Jul 11, 2025 · 56m · more-or-less
#107 Crypto Isn’t for Everyone (And That’s a Good Thing) with Anatoly Yakovenko · More or Less Podcast
Sam Lessin · 20m spoken Anatoly Yakovenko · 19m spoken Jessica Lessin · 9m spoken Brit Morin · 25s spoken
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko joins Sam and Jessica Lessin to discuss how stablecoins reinforce global US dollar hegemony while Solana's Seeker smartphone takes on Big Tech app store monopolies. Together, they analyze the mechanics of crypto adoption, arguing that the industry should focus on serving dedicated power users rather than pursuing generic mass adoption.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 59.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.4 Guest teaching 3.9 Guest disagreement 2.7 The hosts pushing back 3.1
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 7:40 You can't use Bitcoin, you can just hold it
Yakovenko bluntly cuts through traditional financial models, asserting that Bitcoin cannot be rationally valued or engineered, dismissing conventional DCF metrics as inapplicable.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 31:27 Sam rejects open-ended internet use casesSam refuses Anatoly's framing that internet and crypto use cases are mysterious and unknowable, insisting that humans only ever do a small handful of basic activities.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 20:05 Economic incompatibility of app stores and cryptoYakovenko breaks down the math of Apple's 30% take rate on zero-marginal-cost game loot boxes versus scarce crypto assets, demonstrating why existing app stores fundamentally break on Web3 transactions.
The host holds their own ▶ 34:55 Sam asserting dollar hegemony via stablecoinsSam synthesizes macroeconomics and geopolitics, articulating how US dollar stablecoin adoption abroad reinforces American hegemony despite prevailing narratives of dollar decline.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Welcoming Anatoly Yakovenko and Solana's Origins | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Sam Lessin establishes familiar, peer-level rapport, noting his early relationship with Anatoly Yakovenko and Solana's founding. Yakovenko shares his origin story from Qualcomm to Solana in an agreeable, lighthearted tone. | |
| The Crypto Evolution: Punks, Hoodies, and Suits | 5 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Yakovenko introduces his framing of tech movements evolving through punks, hoodies, and suits. Jessica Lessin probes on stablecoin utility in the US, prompting Yakovenko to explain why international volume forces US adoption regardless. | |
| Bitcoin as Digital Gold Versus Meme Investing | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4 | When Sam asks about institutional adoption and holding Bitcoin, Yakovenko directly rejects the premise of utility, stating Bitcoin cannot be used or modeled via DCF, only held out of fear. Sam pushes back with a comparison between Bitcoin and equities as memes. | |
| Solana's Message Bus and the Meme Coin Explosion | 6 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Yakovenko demystifies Solana as an information message bus rather than abstract crypto ideology. Sam displays practical domain expertise by describing his hands-on launches of tokens on Pump.fun and the missing infrastructure around address books. | |
| Disrupting App Stores: The Solana Mobile Strategy | 5 | 5 | 3 | 3 | Yakovenko lays out the structural economic clash between Apple's 30% take rate on zero-marginal-cost digital items and scarce crypto assets, explaining the rationale for the Solana Mobile phone. Jessica gently checks the fee structure while Sam highlights developer allocation issues. | |
| Serving Spendy Niche Users Versus Mass Adoption | 6 | 4 | 3 | 4 | Yakovenko challenges the mass adoption premise, arguing crypto might only ever serve a spendy niche of 100 million people. Sam pushes back against treating shared infrastructure as a defensible business model, drawing parallels to Substack and competing L1 treasuries. | |
| Stablecoin Projections, Macro Cycles, and Dollar Dominance | 7 | 4 | 3 | 5 | Yakovenko predicts a trillion-dollar stablecoin market and explains real-world merchant dynamics in Argentina. Sam actively challenges industry narratives, pushing back against the VC hype around local non-USD stablecoins and arguing USD stables will enforce American dollar hegemony. | |
| Tech Headlines: Linda Yaccarino and Adversarial AI | 5 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Discussing Grok and online disinformation, Yakovenko contextualizes AI toxicity as typical internet adversary dynamics. Sam and Jessica debate institutional trust, with Sam asserting that zero trust is historical baseline reality. | |
| Shaun Maguire, Online Polarization, and Closed Algorithms | 6 | 3 | 2 | 3 | The hosts and guest discuss online crash-outs and Shaun Maguire's posting habits. Yakovenko diagnoses the algorithmic trap that distorts reality for hyper-online individuals, while Sam expands with a detailed sociological theory on zero-marginal-cost audience incentives. |
Statements from this episode (27)
Yakovenko: AI is more of a product than a movement
“AI is more of a product, honestly, and less of a movement.”
Yakovenko: Tech movements evolve from punks to hoodies to suits
“I think you see the punks do it first, and then kind of the hoodies built a bunch of stuff and commercialize it. And then the final stage is when the suits take over. And we're kind of seeing that awkward transition right now, I think, as the hoodies are makin…”
Yakovenko: Global demand will force US to adopt stablecoins
“Like the world is so big that if this, everybody wants us dollars and if the programmable us dollar is tether or circle or whatever, they'll use it. And then us has no choice but to accept them because the economy is so big right now. The global economy is so …”
Yakovenko: Visa will settle via stablecoins instead of banks
“And normal people are not going to switch from credit cards because it's just kind of entrenched. But the way Visa deals with like banks, I think it's going to change because they don't have to care about banks as much anymore. They can actually just do everyt…”
Lessin: JPMorgan will inevitably allow customers to hold Bitcoin
“It seems inevitable that JP Morgan will let you hold Bitcoin inside.”
