‘I am ashamed’ — Solana CEO breaks silence over controversial ad backlash

Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko has broken his silence over the “America Is Back — Time to Accelerate” advertisement, which blended American patriotism and tech innovation with political messaging around gender identity.

“The ad was bad, and it’s still gnawing at my soul,” Yakovenko said in a March 19 X post after receiving immense backlash over the controversial ad. 

“I am ashamed I downplayed it instead of just calling it what it is – mean and punching down on a marginalized group.”

Yakovenko praised those in the Solana ecosystem who called out the “mess” that was posted on Solana’s X account, which accumulated around 1.2 million views and 1,300 comments before it was deleted roughly nine hours later.

Yakovenko said he will use the learning experience to ensure Solana stays focused on open-source software development and decentralization while staying “out of cultural wars.”

Solana hasn’t made an official comment on the matter, though its X account reshared Yakovenko’s post to its 3.3 million followers.

Cointelegraph also reached out to the Solana Foundation shortly after the ad was taken down but didn’t receive a response.

The two-and-a-half-minute ad for the Solana Accelerate conference showcased a man acting as America in a therapy session who said he was having thoughts “about innovation” such as crypto.

The therapist responded that he should instead do “something more productive, like coming up with a new gender” and later said the man should “focus on pronouns.”

The man snapped back, stating that he wanted “to invent technologies, not genders.”

Took them 9 hours to delete it.

Also all the major players in the Solana ecosystem suddenly delete their tweets promoting/supporting the ad and RT’d and liked takes about it being bad.

They approved this, supported it and celebrated it.

They rolled it back because it hurt… pic.twitter.com/kPMERDpTcn

— Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) (@adamscochran) March 18, 2025

The now-deleted ad came nine days after Solana’s X account posted: “Solana is for everyone.”

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Cinneamhain Ventures partner Adam Cochran pointed out that transgender people contribute to open-source software and cryptography in an “insanely disproportionate amount.”

A GitHub survey from 2017 found that of the 5,500 randomly selected open-source developers, 1% were transgender, and another 1% were non-binary.

Most data obtained during 2017 and 2018 suggest that transgender and non-binary people combined represented somewhere between 0.1% and 0.6% of the population.

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