Yakovenko Envisions NASDAQ Integration, Not Rivalry, for Solana in Regulated Finance

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko recently articulated a vision for the blockchain's future, emphasizing collaboration with established financial institutions like NASDAQ rather than direct competition. Speaking on the "All-In Podcast," Yakovenko highlighted the regulatory hurdles preventing the full integration of traditional assets onto blockchain, a challenge he deems more significant than engineering complexities.

Yakovenko stated that Solana's initial mission was to create infrastructure capable of moving traditional finance on-chain at "NASDAQ speed." However, he expressed frustration that speculative assets like memecoins and NFTs have flourished instead, attributing their rise to "how slow regulation was to catch up." He noted that while traditional regulated entities possess compliance expertise, they often lack global availability, contrasting with Solana's worldwide reach and agility.

The Solana executive believes a pivotal moment will arrive when regulators permit public-key cryptography for asset management and transfer. "That's the interface that you can wrap around and start moving anything from inside NASDAQ to Solana and vice versa," he explained. Yakovenko clarified that Solana functions as a protocol, akin to an "email standard," rather than an institution aiming to become an exchange itself.

He asserted that traditional exchanges, including NASDAQ, would ultimately benefit by integrating with Solana. "If the protocol is awesome and globally synchronous and super fast, NASDAQ would make more money by just running a Solana node and integrating with it more directly," Yakovenko said, adding, "We want NASDAQ to do that and to run it on Solana, and that would be great." This perspective underscores a future of symbiotic integration between decentralized networks and conventional financial markets.