Solana Founder: ETC is the Future of Finance
Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder of Solana, suggested that by retaining the PoW reward mechanism, the economic finality time could be compressed to about one day, stating that Ethereum Classic (ETC) aligns more with the form of the "future financial system."
This viewpoint directly opposes the current PoS-dominated narrative. Yakovenko associates "economic finality" with continuous incentives from PoW, implying that under his framework, security derives from long-term computational power investment rather than staked capital, which creates a structural divergence from the security model after Ethereum's mainnet transitioned to PoS.
In the English-speaking crypto community, discussions around "finality speed vs. security cost" are intensifying, with some researchers re-evaluating PoW's censorship resistance and recovery capabilities in extreme environments. ETC, as a chain that retains the original PoW path, is once again included in the discussion.
Source: Public Information
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This kind of statement essentially challenges the current "consensus convergence" in the crypto industry. Over the past few years, PoS has been viewed as a more efficient and capital-utilizing path, but its security model relies on the on-chain capital structure, which can couple system security and power structure if staking becomes concentrated or governance is imbalanced. Yakovenko's argument attempts to pull the security anchor back to "external costs"—namely, computational power and energy.
The so-called "economic finality of about one day" is essentially trading time for certainty. In a PoW system, finality is not achieved instantaneously but accumulates probability security through continuous block production, a mechanism that is closer to the "delayed settlement" in traditional clearing systems in a financial context. This contrasts with PoS, which emphasizes rapid finality, representing two different financial philosophies: one emphasizes speed, while the other emphasizes irreversible costs.
On a deeper level, this is a redefinition of "what is a trusted ledger." PoS internalizes trust into the capital structure, while PoW outsources trust to the resource consumption of the physical world. In the context of rising macro uncertainty and enhanced regulatory and geopolitical risks, some parts of the market are beginning to reassess the value of "external cost-based security," which is also why ETC is being brought up again.
However, from the perspective of industry evolution, this discussion is more about boundary exploration rather than mainstream migration. Currently, the vast majority of DeFi and financial applications still rely on high throughput and low latency environments. If PoW cannot achieve breakthroughs in performance and cost, its narrative of "financial future" is more likely to remain at the level of specific scenarios and ideologies.