The head of Solana opposed Ethereum's development strategy - ForkLog: cryptocurrencies, AI, singularity, future

# Solana CEO Opposes Ethereum Development Strategy

Blockchain must continuously evolve to survive. This was stated by Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana Labs.

I actually think fairly differently on this. Solana needs to never stop iterating. It shouldn’t depend on any single group or individual to do so, but if it ever stops changing to fit the needs of its devs and users, it will die.

It needs to be so materially useful to humans… https://t.co/itqr1b5az4

— toly 🇺🇸 (@toly) January 17, 2026

“Solana should never stop iteratively developing. It should not depend on any one group or person, but if the network ever stops changing to meet the needs of its developers and users, it will die,” — the expert wrote

He reacted to words from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who said that the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap should reach a “fail-proof” point.

“This means that Ethereum should reach a state where we can ‘become rigid’ if we want. We don’t need to stop making changes to the protocol, but we should reach a situation where the blockchain’s value proposition does not strictly depend on functions that don’t yet exist,” he emphasized.

Ethereum Philosophy

Leaders in the blockchain industry adopt various approaches to development. Buterin prioritizes maximum decentralization, privacy, and maintaining long-term sustainability without constant developer involvement.

Recently, he called on the Ethereum community to fight “protocol bloat,” caused by the endless desire to add new features while keeping outdated ones.

An important, and perennially underrated, aspect of “trustlessness”, “passing the walkaway test” and “self-sovereignty” is protocol simplicity.

Even if a protocol is super decentralized with hundreds of thousands of nodes, and it has 49% Byzantine fault tolerance, and nodes fully… pic.twitter.com/kvzkg11M3c

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 18, 2026

According to him, true trustlessness depends less on quantitative metrics of decentralization and more on the simplicity of the system.

“Even if the protocol has super decentralization with hundreds of thousands of nodes, […] but is a bulky mess of hundreds of thousands of lines of code built on five different PhD-level cryptography systems, it will ultimately fail,” believes Buterin.

He noted that complexity undermines Ethereum in three ways:

• Undermining trustlessness: users are forced to blindly trust a small circle of experts because they cannot verify its operation themselves;
• Failure of “fail-proof” testing: if current client development teams leave, recreating full and secure services from scratch will become nearly impossible due to system complexity;
• Erosion of self-sovereignty: even technically savvy users lose the ability to independently analyze, verify, and understand the system’s logic, losing direct control and sovereignty over their assets and actions in the network.

“Garbage Collection”

Buterin believes the root of the problem lies in the methodology for assessing changes. When the main criterion for updates is minimal disruption to existing infrastructure, backward compatibility inevitably becomes a priority.

This creates a systemic imbalance: functions are added but rarely removed, leading to constant growth and increased complexity of the protocol.

To counter this trend, he proposed formalizing the process of “simplification” or “garbage collection.” The initiative includes:

• Sequential reduction of the codebase;
• Abandonment of overly complex cryptographic constructions;
• Implementation of strict rules to make client logic stable and predictable.

As a successful example of such “cleaning,” Buterin cited the transition from PoW to PoS, which rebooted the network architecture, and current reforms to the gas model aimed at replacing artificial limits with transparent economic principles.

In the future, “garbage collection” will allow outdated functions to be moved from the core protocol to the level of smart contracts. This will reduce client software load and simplify further development.

Solana Philosophy

Yakovenko adheres to the principle “adapt or die” and advocates for continuous ecosystem updates to meet real needs. According to him, upgrades should come from the broad community, not a small group of developers.

“To survive, you must always be useful. Therefore, the main goal of protocol changes should be to solve specific problems of developers or users. It doesn’t mean solving all problems; in fact, you need to be able to say no to most requests,” — the expert emphasized

Solana supporters believe that the lack of updates leads to stagnation and defeat in the competitive race.

The Solana Labs head also suggested that in the future, network fees could fund AI development for writing and improving the blockchain codebase.

“You should always count on the next version of Solana,” — Yakovenko said

Recall that Vitalik Buterin criticized modern DAOs and called for their reform.