Share this article
Most Influential 2021: Anatoly Yakovenko
Solana, a distributed network Yakovenko co-founded, has seen massive growth this year.
By CoinDesk
Updated May 11, 2023, 5:16 p.m. Published Dec 10, 2021, 8:24 p.m.
Anatoly Yakovenko calls himself the biggest skeptic of cryptocurrencies, even though he developed one of the fastest-growing crypto networks, Solana. The blockchain can reportedly process 50,000 transactions per second, far more than competing smart contract blockchain Ethereum, which stalls out at 45 transactions per second. In five years, Yakovenko expects the speed to be at least four times greater than it is now.
Solana has been one of the hottest topics this year, not just because of its over 10,000% price increase year to date, but also because of the quality talent moving to its ecosystem. It has a burgeoning decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) economies. Meanwhile, some of the industry’s biggest names, including Three Arrow Capital co-founders Su Zhu and Kyle Davies as well as FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, have made significant bets of Solana’s rapid growth.
The Complete List: CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2021
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
The Protocol: Stripe’s Tempo Testnet Goes Live
Also: ZKSync Lite to Sunset, Blockstream App Update, Axelar’s AgentFlux
What to know:
This article is featured in the latest issue of The Protocol, our weekly newsletter exploring the tech behind crypto, one block at a time. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Wednesday.
Top Stories
