Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, is a big fan of agent coding.

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

“AI is a tremendous force multiplier for someone who is an expert,” Yakovenko said, describing his experience with agent coding after more than 15 years of software development. “Now I can just watch Claude struggle with his thing and I can almost feel when he’s going off the rails.”

“If people are in a meeting with me and I don’t pay attention,” he continues, “it’s because I’m observing Claude.

Co-founder of cryptocurrency protocol Solana, Yakovenko has seen immense success this year, even as many cryptocurrencies have struggled. The system reported annual revenue of $2.85 billion earlier this month, fueled largely by cryptocurrency trading platforms. Even more impressive was the coin’s first exchange-traded fund (or ETF) Solana, launched the day before Yakovenko took the stage. Launched by crypto asset manager Bitwise, the fund saw nearly $70 million in inflows in a single day.

On stage, Yakovenko attributed the success to a growing acceptance of crypto, particularly from the conventional financial sector. “If you’re a back-office financial manager, you actually get cryptocurrencies a lot faster,” Yakovenko said. “Financiers constantly face settlement risk. They constantly face banking risk.”

During the same period, the cryptocurrency received significant new criticism for enabling public corruption, particularly in relation to the Solana-hosted Trumpcoin. The coin earned the president around $350 million, which critics view as a form of corruption – especially following Trump’s high-profile pardons of 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 could send you an email with a link to Trumpcoin or Fartcoin,” Yakovenko explained on stage, “and those two protocols are both the email and the underlying protocol that creates this market.”