Written by: Lostin, Helius
Compiled by: Yangz, Techub News
Summary
As of Epoch 685, Solana has 4514 nodes, including 1414 validators and 3100 RPC. No validator controls more than 3.2% of the staking share.
Nakamoto Coefficient (NC) represents the minimum number of independent entities needed to collude maliciously to cause a validity failure and refuse to reach consensus required for new block production. The current Nakamoto Coefficient for Solana is 19, but the actual number may be lower as a single entity can anonymously operate multiple validators.
Solana's validators are spread across 37 countries and regions. The largest concentration is in the United States, with 508 validators. Additionally, four jurisdictions account for over 10% of the total share, with the U.S. at 18.3%, the Netherlands and the UK at 13.7% each, and Germany at 13.2%.
68% of the staking is delegated to validators in Europe, with 50.5% of the staking delegated to validators operating within the EU (excluding Norway, Ukraine, and the UK). Additionally, 20% is delegated to North America.
Validators are distributed across 135 different hosting service providers. Among them, Teraswitch and Latitude.sh (formerly Maxihost) are the two leading providers; the former is a private U.S. company providing hosting services for validators, accounting for 24% of the share; the latter is a Brazilian company providing low-cost bare-metal servers, accounting for 19% of the share.
The Agave client codebase has 357 individual contributors. The Firedancer client is developed by a small team led by Chief Scientist Kevin Bowers, currently having 57 contributors.
The Jito client is a fork of the Agave original codebase that contains an off-protocol block space auction, currently holding an 88% dominant share in the network. However, with the gradual introduction of the new Firedancer client into the ecosystem, significant changes are expected in the next 12 months. Solana and Ethereum are currently the only L1s providing multiple client implementations.
Significant changes to Solana's core components require a formal and public Solana Improvement and Development (SIMD) proposal process. The most significant protocol changes, especially those affecting economic parameters, must go through governance voting. So far, three such votes have been conducted.
The Solana Foundation was established in June 2019 as a non-profit organization registered in Switzerland, dedicated to the development and support of the Solana ecosystem. The foundation's team is relatively lean, composed of 60-65 full-time employees responsible for overseeing the funding of grants, delegation programs, and developer tools.
In addition, the geographical diversity of the Solana developer community is strongly evidenced. The recent hackathon event 'Radar' attracted 13,672 participants from 156 countries, with high participation from India, Nigeria, the United States, and Vietnam. SuperTeam is a network connecting Solana creators, developers, and operators, which has now expanded to 1300 members across 16 countries.
What is Decentralization
Decentralization can be summarized as the absence of single points of failure within the system. This multi-faceted concept involves several dimensions, including token distribution, the influence of key individuals, participation in permissionless networks, control over development, and software/hardware diversity. Aside from Balaji's Nakamoto Coefficient, there are hardly any recognized standards for quantifying the degree of decentralization in blockchains. Many of the measuring criteria are imperfect. Furthermore, discussions around blockchain decentralization are often rooted in political philosophy, leading to profound ideological debates that can sometimes border on religious disputes. Solana's degree of decentralization has been criticized by certain blockchain communities, who argue that Solana lacks decentralization and censorship resistance. A recent example is Edward Snowden, a former NSA whistleblower, who expressed concerns during a keynote speech at the Token2049 conference. However, like many of Solana's critics, Snowden did not provide any data to substantiate his claims, despite being publicly invited to do so. In the following sections of this article, we will analyze Solana's decentralization using data, highlighting areas where the network has demonstrated relatively strong decentralization while pointing out areas needing further progress.
Various Aspects of Decentralization
Through this report, we will analyze Solana's decentralization status using a quantitative and multifaceted approach based on factual and publicly verifiable information. We will assess the following aspects:
Staking Distribution
Geographic Distribution of Nodes
Diversity of Hosting Service Providers
Diversity of Client Software
Diversity of Developers
Governance Process and Entities
At appropriate times, we will compare Solana's metrics with other PoS L1s. It should be noted that similar networks are only used as benchmarks to provide a broader context for Solana's decentralization journey and highlight areas where it may fall short or exceed expectations. These comparisons should not be misunderstood as attempts to claim that one network is superior to another. In many cases, Ethereum provides the most useful benchmark as it is widely regarded as the most decentralized PoS L1. Notably, Ethereum's genesis block was produced in July 2015, while Solana's genesis block was produced in March 2020. Decentralization is dynamic, and blockchains tend to become more decentralized over time. Under similar conditions, it is reasonable to expect that older chains will have a higher degree of decentralization.
