Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko mentioned he desires Solana to be a consistently evolving community, constantly updating to fulfill the altering wants of customers, contrasting with Vitalik Buterin’s imaginative and prescient of Ethereum as a self-sustaining blockchain.
“Solana must by no means cease iterating. It shouldn’t depend upon any single group or particular person to take action, but when it ever stops altering to suit the wants of its devs and customers, it would die,” Yakovenko acknowledged in a publish to X on Saturday.
His remarks have been in response to a publish from Buterin, who mentioned Ethereum wants to succeed in a degree the place it passes the “walkaway check,” that means it turns into self-sustainable with out developer affect for many years to return.

Ethereum and Solana are two of the main blockchains in a sea of layer 1 rivals.
Ethereum is by far probably the most decentralized good contract layer 1 blockchain and dominates stablecoin and real-world asset tokenization exercise, whereas Solana is without doubt one of the speedier networks that’s arguably extra well-liked for client apps and earns extra charges.
Their deliberate paths to success, nevertheless, couldn’t be extra totally different.
Buterin desires to maximise decentralization, privateness and self-sovereignty on Ethereum — even at the price of mainstream adoption — whereas Yakovenko desires Solana to be an evolving ecosystem that introduces new options to adapt to real-world wants.
Supporters of Buterin’s strategy argue that including too many options will increase the danger of bugs, safety flaws, and unintended protocol penalties, whereas increasing the assault floor for centralization.
These aligned with Yakovenko’s “adapt or die” mentality, nevertheless, suppose a hands-off strategy results in slower innovation and probably being overtaken by faster-moving rivals.
AI might replace Solana sooner or later: Yakovenko
Yakovenko, nevertheless, mentioned protocol updates ought to come from a various neighborhood of contributors reasonably than a number of growth groups.
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He even pointed to a future the place Solana community charges might fund AI-assisted growth to put in writing and enhance Solana’s codebase.
“You need to at all times depend on there being a subsequent model of Solana,” Yakovenko mentioned.
Ethereum isn’t self-sustainable but
In the meantime, Buterin mentioned there’s nonetheless a number of work to be finished earlier than Ethereum can undertake the hands-off strategy.
Quantum resistance options, extra scalable structure, and a greater block-building mannequin that resists centralization pressures have been among the many important enhancements Buterin mentioned Ethereum must need to go the check of time.
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