Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko has addressed the controversial advertisement titled “America Is Back — Time to Accelerate,” which awkwardly combined themes of American pride, technological advancement, and political commentary on gender identity.
In a post on X on March 19, following significant backlash over the ad, Yakovenko remarked, “The ad was bad, and it’s still gnawing at my soul.”
He expressed regret for having minimized the issue instead of straightforwardly labeling it as unkind and disrespectful to a marginalized group.
Yakovenko acknowledged those within the Solana community who criticized the chaotic message that appeared on Solana’s X account, which garnered about 1.2 million views and 1,300 comments before it was removed approximately nine hours later.
He pledged to turn this experience into a lesson, committing to keeping Solana focused on the principles of open-source software development and decentralization, while steering clear of cultural conflicts.
Although Solana has not issued an official statement about the incident, its X account did share Yakovenko’s post with its 3.3 million followers.
After the ad was taken down, inquiries made to the Solana Foundation received no response.
The controversial two-and-a-half-minute ad for the Solana Accelerate conference depicted a man, representing America, in a therapy session discussing his thoughts on “innovation” like cryptocurrency.
The therapist suggested he engage in “something more productive, like coming up with a new gender,” and additionally advised him to concentrate on pronouns. The man retorted that he wished to create technologies instead of defining genders.
One observer noted, “It took them 9 hours to delete it. All the major figures in the Solana ecosystem promptly removed their tweets supporting the ad and liked those criticizing it. They backed this and were proud of it until it became problematic.”
The now-deleted advertisement was released just nine days after Solana’s X account proclaimed, “Solana is for everyone.”
Additionally, a partner at Cinneamhain Ventures highlighted that transgender individuals contribute significantly to open-source software and cryptography.
A 2017 GitHub survey indicated that among 5,500 randomly selected open-source developers, 1% identified as transgender and another 1% as non-binary, despite data from 2017 and 2018 suggesting that transgender and non-binary individuals made up roughly 0.1% to 0.6% of the overall population.