Distribution of Staking
The staking distribution in a blockchain network refers to how the network's native tokens are allocated among validators. In a well-distributed system, no single validator or small group would hold excessive staking shares, thus reducing the risk of any entity gaining undue influence or control over network consensus. Balanced staking distribution ensures the diversity of validators, promoting decentralization and making it difficult for any malicious actor to compromise the integrity of the network. As the network's resilience against single validator failures increases, it also helps to enhance fault tolerance. 'You need a very large validator set; intuitively, the larger the validator set, the more secure the network, and academically, the larger the node set, the easier it is to ensure that a minimum spanning tree of honest nodes has access to each other. This is not even referring to the protocol layer, but to people communicating on the phone. In fact, people can enter Discord or IRC, or talk to each other on the phone. And that is the key to solving the splitting issue and figuring out where the problem lies. The more people we have, the easier it is to ensure that splitting is impossible.' — Anatoly Yakovenko, Breakpoint 2024 Running a node on Solana is completely permissionless, requiring only a very low mandatory minimum staking (1 SOL) to operate as a validator. The network natively supports delegated proof-of-stake (dPoS), consisting of 4514 nodes, including 1414 validators and 3100 RPC nodes. By staking volume, the two largest validators are operated by Helius and Galaxy, each holding about 3.2% of the staking share. The minimum delegated stake required to enter the top third and top two-thirds is 4.4 million SOL and 1.23 million SOL, respectively.
For clarity, the following chart groups validators by delegated staking. Among them, 82 validators (5.87% of the total) hold more than 1 million delegated SOL; 825 validators (59.1% of the total) have less than 50,000 delegated SOL, most of which are participating in the Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP), aimed at helping smaller validators achieve sustainability quickly. About 72% of Solana validators benefit from SFDP support, accounting for 19% of the total stake. For an in-depth discussion of SFDP, please refer to our earlier released Helius report: (SFDP and the Challenges Faced by Long-tail Validators).
Just as blockchain addresses do not equate to users, the number of validators does not reflect the actual number of distinct entities operating validators. Large entities may choose to distribute their stakes across multiple validators, leading to a lower real number. For example, Jito (1,2), Coinbase (1,2), and Mrgn (1,2) operate multiple validators. There is no inherent problem with a single entity operating multiple validators; in fact, as long as the validators are distributed rather than centralized, the network can be strengthened by enhancing geographic and hosting service provider diversity. However, if these validators are configured similarly with non-standard settings or firewall rules, risks may arise. Additionally, as part of a 'validator-as-a-service' model, having one entity manage numerous validators on behalf of large companies or projects could bring further decentralization issues.
Nakamoto Coefficient
In proof-of-stake networks, the Nakamoto Coefficient (NC) represents the minimum number of nodes required to control at least one-third of the total stake. The higher this coefficient, the more widely distributed the stake is, indicating a higher degree of decentralization. Additionally, it can also be viewed as the minimum number of independent entities that could collude maliciously to cause validity failures, thus refusing to reach consensus required for new block production. Blockchains based on PoS and Byzantine fault tolerance require more than two-thirds of staking nodes to reach consensus on the network's state to continue processing transactions. To determine Solana's Nakamoto Coefficient, we arranged validators by their staking share from highest to lowest and calculated the number of validators needed to control one-third of the total stake. The result is that Solana's Nakamoto Coefficient reached a peak of 34 on August 13, 2023, and is currently at 19. This coefficient has remained relatively stable over the past year.
Compared to similar networks in the industry, Solana's Nakamoto Coefficient ranks in the middle. However, the above data does not consider that a single entity can anonymously operate multiple validators, so the real Nakamoto Coefficient may be lower.
Geographic Distribution of Validators and Staking Nodes
The geographic diversity of network nodes is essential for reducing risk and promoting the network's antifragility. If too many validators are concentrated in one area, the network's resilience will depend on the regulatory frameworks of those specific jurisdictions. Natural disasters, including earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and tsunamis, pose another risk. Such events can stress the national grid, severely disrupt the operation of data centers, and lead to sudden outages. Man-made threats, such as wars, cyberattacks, and damage to critical internet infrastructure (including undersea cables), also pose risks that could jeopardize network stability. The Solana data used for this section's analysis comes from the 685 epochs of validators.app. The original dataset in spreadsheet format can be found here. This data only reflects staked validator nodes and does not include unstaked RPC nodes.
