Solana Founder Links AI Slowdown to Profitability at $1 Trillion Market Cap
Solana (SOL)
Editor:
Eugene Serbin
u.today reported on 13 September 2026 that Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko reacted sarcastically to a sudden agreement among AI industry leaders to halt the development of advanced neural networks. Yakovenko commented on Dario Amodei's manifesto, 'We Must Pace the Frontier,' with the concise remark: 'Profitability at $1 trillion mcap'. He followed this by stating he had told his Codex to use tokens more sparingly, mocking calls for artificial pauses.
The report suggests OpenAI and Anthropic have hit an infrastructure dead end where rising costs for chips and electricity require real profits. David Sacks, the former White House special adviser on AI and cryptocurrencies, joined the discussion to point out the hypocrisy of AI labs. Sacks argued that if these companies truly saw a deadly threat, they could halt their own work voluntarily instead of lobbying for industry-wide laws.
He noted that the imposed top-down regulation serves two pragmatic goals. Despite these statements, markets are not pricing in panic at Monday's stock market open. The prevailing consensus is that a slowdown in frontier model development merely stretches out equipment procurement cycles rather than reducing investment.
How the market reacted
Whalio's own Binance spot order flow for SOL, measured when this story was written up on 13 September 2026. Not the outlet's figures.
SOL is trading at $101.76 with a 1-hour buy ratio of 58.4%, indicating immediate buying pressure that is higher than the 49.9% seen over the 4-hour window. The 24-hour buy ratio sits at 51.2%, showing that short-term aggression has cooled to a neutral baseline after the initial spike. Volume delta reflects this shift, moving from a positive +$1,071,887 in the last hour to a negative -$28,238 over four hours. Over the full day, cumulative buying has reached +$2,793,724, though the closing CVD is -$8,326,178, suggesting late-session selling offset earlier gains. The buy ratio measures the proportion of trades executed on the buy side, while volume delta shows the net value of buys minus sells. Current flows show a brief burst of activity followed by a return to equilibrium.
The latest daily buy ratio of 48.8% sits at the 27th percentile of the last 322 days, against a median of 50.0% - weaker buying than most days.
Was that an ordinary day?
The same Binance spot measurements for SOL, averaged over the days leading up to the story.
Over the preceding week, SOL experienced a 7-day average buy ratio of 49.4%, making the current 24-hour reading of 51.2% a slight increase of 1.8 points. Daily volume has been relatively quiet, trading at 0.48x the average volume for this period. The coin has seen a price change of -1.4% over eight days, with a total volume delta of -$9,780,436 for the week. Only three of the seven days recorded net buying, indicating a generally bearish or neutral trend leading into today. This day represents a marginal uptick in buying intensity compared to the weekly average, but volume remains subdued relative to typical activity.