Solana hate boils down to one thing: greed

Pretty much every single comment I have ever seen that expresses negativity about Solana is literally just the same argument: “it’s too centralized.”

Let’s just dispel that myth right now with the facts. Solana has around 3,000 validator nodes spread across many continents. It has a nakamoto coefficient of ~30-35, which beats most layer-1 and layer-2 smart contract platforms. It also has 2 separate validator clients, which reduces its risk of failure and exploitation. Almost ALL blockchains have only 1 client implementation. By all accounts, Solana is one of the least centralized blockchains in existence.

But why do people keep pedaling this “Solana is centralized” narrative?

Well, first of all, most people are non-technical. They don’t have the deep knowledge of how these systems work or, in some cases, what the relevant terms mean. That’s okay, but it limits their judgment. I can forgive people for not knowing these facts.

Others cite the collective “validator reset” events that occurred to get Solana back online after outages. And to that I say… well, decentralization doesn’t mean validators never coordinate. It means they have very little ability and (crucially) incentive to screw over users. In this case, validators had an obvious incentive to cooperate to fix the network and improve its stability, because they have a literal stake in the success of the chain. It would be weird if Bitcoin had a critical exploit and none of the miners wanted to do anything about it. Why would Solana validators not work together to fight for survival? None of this would ever result in collusion to alter/censor block validations, obviously. So that’s an absolutely silly criticism.

But then you prod deeper into the reasons why people say it’s centralized, and eventually they say the one thing they care about: “VCs own too many of the tokens.” There it is, lol. They just don’t want to get involved with a blockchain if they can’t be super early and profit from it. In short, it comes down to greed.

But to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of how blockchains work, token distribution does not contribute much to (de-)centralization. This is especially true when you realize that most whales diversify their staking allocations. But hey, I guess if people think they can be early investors in the next Solana-killer-chain-of-the-day, then more power to them.

Go where the users and devs are. Forget about everything else. Everyone is early these days, even for Bitcoin. Don’t let greed cloud your judgment.