Solana Validators and Staking Nodes by Continent
After classification by continent, the data shows that 632 Solana validators (46%) are located in Europe, and 550 (40%) are located in North America. In terms of stake distribution, 68% of the staking is delegated to validators in Europe, and 20% is delegated to validators in North America. Among these, 50.5% of the staking is delegated to validators operating within the EU (excluding Norway, Ukraine, and the UK).
In contrast, Ethereum's stake distribution is similar, but North America's weight is higher at 34.4%.
Solana validators categorized by country and region
The distribution of Solana validators spans 37 different countries and regions. The largest concentration is in the United States, with 508 validators (37%) operating in U.S. data centers, followed by 112 validators (8%) in the Netherlands and 111 validators (8%) in Russia.
Geographic Distribution of Solana Validators Classified by Staking Share
When measuring validators by staking share, this distribution is more balanced. Four major jurisdictions each account for over 10% of the share, with the U.S. at 18.3%, followed by the Netherlands and the UK at 13.7% each, and Germany at 13.2%.
In contrast, Ethereum nodes are distributed across 83 different countries and regions, with nearly half located in the U.S. and Germany.
Top 10 Cities Ordered by Solana Node Count and Staking Share
A more detailed analysis of validators and delegated staking distribution by city shows that Solana validators are spread across 121 cities worldwide. Specifically, in the U.S., validators are distributed across all major regions, accounting for a total of 35 cities. The most popular cities are Chicago (124 validators, staking share 2.3%), Los Angeles (57 validators, staking share 2.3%), and New York (32 validators, staking share 3.5%).
Earlier this year, Anza employee Rex St.John proposed strategies to improve the geographic diversity of Solana validators (particularly by expanding support for operators in the Global South) and identified several major challenges:
Higher Latency: Nodes in remote areas struggle to stay in sync with the network
Bandwidth Costs: Bandwidth costs are very high in some areas
Regulatory Constraints: Laws implemented in different jurisdictions limit the feasibility of blockchain infrastructure operations
Underdeveloped Infrastructure: Inadequate network and data center infrastructure
Unfavorable Taxes and Tariffs: High costs for hardware equipment
Talent Shortage: Lack of local specialized Solana talent and limited avenues to obtain the capital required for staking
Hosting Providers
Ideally, the validator set should be hosted by multiple independent providers rather than relying heavily on a few centralized providers. This diversification is crucial for reducing the risk of network disruption or censorship from any single provider. A notable incident in 2022 involved the German hosting provider Hetzner, which unexpectedly removed Solana validators from its services, causing over 20% of active staking nodes (about 1000 validators) to go offline within hours. Nevertheless, Solana continued to run smoothly without any failure issues. Most affected validators successfully migrated to new data centers within a few days, and nearly all staking nodes were back online within weeks.
Hosting Providers of Solana Validators Classified by Staking Share
Solana validators are distributed across 135 different hosting providers, with Teraswitch and Latitude.sh (formerly Maxihost) leading the way; the former is a private U.S. company hosting 24% of validators, and the latter is a low-cost bare-metal server provider from Brazil hosting 19% of validators. Together, these two providers account for 43.4% of the share. Other popular hosting providers include the French cloud computing company OVHcloud (8.65% share) and the Lithuanian Cherry Servers (8.45% share).
Solana Validator Hardware Requirements
As a high-performance, high-throughput blockchain, Solana's requirements for nodes are higher than most of its industry peers. The hardware recommendations for Solana validators include the following key components:
Central Processing Unit: 24 cores/48 threads or more, with a base clock speed of 4.2GHz or faster
Memory: 512 GB
Disk: PCIe Gen3 x4 NVME SSD or higher, 2TB combination or larger. High TBW
No GPU requirement
In practice, Solana's bandwidth requirements make home operations impractical, so validators are mainly run on bare-metal servers in dedicated data centers.
Diversity of Solana Clients
At its launch, Solana only had one validator client developed by Solana Labs, written in Rust. Although Solana Labs' client is no longer actively updated, a fork version called Agave is still in use. Relying entirely on a single client implementation is a significant manifestation of centralization, as it poses the risk of critical software errors leading to the failure of the network's validity. Increasing client diversity has always been a top priority for the Solana community, and with the launch of Firedancer, this goal has finally been realized.
Solana Client
Currently, multiple Solana client solutions are running or in development:
Agave: A fork of the original Solana client maintained by the Solana software development company Anza, written in Rust.
Firedancer: A comprehensive rewrite of the original client in C language, maintained by Jump Crypto.
