Solana's CEO Wrote Auchincloss a Maximum Check — Months After Auchincloss Voted to Strip SEC Oversight of Solana

April 19, 2026

On November 7, 2025, the chief executive officer of Solana Labs, Anatoly Yakovenko, wrote two checks totaling $7,000 to Jake Auchincloss for Congress — the maximum amount any individual is legally permitted to give a federal candidate’s principal campaign committee for a single election cycle.¹ On the same day, Solana Labs’ chief operating officer, Philip Chang, wrote a check for $3,500 to Auchincloss.¹

Solana is one of the largest blockchains in the world by market capitalization. Its SOL token sits behind tens of billions of dollars in speculative trading, much of it concentrated in memecoin platforms that financial regulators, academic researchers, and consumer-protection groups have repeatedly described as essentially predatory. The CEO and COO of Solana Labs do not write maximum checks to a member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce for sentimental reasons.

The chronology matters. Long before Yakovenko wrote that check, Auchincloss had already done several things that materially benefit Solana. He had also said several things, on the public record, that should make a Solana check look uncomfortable in his treasury. This post lays out both — the votes that helped, and the rhetoric that contradicts the money.

The Trump Memecoin Ran on Solana

On January 17, 2025 — three days before his second inauguration — Donald Trump launched a memecoin called $TRUMP on the Solana blockchain.² One billion tokens were minted, with 800 million retained by Trump-affiliated companies (CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC) and 200 million sold publicly.² The First Lady launched a parallel $MELANIA token, also on Solana, two days later.²

Within 36 hours, $TRUMP’s circulating market capitalization briefly exceeded $14 billion, with a fully-diluted valuation that ran into the tens of billions, and SOL — the underlying token of the Solana blockchain — rallied roughly 12 percent to approximately $247 the day after launch, before continuing higher.³ Solana saw nearly 9 million new addresses in a single day, the largest spike in its history.⁴ Within months, the token’s price had collapsed by more than 95 percent from its peak, leaving retail buyers — many of whom had bought near the top — holding the bag.⁵

The economics were not subtle. The Trump organization controlled the supply, profited from the trading fees, and benefited from a parallel rally in the Solana ecosystem that the launch was hosted on. The platform that made the entire scheme technically possible — the rails on which the coin was issued, the trading infrastructure that let speculators pile in within minutes, the meme-coin economy that gave the launch a ready-made audience — was Solana.

Auchincloss Was Right About the Memecoin

To his credit, Auchincloss publicly identified the Trump memecoin scheme as exactly the kind of grift it was. On January 23, 2025, six days after the $TRUMP launch, Auchincloss and Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a joint letter to the Office of Government Ethics, the Treasury Department, the SEC, and the CFTC asking those agencies to investigate consumer harms, conflicts of interest, and the risk that foreign actors could anonymously enrich the President by purchasing his personal token.⁶

Two months later, in March 2025, Auchincloss and Warren followed up with a second letter — this one specifically demanding that the SEC explain why its Division of Corporation Finance had quietly issued a staff statement asserting that “persons who participate in the offer and sale of meme coins” were not subject to federal securities laws.⁷ That staff statement, in effect, was a regulatory amnesty for the entire Solana memecoin economy.

Auchincloss was direct about why this mattered. Memecoins, he and Warren noted, sit at the center of “consumer ripoffs, foreign influence-peddling, [and] conflicts of interest.”⁶ Those are not abstract concerns. The pump.fun platform — the largest memecoin launchpad on Solana — has been repeatedly studied by independent researchers, who found that roughly 98.6 percent of the tokens launched on the platform exhibited the characteristics of pump-and-dump schemes or rug pulls.⁸ A separate analysis of the Raydium decentralized exchange, also Solana-based, found that 93 percent of liquidity pools examined showed patterns consistent with “soft rug pulls” by developers.⁸ One forensic study identified twelve coordinated wallet clusters responsible for thousands of automated scam launches; the largest single cluster was responsible for over 1,200 scam token launches before vanishing with $1.1 million in drained liquidity.⁸

This is the ecosystem Auchincloss was, correctly, complaining about. It is also the ecosystem on which Solana Labs’ valuation depends.

Then He Voted for Solana’s Wishlist

Saying the right thing about Trump’s memecoin is one form of political conduct. Voting on legislation that materially affects the regulatory environment around the blockchain that hosted that memecoin is another. The two diverged.

On July 17, 2025, the House voted on H.R. 3633, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (“CLARITY Act”). The legislation rewrites which agency has primary jurisdiction over digital-asset markets in the United States. It hands “exclusive jurisdiction” over so-called “digital commodity” spot markets to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, sharply narrowing the SEC’s ability to apply existing securities law to tokens like SOL.⁹ The CFTC is a smaller, less well-resourced regulator with a long history of being friendlier to the industries it nominally polices than the SEC has historically been to crypto.

