Solana Co-Founder Prioritizes Five Apps Over Network Infrastructure

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko prioritized five major applications for network optimization, citing assets under management and retail volume. His Oct. 23 post did not announce a protocol change, funding allocation or new validator rules.

CryptoMEV Bot NewsroomOct 24, 20264 min read

A man in a black cap and shirt gestures with his hands while sitting in a white armchair at a conference. — Image: TechCrunch / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

At a glance	Details
Who	Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko
What	Five applications prioritized for network optimization
When	Oct. 23, 2026 post
Where	Solana
Key figure	Roughly 150 milliseconds of finality target

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said, “Products with a ton of aum and a ton of retail volume are the two most important groups to optimize for,” according to crypto.news. The co-founder’s Oct. 23 post placed Phantom, Pump.fun, Fomo, Jupiter and Kamino ahead of validators, developers, market makers and core engineers when deciding what Solana should optimize for.

"Products with a ton of aum and a ton of retail volume are the two most important groups to optimize for," — Anatoly Yakovenko

The statement was a prioritization argument rather than a technical proposal. Yakovenko did not provide figures for assets under management or retail volume, identify a measurement period or set thresholds. He also did not rank the five products against one another.

Which applications did Yakovenko name?

Yakovenko named five applications as the products that should receive greater attention from Solana’s network optimization efforts:

Phantom
Pump.fun
Fomo
Jupiter
Kamino

His wording concerned whose needs should guide optimization, but it did not specify a network setting that would change for the named teams. The post did not announce an agreement with those teams or grant them governance authority. A Pluang summary described the same product-first approach and likewise reported that no specific data or ranking was supplied, according to Pluang.

For traders following Solana execution and liquidity, the relevant distinction is between a stated optimization priority and an implemented protocol change. The former was documented; the latter was not. Readers working with Solana transaction strategies can use the Advanced Solana MEV Bot guide as a reference for the infrastructure and execution context, but the post itself did not alter validator participation rules or application access.

What criteria did Yakovenko use?

The two stated criteria were assets under management and retail volume. Yakovenko described products with substantial assets and retail activity as the most important groups to optimize for. The sources did not establish whether each named product individually meets both criteria, and they did not disclose comparable figures for the five applications.

The comments came after criticism that some Ethereum protocol designers do not use the network they help build. Yakovenko responded with qualified praise for the Ethereum Foundation, saying it had done a decent job optimizing for Aave. His reasoning was that an inability to get transactions included during an outage or congestion would break the lending platform. This point is relevant to users of Aave Flash Loan Arbitrage Bot, where reliable transaction inclusion matters when a strategy depends on an on-chain lending protocol, but it did not amount to a new Solana or Ethereum rule.

Did Alpenglow change the priorities or the rules?

The timing of the comments overlapped with Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade, but Yakovenko did not connect his application list to Alpenglow. TokenPost reported that the comments came two days after Solana activated Alpenglow on mainnet. The consensus protocol governs how validators agree on transaction order and finality.

Alpenglow targets finality in roughly 150 milliseconds, compared with about 12.8 seconds under TowerBFT. That is the target for consensus finality, which is distinct from the initial indication that a transaction landed. The upgrade did not, according to the reported priorities, create a funding allocation for Phantom, Pump.fun, Fomo, Jupiter or Kamino.

Earlier Alpenglow coverage also described separate duties for application teams and validator operators. Applications that only submit transactions and read balances would not need a migration, while services processing blocks or tracking validator activity faced changes in how they read network data. Validator fee guidance described a plan to replace individual onchain voting fees with a flat 0.8 SOL admission charge per epoch, burned in full. Operators would need to fund the charge above their vote account’s rent-exempt minimum and pay one epoch in advance. A validator unable to pay would lose permission to vote or produce blocks in the following epoch.

What does the announcement mean for on-chain traders?

For traders, the immediate change is limited to attention and prioritization. Yakovenko’s post did not announce a specific upgrade, funding allocation, change to validator participation rules or new product access for U.S. customers. It also did not provide a timetable for implementing any optimization.

The distinction matters for automated trading strategies such as the Ethereum Arbitrage Bot: the named Solana applications are not new execution venues or newly authorized infrastructure providers under this post. They are the applications Yakovenko said should receive greater attention when Solana decides how to optimize the network. The latest documented step remains the Oct. 23 post, with no further dated implementation milestone identified by the sources.