Written by: TechFlow

There will always be a gap in the crypto world, but no one expected Snowden to join the battle this time.

That’s right, Snowden is the former NSA whistleblower who is regarded by the crypto industry as a representative of resistance to centralized authority. Recently, at the Token2049 conference in Singapore, Snowden spoke via video link and unexpectedly criticized the Solana blockchain network for being very centralized, saying that the system is easily manipulated by nation-states and bad actors because of its centralized structure.

Snowden emphasized that while Solana has technological advantages in speed and efficiency, these advantages come at the cost of decentralization.

“Solana takes good ideas and says, ‘What if we centralized everything? It’d be faster, more efficient, cheaper… and no one would use it except meme coins and scams,’ ” Snowden commented.

His criticism quickly sparked heated debate in the crypto community, and the debate over whether Solana is centralized is not new, especially in the last crypto cycle, when controversies over SBF and outages were heard everywhere.

At the same time, developers in the Solana ecosystem also began to fight back against Snowden.

Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius, the platform Solana is developing on, challenged Snowden on X, questioning his claim and asking him to provide specific data to support it.

“Snowden appears to believe that Solana is centralized without providing any data to support this view.

I want to see who can come up with hard evidence to prove that there is a single force that can do whatever it wants on this network, either by taking away funds or by holding on to power for a long time.

Show me, with real data, how you would conquer thousands of full nodes in hundreds of geographic locations across different jurisdictions, countries, and governments.

If you can’t do that and call Solana centralized, you’re talking bullshit.”

Furthermore, he added:

“You could say Ethereum and Bitcoin are more decentralized than Solana, and that’s true.

Bolt is faster than LeBron James in the 100-meter sprint, but that doesn't mean James is slow.

The only possible single point of failure is a single client, but that no longer holds true now that Frankendancer is on mainnet, not to mention the full version of Firedancer and other clients that are about to hit the network.

If this network is really that centralized, it would be worth tens of billions now. Come and attack it if you can!"

Snowden’s criticism comes at a time when Solana has attracted much attention for its low transaction costs and high processing speeds, with institutions including VanEck predicting that Solana’s market value could surge due to its superior transaction efficiency, with the price of SOL expected to rise to $330.

VanEck said Solana’s ability to process thousands of transactions per second — far more than Ethereum — makes it a strong contender in the DeFi and payments space.