- Snowden referred to Solana as a centralized network predominantly used for meme coins and fraudulent schemes.
- The community remains split over the issue of Solana’s decentralization.
Solana [SOL] made headlines this week amid a heated discussion regarding its decentralization.
Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor and whistleblower, instigated the debate.
He voiced his opinions at the recently held Token2049 conference in Singapore, where he stated that Solana has centralized its operations to boost efficiency, but ultimately is saturated with meme coins and scams.
“However, nobody is truly utilizing it apart from for memecoins and scams. If any significant activity occurs on it, governments tend to act.”
Snowden further commented,
‘It (Solana) may become a system where controls can easily be removed from you. One must consider adversarial scenarios rather than just relying on the simple, initial cases.”
Varied perspectives on Solana’s decentralization claims
Some prominent figures within the Ethereum community concurred that Solana is, in fact, ‘centralized.’ Notably, Ryan Berkmans remarked that Snowden’s assertion was ‘mostly accurate,’ pointing to the network’s validator client and the substantial costs associated with running a validator node.
“Fact check: Mostly True, SOL operates best with a 10GBit/s upload speed. Less than 1% meet this requirement. It functions more like a data center chain. Solana has a single full client with no specifications. It resembles more of an application than a protocol. Validators invest heavily to participate—approximately $1.2M in ~2.5 years to achieve break-even. Centralized!”
It’s important to note that the performance of validator execution clients and their global distribution are key factors in assessing blockchain decentralization.
Currently, Solana uses Agave for validator execution, which is viewed as a point of vulnerability when compared to Ethereum’s six diverse clients.
Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius Labs, which focuses on SOL, claimed that there are approximately three clients actively utilized on the platform.
“SOL features more than one client: Frankendancer is operational on mainnet, Jito is live on mainnet, and Firedancer functions on mainnet in non-voting mode (specification also available), with Sig and Mythril (a home-verifying client) on the horizon.”
Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, reiterated a similar viewpoint but asserted that only two clients currently exist.
“Firedancer is currently active on mainnet! It’s just not yet voting or creating blocks as per choice. However, it is fully validating all state transitions. As of now, we officially have two clients.”
Conversely, David Hoffman of Bankless disagreed with Yakovenko, referencing the latter’s recent comments indicating that Agave was intended as a backup to Firedancer, rather than a genuine multi-client framework.
“The initial intention was for Firedancer to serve as the primary client, with the old client as a secondary fallback. This does not align with a robust, multi-client ecosystem.”
As for the geographical layout of nodes, Chris Remus of Chainflow PoS highlighted that SOL’s distribution is comparable to other chains, predominantly concentrated in the U.S. and Europe, alongside some presence in Asia.
At the time of writing, SOL was priced at $141, reflecting a 5% decrease over the last five days of trading.
