Solana’s Co-Founder Says True Decentralization Is Still Years Away — Here’s His Plan
Anatoly Yakovenko says Solana's AI push is just one chapter. The real goal — making SOL uncensorable — could take over a decade.
If you own SOL and thought Solana’s big story this year was all about AI agents plugging into the blockchain, co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko wants you to think bigger — and further out. In a post shared on July 20, 2026, he laid out a roadmap that stretches years beyond the current tech upgrades, with the end goal being a network that literally cannot be censored or shut down by any single group of validators.
Yakovenko compared the journey to American history, noting that roughly 12 years passed between the start of the American Revolution and the signing of the U.S. Constitution. He suggested Solana is looking at a similarly long stretch between finishing its current AI rollout and hitting what he calls the “Nakamoto” milestone — a nod to Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision of a network no single party can control.
What Solana is building right now
Right now, Solana is in the middle of rolling out something called the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, at scale. In plain terms, this is the plumbing that lets AI agents “read” the blockchain and even manage wallets on a user’s behalf. It’s the tech behind Solana’s recent push to position itself as a home for AI-driven crypto activity.
But according to Yakovenko, that’s not the finish line — it’s a stepping stone. His longer-term target is raising what’s known as the “Nakamoto coefficient,” a number that measures how many validators would need to team up (or be compromised) to censor or freeze the network. Solana’s current score sits around 20, which the source notes is held back by validators clustering in the same data centers and geographic regions.
Yakovenko’s aim is to push that number up dramatically, spreading control across far more independent validators so that no government, company, or coordinated group could realistically pressure the network into blocking transactions.
Why speed alone wasn’t enough
Solana has spent the last stretch fixing its reputation for outages and slow performance, largely through the rollout of the Firedancer client — new software that, in test environments, has pushed the network’s theoretical throughput past one million transactions per second. Just as importantly, Firedancer gives Solana “client diversity,” meaning the network no longer depends on a single piece of software, which reduces the risk of one bug taking everything down at once.
Yakovenko’s point is that raw speed doesn’t matter much if a network can still be pressured or censored. As he put it on X: “The same amount of time will pass between full mcp and Nakamoto as between the constitution and the revolution.”
What this means if you hold SOL
For everyday holders, this isn’t a roadmap that changes anything about your SOL balance today. There’s no new token, no snapshot, no airdrop attached to any of this — it’s a statement of engineering priorities, not a product launch.
What it does signal is a shift in how Solana wants to be seen. Instead of leaning purely on its reputation as the “fast and cheap” chain for trading and meme coins, the network is now openly chasing Ethereum’s core selling point: long-term reliability and resistance to censorship, the qualities that matter most to banks, funds, and other institutional players weighing whether to build on a blockchain for the long haul.
That’s a multi-year bet, not a quarterly one. If Yakovenko’s timeline holds, Solana holders should expect the network’s decentralization story to unfold gradually — measured less in flashy announcements and more in a slowly rising Nakamoto coefficient, as validator control spreads further from today’s handful of dominant operators.
Read more: SHIB, SOL, HYPE and XRP All Stalled This Week — What the Charts Are Really Telling Holders
