Most Influential 2021: Anatoly Yakovenko

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