The bill passed 294 to 134.¹⁰ Auchincloss voted yes.¹¹

This was not the first time Auchincloss had voted to weaken oversight of the crypto industry. The independent advocacy tracker Stand With Crypto records that in addition to his CLARITY Act vote, he also voted for the FIT21 Act in May 2024 (a similar jurisdictional shift), for H.J.Res.25 in March 2025 (which rolled back the IRS DeFi broker reporting rule, a separate vote covered in our earlier post on Auchincloss’s crypto record), and for the SAB 121 resolution in May 2024 (which rolled back an SEC accounting bulletin that limited banks’ ability to custody crypto).¹²

Each one of these votes is a concrete deliverable for the crypto industry. Each one of them benefited Solana directly: SOL is exactly the kind of token whose regulatory status is at issue, the pump.fun economy depends on lighter SEC oversight, and the broader Solana ecosystem benefits whenever Congress signals that the U.S. regulatory environment is loosening.

Then the Check Arrived

Roughly four months after Auchincloss’s vote on the CLARITY Act, Solana Labs’ two top operating officers wrote him max-out checks on the same day:

The Federal Election Commission filing — the Q1 2026 quarterly report filed by Jake Auchincloss for Congress on April 15, 2026 — records all three contributions (two $3,500 payments from Yakovenko, one $3,500 payment from Chang), all dated November 7, 2025 and processed through the ActBlue payment platform.¹

What Yakovenko Wants

It is not difficult to identify what Solana, as a corporate matter, wants from Congress. The CEO has been publicly explicit about it.

In early March 2025, after the Trump administration designated SOL as one of the assets to be considered for inclusion in a U.S. “strategic crypto reserve” alongside Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, and Cardano — and on the eve of the March 7, 2025 White House Crypto Summit — Yakovenko publicly opposed the federal government holding crypto assets at all, arguing instead for what he called “measurable and rational criteria” set by Congress.¹³ What he wants from Washington is not money. What he wants is a regulatory regime that defines tokens like SOL out from under the SEC’s reach. The CLARITY Act gives him exactly that.

The question is not whether Yakovenko’s interests are well-defined. They are. The question is whether a member of Congress who collected $10,500 from Solana Labs’ two top officers four months after voting to deliver the regulatory restructuring those officers were lobbying for can credibly claim that the two events are unrelated.

The Memecoin Statement Doesn’t Cancel the Vote

Auchincloss’s office may point to his Warren letters as evidence that he is a critic of the crypto industry’s worst excesses, not a captive of them. The record does not support that read. A press release calling for an SEC inquiry into a single bad actor — Donald Trump — is meaningfully different from a vote on legislation that strips the SEC of jurisdiction across the entire asset class.

The first protects no one outside the immediate Trump ethics question. The second restructures who polices Solana, Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Ripple, and every other major crypto firm — for years to come. Auchincloss did the first as rhetoric; he did the second as policy. Solana Labs’ executives did not write him max-out checks for the rhetoric.

It is also worth being precise about the relationship between the Trump memecoin and Solana itself. Auchincloss’s letter focused on Trump as the bad actor. But the infrastructure that made the Trump memecoin possible — the high-throughput chain, the trading platforms, the meme-coin launchpads where 98 percent of new tokens are scams — is the business that Yakovenko runs. You cannot meaningfully condemn the memecoin economy as a “consumer ripoff” and then take maximum-allowable contributions from the company that operates the largest blockchain on which that economy runs. Or rather, you can — many members of Congress do — but constituents are entitled to ask why.

A Pattern, Not an Anomaly

In the two years preceding the Yakovenko and Chang checks, Auchincloss collected at least $77,500 in cryptocurrency-industry contributions, including from Andreessen Horowitz partners (whose firm has invested billions in Coinbase and other crypto companies and has poured $44 million into the crypto industry’s Fairshake super PAC), from the Winklevoss twins of Gemini, and the now-infamous $5,800 from Sam Bankman-Fried that he has refused to return.¹⁴

The Solana contributions are not the largest single item in that pattern. They are the most recent. They arrive at a moment when the industry’s lobbying push — the CLARITY Act, the GENIUS Act, the rollback of SEC custody guidance, the elimination of DeFi broker reporting — is in its final stages. They arrive from the leadership of a company whose business model materially depends on the regulatory restructuring those bills accomplish.

Auchincloss should commit to returning or donating the $10,500 from Solana Labs leadership, and to refusing further contributions from companies actively lobbying the committee on which he serves. The voters of the Massachusetts 4th deserve a representative whose financial interests do not consistently line up with the donors writing the checks.

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