Solana [SOL] has been in the spotlight this week as there is a heated debate about its decentralized status.
Former NSA intelligence contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden sparked the discussion with a comment he made.
This statement was made at the Token2049 conference that just took place in Singapore. Snowden said that Solana focused everything on efficiency, but it was full of meme coins and scams.
âBut no one uses it, except for meme coins and scams. Because if someone puts anything important on here, countries will start taking action.â
Snowden also added,
âIt (Solana) will be a system with levers that people can easily take away from you. You have to think for the opposite situation, instead of the convenient, easy, initial case.â
Mixed Views on Solana's Decentralized State
Some in the Ethereum community agree that Solana is âcentralized.â In particular, Ryan Berkmans said Snowdenâs comments were âlargely trueâ, citing the networkâs validator clients and the high cost of running a validator node.
âFact Check: Mostly true, SOL needs 10GBit/s upload. Less than 1% have this. This is a central data chain. Sol has a full client, no configuration. It's an application more than a protocol. Validators have to pay a lot to vote. In about 2.5 years, $1.2M just to break even. Centralized!â
For context, validator execution and geographic node distribution are just one aspect of assessing the decentralized status of a blockchain.
See also: Expert Forecast: Strong Buy Signal For Solana (SOL)
For clients that execute validators, Solana currently runs on Agave, but it is considered a single point of failure compared to Ethereum with 6 different clients.
Mert Mumtaz, CEO of SOL-focused Helius Labs, claims that there are about three customers on the platform.
SOL has more than one client, Frankendancer is on mainnet, Jito is on mainnet, and Firedancer is on mainnet but in non-voting mode (and the configuration is already there), with Sig and Mythril (a homegrown verification client) in development.
Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko agrees but notes that there are only two customers.
âFiredancer is running on mainnet! Just hasn't voted or built a block yet, but it has done all the state transitions. Now officially has two clients.â
However, Bankless' David Hoffman disagrees with Yakovenko, citing the founder's recent statement that Agave will be a backup compute for Firedancer, not a robust multi-client setup.
âThat said, Firedancer aims to be the primary customer, with the old customer as a secondary backup customer. Not quite the same as a strong multi-customer network.â
Regarding the geographical distribution of nodes, Chris Remus of Chainflow PoS commented that SOL's distribution is similar to other Chains, concentrated mainly in the US and Europe and partly in Asia.
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Meanwhile, SOL's price at the time of publication was $141, down 5% over the past five trading days.
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