Frankendancer: A hybrid validator that combines the network stack and block production components of Firedancer with the execution and consensus of Agave.
Jito: A fork of the Agave client built by Jito Labs that introduces off-protocol block space auctions, providing more economic incentives for validators through tips.
Sig: A read-optimized Solana validator client written in Zig by Syndica.
Additionally, Mithril is a low-hardware-requirement client written in Golang, developed by Overclock, which can be used as a full node validator. Having multiple full-time core engineering teams review each other's codebases can significantly enhance the likelihood of identifying errors while promoting knowledge sharing and collaboration. Anza engineer Joe Caulfield pointed out in a recent interview: 'We learned a lot from the Firedancer client team; they came up with many very clever solutions.' Furthermore, both Agave and Firedancer have launched bug bounty programs.
Diversity of Solana Clients vs. Ethereum
Solana and Ethereum are the only L1s providing multiple client implementations. Ethereum has at least five major software clients, with the most widely used being Nethermind written in C at 45% usage and Geth written in Go at 39% usage. On Solana, the Jito client currently accounts for 88% of staking nodes. However, with the gradual introduction and integration of new clients (Frankendancer and Firedancer), this landscape is expected to undergo significant changes in the next 12 months.
Decentralization of Developers
In the book (Quantifying Decentralization), Balaji argues that developer decentralization is a key factor in the blockchain ecosystem, emphasizing the importance of minimizing reliance on individual contributors and reducing 'key person risk.' All core client software on Solana is publicly hosted on GitHub under open-source licenses, allowing for open access and community contributions. The Agave validators maintained by Anza, a software development company founded in early 2024, play a significant role in this area. Anza was established with around 45 employees, roughly half of Solana Labs' previous workforce. In addition to managing Agave, the Anza team contributes to the broader Solana ecosystem through projects like developing token expansion, cross-border payment infrastructure, and Solana's permissioned environment.
Number of contributors to the Agave client codebase
The Agave client codebase has 357 contributors and 26408 commits, but the data is not perfect in terms of original commit counts, and cannot fully reflect the depth of individual contributions. Notably, most commits are primarily authored by a small number of developers, mainly senior engineers and co-founders of Solana, along with a long list of minor contributors.
In contrast, the popular Geth and Nethermind clients on Ethereum also exhibit a similar contributor 'centralization' pattern across a larger community. Geth has 1098 contributors, while Nethermind has 142. More than half of Geth's commits are attributed to three core contributors. In all of Nethermind's commits, contributions from two developers exceed 50%.
Number of contributors to the Firedancer client codebase
The Firedancer client is developed by a small team led by Kevin Bowers from the famous high-frequency trading company Jump in the United States, currently having 57 contributors and 3722 commits. Given that Firedancer is a relatively new project (the first commit dates back to August 2022) and recently went live on the mainnet, the diversity of contributors is still limited.
Solana Ecosystem Developers
Within the broader Solana ecosystem, the geographic diversity of the developer community is unquestionable. Solana's biannual online hackathon is one of the most attended events globally, playing a crucial role in fostering some of the most successful Solana protocol and application teams today (including Tensor, Drift, Jito, and Kamino). The most recent 'Radar' attracted 13,672 participants from 156 countries/regions, with representatives from India, Nigeria, the United States, and Vietnam being particularly prominent.
Additionally, as a network connecting Solana creators, developers, and operators, Superteam has now expanded to 1300 members across 16 countries/regions. Its localized chapters promote collaboration through events and shared workspaces. Furthermore, the Solana Allstars ambassador program led by Step Finance has seen tremendous success in Nigeria, hosting over 120 gatherings in various regions with continuous participation.
Governance
Governance is an important vehicle for decentralization as it determines how decisions are made within the network. This affects various aspects from protocol upgrades to economic policies and community rules. Decentralized governance can enhance the transparency, fairness, and trust of the network.
