Anatoly Yakovenko: Bitcoin’s playbook won’t fit other coins
On Nov 5, 2025, Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko argued that Bitcoin’s path to product‑market fit can’t be copied. Colosseum cofounder Matty Taylor extended the point, outlining two routes to non‑sovereign stores of value (SoV): privacy‑first money on its own L1, and a cash‑flowing token that rides Solana’s performance improvements.
Yakovenko’s argument is blunt and generalisable: copying features from a rival with product‑market fit (PMF) doesn’t recreate PMF. “What worked for Bitcoin isn’t going to work for any other cryptocurrency,” he wrote, drawing a line under years of attempts to iterate on Bitcoin’s scarcity‑plus‑time formula.
Taylor moves from principle to practice. He contends that a coin can still reach escape velocity – that durable point of demand, liquidity and conviction where it no longer relies on hype cycles – but it will do so through its own wedge of value. His examples are Zcash and Ore, each pursuing a different route to the same goal.
In Zcash’s case, the wedge is privacy, built‑in. Zero‑knowledge proofs make private payments a native feature rather than a bolt‑on, while the Tachyon roadmap focuses on scaling the project’s own Layer‑1 so it can handle more users and applications without sacrificing confidentiality. The pitch is straightforward: be a privacy‑first form of money that remains fast and usable at scale.
Ore pushes a different lever: economics. The protocol is designed to generate revenue and yield from on‑chain activity and direct a share of that value toward long‑term holders, rather than leaving it entirely with short‑term speculators. Because Ore builds on Solana, it inherits Solana’s ongoing upgrades – higher throughput, lower fees, evolving privacy add‑ons and deep composability with DeFi – without creating its own base chain. The result is a cash‑flowing asset tied to real usage, delivered with the speed and UX of Solana.
Framed together, the two examples underscore the broader claim Anatoly Yakovenko set out: there is no single Bitcoin‑style playbook for becoming a widely held digital SoV. Zcash leans on privacy‑at‑scale; Ore on protocol cash flows plus Solana’s infrastructure. Whether either crosses the chasm is uncertain, but treating Bitcoin’s history as a template is a strategic mistake.
As GNcrypto wrote previously, the Nov 5 sell‑off pushed Bitcoin briefly below $100,000 as leveraged longs were flushed and U.S. liquidity tightened during the government shutdown. That backdrop – macro‑driven swings around BTC despite record adoption – reinforces Yakovenko’s point: Bitcoin’s path can’t be copy‑pasted, and any new contender must earn durable demand on its own terms rather than rerunning a scarcity‑plus‑time script.
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