In this episode, ARK’s Brett Winton and Lorenzo Valente sit down with Anatoly Yakovenko — co-founder of Solana — to explore how Solana is evolving into a high-performance, globally distributed financial infrastructure. Anatoly shares the network’s origin story, explains how Solana leverages parallel compute and hardware innovation to scale, and outlines why execution—not just settlement—is the future of crypto-based finance.

The discussion covers how Solana compares to centralized systems like NASDAQ, why monolithic architecture matters, and how innovations like Firedancer and Alpenglow will push the boundaries of decentralized coordination and real-time price discovery. They also explore tokenomics, validator incentives, and why Solana is built to handle machine-generated transaction volumes at global scale.

Anatoly offers a wide-ranging perspective on decentralization, future throughput limits, and why blockchains should eventually become invisible to end users.