Governance Voting and SIMD
The Solana Improvement and Development (SIMD) proposal is a formal document required for any substantial changes to Solana's core components. The definition of 'substantial' changes refers to those that typically alter network protocols, transaction validity, or interoperability. Non-substantial changes, such as minor code refactoring or objective performance improvements, do not require a proposal. Although submitting SIMD does not require any permission and can be submitted by any developer or researcher, most SIMD are submitted by developers from client teams engaged full-time in core protocol improvement work. There are two types of SIMD proposals:
Standard Proposals: Impacting core functionalities of Solana (e.g., consensus, network, and API interfaces)
Meta Proposals: Involving processes or guidelines outside of the codebase
SIMD Process
SIMD typically goes through stages such as ideation review, drafting, review, and acceptance. Formal reviews are conducted publicly on GitHub, with the proposal authors responsible for gathering feedback from relevant core contributors, who then decide whether to accept, modify, or withdraw the proposal. Authors are not obliged to implement their proposals, but they are generally encouraged to do so as it is the best way to ensure successful completion of the proposal. If a proposal is accepted, it usually includes a relevant feature implementation tracking issue and may need to be activated through Solana's feature-gate mechanism. Feature gates are first activated on Testnet based on time limits, followed by activation on Devnet and finally on Mainnet. Discussions about improvements involve the following areas:
SIMD (Solana Improvement Document) Github Repository
sRFC (Solana Request for Comments) section of the official Solana forum
Solana Technical Discussion Area
Social channels including X (formerly Twitter) and Telegram
Solana Governance Voting Process
SIMD that significantly changes the protocol, especially those affecting economic parameters, must go through governance voting. The Solana governance voting process is a relatively new initiative initiated by long-term members of the validator community, focusing only on key issues to maintain engagement and avoid governance fatigue. So far, three such votes have been conducted, including:
First consultation vote in October 2023 (14.3% of staking nodes participated)
SIMD33 regarding timely voting points in April 2024 (53% of staking nodes participated)
SIMD96 regarding full priority fees paid to validators in May 2024 (51% of staking nodes participated)
Voting is conducted by depositing tokens into each validator's identity account, where the amount received by each account is proportional to its active staking share in lamports. To vote, validators need to transfer tokens to one of several designated public keys corresponding to the voting options (including abstention). Once voted, it cannot be changed. In this structure, SOL token holders participate indirectly by delegating their SOL to validators whose voting choices align with their values or preferences.
Governance Benchmark
According to a benchmark report released earlier this year by CCData, Solana is one of only four AA-rated assets among the top 40 digital assets assessed against environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria. In the governance rating of the report, Solana ranks fourth among L1s, with assessment factors including stakeholder participation, transparency, and degree of decentralization.
Solana Foundation
The Solana Foundation (SF) was established in June 2019 as a non-profit organization registered in Switzerland, dedicated to the decentralization, adoption, and security of the Solana ecosystem. SF has an initial funding of 167 million SOL tokens, responsible for overseeing the funding of grants, delegation programs, and developer tools. It controls the official brand assets, social media accounts, website, and trademarks. Currently, SF is led by Executive Director Daniel Albert and President Lily Liu, and operates with a relatively lean team of 60-65 full-time employees, under the oversight of the foundation's board. The mission of the foundation is to build a scalable, self-sustaining Solana ecosystem, focusing on education, research, and ecosystem development initiatives. SF organizes large-scale Solana events, including Hacker Houses and the annual Breakpoint conference, to promote developer engagement and community building. The SF developer relations team is responsible for maintaining official documentation, social channels, and developer education. In January 2024, SF transferred the management of its flagship hackathon to Colosseum, a new independent accelerator co-founded by former SF Growth Director Matty Taylor. Dan Albert pointed out in a recent debate: 'Our job is to get ourselves out of a job, find scalable ways to support the network and ecosystem, and then let go.' This indicates that the long-term goal of SF is to establish a network that can sustain itself without oversight.
Summary
As stated in this article, Solana's decentralization is comparable to or even superior to its industry peers on many key metrics, including Nakamoto Coefficient, geographic distribution of validators and staking nodes, developer decentralization, and governance benchmarks, while client diversity remains an evident issue that the new Firedancer client aims to address. To enhance Solana's decentralization, it may be considered to focus on the following aspects:
Explore the distribution of SF's responsibilities among multiple organizations
Increase transparency in foundation spending and grant distribution
Initiatives like 'Solana Nations' to increase geographic diversity
Reduce the maximum expenditure of validator operators, namely voting costs
Explore strategies to reduce validator data output requirements; data output costs for validator operators outside the EU and the US are significantly higher
Encourage more active participation in governance voting
Expand Solana's core contributor and research community to strengthen the network's development
Currently, the Solana validator set is still somewhat concentrated in the United States and the EU, relying on a limited number of hosting service providers. While this challenge is not unique to Solana, it highlights the potential for Solana to improve its level of decentralization in this regard. Finally, thanks to Overclock, Amira Valliani, Matt Sorg, Yelena Cavanaugh, Dan Albert, Tim Garcia, 0xIchigo, Anatoly Yakovenko, and Brady Werkheiser for reviewing early versions of this article.
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