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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.
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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
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KuCoin captured a record share of centralised exchange volume in 2025, with more than $1.25tn traded as its volumes grew faster than the wider crypto market.
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- KuCoin recorded over $1.25 trillion in total trading volume in 2025, equivalent to an average of roughly $114 billion per month, marking its strongest year on record.
- This performance translated into an all-time high share of centralised exchange volume, as KuCoin’s activity expanded faster than aggregate CEX volumes, which slowed during periods of lower market volatility.
- Spot and derivatives volumes were evenly split, each exceeding $500 billion for the year, signalling broad-based usage rather than reliance on a single product line.
- Altcoins accounted for the majority of trading activity, reinforcing KuCoin’s role as a primary liquidity venue beyond BTC and ETH at a time when majors saw more muted turnover.
- Even as overall crypto volumes softened mid-year, KuCoin maintained elevated baseline activity, indicating structurally higher user engagement rather than short-lived volume spikes.
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Solana’s new phase is ‘much more about finance,’ says Backpack CEO Armani Ferrante
The Solana ecosystem has spent the past year doubling down on a financial infrastructure, Backpack CEO Armani Ferrante told CoinDesk.
What to know:
- Solana’s latest phase looks a lot less flashy than its memecoin-fueled highs, and that may be the goal.
- Armani Ferrante, CEO of crypto exchange Backpack, told CoinDesk in an interview the Solana ecosystem has spent the past year doubling down on a more sober focus: financial infrastructure. A
- fter years of experimentation as the wider crypto industry focused on NFTs, games and social tokens, attention is now shifting back toward decentralized finance, trading and payments.
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