Anatoly Reveals Why the Market Gets Stablecoins Wrong—And Why It Actually Matters for Your Portfolio

When Solana founder Anatoly discusses the true nature of stablecoins, he doesn’t sugarcoat it: the crypto industry is simultaneously obsessed with and clueless about what stablecoins actually represent. This contradiction sits at the heart of where the next trillion dollars in value might emerge.

The Real Power of Stablecoins: From Payment Tool to Monetary Revolution

At first glance, programmable currencies backed by real assets like government bonds seem like a technical upgrade to existing financial infrastructure. But Anatoly argues this fundamentally misses the point. When USDT and USDC become the dominant settlement layer across borders, we’re not just witnessing a payment innovation—we’re watching the dollar system itself undergo a digital transformation that hasn’t happened since WWII.

The numbers tell a compelling story. Despite regulatory headwinds and government skepticism, the stablecoin market has already crossed $250 billion. This grassroots adoption in emerging markets (Argentine street vendors adopting USDT to escape local currency devaluation, for example) reveals something institutional investors keep overlooking: the demand for USD stablecoins isn’t a speculative bubble—it’s solving real problems for real people.

Anatoly predicts that if stablecoin circulation reaches $5 trillion globally, it would represent roughly 5% of the world’s USD supply moving on-chain. Regulators are beginning to shift their stance this year, though legislation will likely take 2-4 years to formalize. The asymmetry is stark: alternatives like Euro stablecoins remain suppressed while Yuan stablecoins depend entirely on policy mandates. The market is voting with its feet, and it’s choosing USD.

Why Crypto as a Movement Beats AI as a Product

Here’s a distinction Anatoly makes that separates clear thinking from hype: AI is a product category, but crypto is a social movement. That matters because movements follow predictable trajectories across tech waves—and we’re currently at a critical transition point.

The evolution always unfolds the same way: rebellious geeks drive innovation with punk ethos, then hoodie-wearing entrepreneurs scale the technology, and finally institutional capital in suits seeks to professionalize and financialize everything. The crypto industry isn’t exempt from this cycle. We’re now watching suited capital attempt to repackage blockchain and digital assets into formats that look exactly like traditional finance, just with blockchain underneath.

The stakes? If Bitcoin eventually functions as a mainstream hedge asset equivalent to gold, the entire crypto market can declare victory, regardless of other metrics. Like his parents who fled Soviet collapse with gold, Anatoly sees Bitcoin fulfilling a timeless human need: storing value outside government control during uncertainty.

The Mobile Device Play: Why Solana Isn’t Just Building Another Exchange

Anatoly’s background in mobile phone R&D (2004-2015 at Qualcomm) revealed a pattern he couldn’t unsee: Apple, Google, and Meta operate “sandbox” ecosystems that extract 30% transaction fees from all value flows. They’ve created closed gardens where developers and users have no real alternatives.

Crypto assets like NFTs and meme coins fundamentally break this model. Here’s why: a CryptoPunk isn’t infinitely replicable like a game item. When a user pays $10,000 for a unique NFT, Apple can’t extract a 20% cut without destroying the entire economics. The scarcity of on-chain assets creates a structural advantage for alternative platforms.

The response? Build dedicated hardware and app stores for crypto users, charging 0.5% instead of 30%. Even at these razor-thin margins, the economics work because crypto users generate 10-50x higher transaction volumes than mainstream internet users. With 100 million crypto users representing just 1% of global population, the revenue per user (ARPU) exceeds ordinary internet users by orders of magnitude. This is why Solana is building mobile infrastructure—not to compete with iPhones for mass market, but to capture a niche with extreme economic density.

The Meme Coin Phenomenon: Infrastructure Follows Adoption

Solana now generates 20,000-50,000 new meme coins daily, sometimes exceeding 100,000 at peak times. This isn’t chaos—it’s evidence of infrastructure working at scale. Yes, bad actors exploit loopholes just as they do with mobile phone fraud, but the system is functional enough to enable rapid experimentation.

The real lesson: when a platform can support this volume of low-stakes tokenization experiments, it proves the underlying infrastructure is robust. Most alternatives remain years behind in capability.

The Information Cocoon Problem and Why Crypto Idealists Are Exiting

Anatoly’s final observation cuts deepest. The same algorithms that amplify engagement also trap people in confirmation loops. If your feed shows you every Steph Curry miss, you’ll conclude he’s an inefficient shooter—despite objective statistics showing otherwise.

When cognitive disconnection from reality becomes severe enough, the original idealists simply leave. As he notes: “When the idealists exit, their voices disappear.” The punks who started this movement have largely moved on, replaced by entrepreneurs chasing returns, then institutions seeking scale. This isn’t cynicism—it’s the predictable evolution of any technology wave.

The question investors should ask: are we still in the transition between hoodie entrepreneurs and suit capital? Or have we already crossed that threshold? The answer determines whether the next cycle will be defined by infrastructure breakthroughs like Solana’s mobile play, or by purely financial engineering dressed up in blockchain terminology.