Whistleblower Edward Snowden has faced a backlash from the Solana (SOL) community following his remarks about the blockchain’s alleged centralization during his keynote speech at Token 2049 in Singapore.
Snowden’s comments, which suggested that Solana’s design compromises decentralization for efficiency, sparked a fierce debate among community members and developers. During his keynote address on Monday, Snowden expressed concerns about Solana’s prioritization of speed and efficiency over decentralization.
“Solana… are taking good ideas, and they’re just going, ‘What if we just centralized everything? It’ll be faster, it’ll be more efficient, it’ll be cheaper.’ And yeah, sure it is… but nobody’s using it but for like meme coins and scams.” He stated.
Snowden’s comments drew parallels between Solana’s structure and historical examples of state control over digital communications. He warned that such centralization could create vulnerabilities exploitable by government actors, citing the case of Pavel Durov, Telegram’s founder, who faced state coercion leading to changes in his platform’s policies.
That said, the Solana community quickly responded to the pundit’s allegation with Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, firing back with a brief tweet: “Snowden is centralized.”
Other Solana supporters quickly rallied to defend the network’s decentralization. One pseudonymous member, “Oxmert,” took issue with Snowden’s claims, stating, “Snowden seems to think Solana is centralized while providing zero data to back it up.” Oxmert emphasized that compromising the network would be exceedingly difficult, given its thousands of geographically distributed full nodes across various jurisdictions.
“You might argue that Ethereum and Bitcoin are more decentralized than Solana,” he further noted, highlighting upcoming clients like Firedancer, which is set to enhance Solana’s scalability and decentralization efforts even further.
However, not all users disagreed with Snowden. A Twitter user named “Dave” raised concerns about the Solana Foundation’s significant stake in the network, suggesting potential centralization risks. Another user supported Snowden’s view, describing the network as a “data center chain” with high hardware requirements and a single full client.
Notably, the debate surrounding Solana’s centralization is not new. The blockchain has faced similar allegations in the past, particularly regarding its initial token distribution. Significant investments from prominent firms in Solana’s early stages led to concerns about token concentration among private investors.
That said, this controversy also comes at a time when Solana is still recovering from the fallout of the FTX collapse. Despite recovering notably, the price of SOL, has remained highly volatile since the fall of FTX, whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was a vocal supporter of Solana.
A recent report by Arkham Intelligence highlighted these ongoing challenges, revealing that FTX still possesses over $1 billion in Solana tokens that it must offload as part of its bankruptcy proceedings, potentially adding pressure to SOL.
