Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko is pushing back hard against President Donald Trump’s plan for a U.S. crypto reserve, arguing it undermines the whole point of decentralization by handing control to the government.
In a post on X on March 5, 2025, Yakovenko weighed in on Trump’s recent announcement of a national reserve including major tokens like Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Cardano, and Solana, saying, “No reserve, because if you want decentralization to fail you’d put the government in charge of it.” He made it clear he wasn’t consulted about including Solana (SOL) in the lineup, quashing rumors sparked by crypto journalist Laura Shin, who claimed Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse pitched SOL to make XRP’s inclusion look legit. Yakovenko shot that down, saying he wasn’t asked or involved.
Yakovenko’s not totally against the idea of crypto reserves, but he’s got a specific vision—any reserve should be built on “objectively measurable requirements” to keep it fair and decentralized for everyone, not just favoring one coin like Bitcoin. “I don’t care what they [the measures] are, they can even be constructed such that only Bitcoin satisfies them right now, they just must be objectively measurable and rationally justified,” he wrote. If a reserve must exist, he’d rather see states run their own, like the 26 U.S. states pushing Bitcoin reserve bills, per the Bitcoin Reserve Monitor. He thinks state-level reserves could act as a “hedge against the Fed making a mistake,” keeping things more distributed than a big federal grab.
