrades ought to emanate from a various, decentralized group of contributors.
I truly assume pretty in a different way on this. Solana must by no means cease iterating. It shouldn’t rely upon any single group or particular person to take action, but when it ever stops altering to suit the wants of its devs and customers, it would die.
It must be so materially helpful to people… https://t.co/itqr1b5az4
— toly 🇺🇸 (@toly) January 17, 2026
Curiously, the Solana government stated synthetic intelligence may play a central position in sustaining the community’s speedy improvement by shaping its governance and coding sooner or later.
“LLM can generate a SIMD spec so tight that LLM can verify it’s complete and unambiguous and implement it. The only long pole is agreement and testnet soak testing,” he claimed.
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This method would ostensibly permit the community to self-optimize at a tempo not possible for human-only groups.
In the meantime, Yakovenko’s feedback function a direct counter-argument to a current strategic imaginative and prescient laid out by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Buterin just lately launched the idea of the “walkaway test.” This can be a milestone through which the Ethereum community turns into self-sustaining and might function completely with out its founding builders.
Underneath this imaginative and prescient, Ethereum will “ossify,” reaching a state through which its worth proposition is derived from the protocol’s permanence fairly than the promise of future options.
Buterin acknowledged that Ethereum should proceed to vary within the brief time period. Nonetheless, he emphasised that the community goals to lock the protocol as soon as it clears particular technical hurdles.
A few of these hurdles embrace the necessity for full quantum resistance, ample scalability, and a long-lasting state structure.
Certainly, this conflict of ideologies delineates two distinct paths for the crypto market.
Buterin’s roadmap positions Ethereum as a dependable settlement system that prioritizes safety and immutability to draw belief.
Conversely, Yakovenko’s technique positions Solana as a high-growth know-how platform. This implies the community prioritizes velocity and aggressive adaptation to seize market share in a aggressive setting.