Yakovenko: Discounted cash flow models cannot be applied to Bitcoin or gold
“You know, if you leave, if you read the Intelligent Investor, or you actually try to think things from first principles, there's no way to put a discount cash flow model on Bitcoin, or gold for that matter.”
Yakovenko: Crypto wins if Bitcoin becomes a portfolio hedge like gold
“It's weird if it actually ends up being like a, you know, part of somebody's like hedge strategy, like gold. I think that is, if that happens, then this whole crypto experiment is effectively won, whatever, whatever you want to call it.”
Yakovenko: Most meme coins launch on Solana, peaking over 100k daily
“At this point, most, but I think Ethereum has probably the most valuable ones, but by sheer number of launches per day, I think it's like, was peak over a 100,000 per day. I think it may be like 20 to 50,000 right now.”
Yakovenko: Minting a meme coin on Solana costs about 20 cents
“It costs like 20 cents to like create a meme coin because it is just sending a message, right?”
Lessin: Billions of dollars have traded on his Jelly Jelly meme coin
“The biggest one I launched, right, was this Jelly Jelly thing, which went just ballistic... It's like billions and billions of dollars have been traded of this.”
Lessin: Basic consumer infrastructure for crypto meme coins is shockingly bad
“When you start thinking of this consumer products and communities and memes you want to drive, there's all this like pretty basic infrastructure that's like shockingly bad or doesn't exist yet.”
Yakovenko: Apple's 20% app fee cannot function on scarce crypto assets
“With crypto, you can't produce another loot box. There's only one, you know, CryptoPunk NFT. There's only one Bordet. So, You are selling it for 10,000 dollars. You cannot add a 20% fee inside the Apple store on that digital item. It would be absurd, right? A …”
Yakovenko: Solana's Seeker phone has 150,000 pre-orders and ships August
“Seeker, the device, we got 150,000 pre-orders and it's shipping August.”
Lessin: Crypto's speculative windfalls pull top builders away from real products
“It's a weird economy, because there's so many ways to make an absurd amount of money, that like, it's really hard to get people who are great product builders, to like, build great products, right? Because the draw, if you're in it for the money, or in it wher…”
Yakovenko: Crypto Will Cap Around 100M High-Spending Users, Not 8 Billion
“I think there is just a set of users that are kind of heavy users, and that might be a limited, that's not going to be eight billion people. I don't know how big that set is, but it could be like A hundred million. Right now, that sounds like a small fraction …”
Lessin: Newsletter Platforms Like Substack Have No Long-Term Margins
“And the problem is, is, like, those are, that's shared infrastructure, but just shared infrastructure, and it's too easy to copy, right? And so, like, there's just, like, no margin long-term in it.”
Yakovenko: US crypto legislation will take 2-4 years to take effect
“For them to pass a bill, right, it just took six months. For that to take effect is going to be the next two to four years.”
Yakovenko: There is very little crypto demand for euro stablecoins
“No, I mean, we've seen very little demand for even just euros. Like it's just been a slog trying to get anyone to want them.”
Yakovenko: Stablecoin adoption will be limited to USD and Chinese yuan
“I think it's USD and maybe like Chinese R&D. Yuan, yeah. But that, that's gonna be, like, muscled in. I don't know how much, like, adoption we'll have organically.”
Yakovenko: Stablecoins will reach $1T in near-future crypto growth mode
“I think at some point the, We're, we'll see that accelerated event. It's hard for me to predict whether it's the next two years or some other two years short in the near future, but you'll see this massive kind of growth mode for crypto where we see a trillion…”
Yakovenko: Public AI models inevitably suffer worst-case adversarial misuse
“I think these are kind of growing pains for AI systems that have public access. Like it's just Sam has built systems that have untrusted user inputs. As soon as you build one of these, people will do the worst possible thing just, you know, for fun, for whatev…”
Lessin: Trust networks, not cameras, will determine future truth
“The big lie has always been like with citizen journalism. Right. And like this idea that truth could come from anywhere. And it's because basically we got super lazy in the last hundred years because there was this brief moment in time where it was really hard…”
Lessin: Shaun Maguire is abrasive but a good guy with good takes
“I think he's abrasive at times to say the least, but he's a good guy. I think, you know, he's got good takes in a lot of places. And I think most importantly, like, you know, it's the internet. I believe in free speech. I don't like, I think it's like people c…”
Lessin: The internet economically rewards adopting ever more extreme viewpoints
“The problem with the internet and the economics of internet is that the best strategy is to always be more extreme, right? And the way, like, because what happens is any extreme you pick, Eventually that with so many people online, there are too many people in…”
Lessin: Posting bad takes online is the best way to learn
“One of the best ways to get information or like learn things is to post random shit on the web and let people correct you. Because people will spend an infinite amount of effort correcting.”
Yakovenko: Centralized closed algorithms are worse than offensive speech online
“I think that what sucks is the only innovation in this over the last like decade is like basically a centralized closed source algorithm that feeds you a specific set of information and then you don't have user engagement. That's kind of a very sad outcome. Li…”