A viral submit claimed Solana misplaced 84% of its validators, however Anatoly Yakovenko says the actual drop is ~20% and tied to a subsidy program ending, not a community collapse.
Abstract
- A social submit alleging an 84% plunge in Solana validators sparked contemporary centralization fears, evaluating SOL to a “centralized database.”
- Yakovenko countered that validator participation fell nearer to twenty% after the Solana Basis’s Delegation Program wound down.
- He pressured the distinction between validators and full nodes, claiming roughly 5,000 Solana full nodes versus 8,300 on Ethereum regardless of ETH’s a lot bigger market cap.
A dispute over Solana’s (SOL) validator depend and community decentralization emerged over the weekend after a submit claiming an 84% drop in validators circulated broadly on social media.
Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko disputed the claim, stating the precise decline in validator participation was nearer to twenty% over the previous 12 months, based on his public response.
Yakovenko additionally contested the submit’s conflation of validators and full nodes, writing that “Validators will not be full nodes.” Based on Yakovenko, Solana operates roughly 5,000 full nodes, in comparison with 8,300 full nodes on the Ethereum blockchain, which has a market capitalization 4 occasions bigger than Solana’s.
The decline in Solana nodes was attributed to the conclusion of the Solana Basis Delegation Program (SFDP), a one-year bootstrap initiative that coated voting prices for small validators, based on Yakovenko’s clarification.
Critics continued to query Solana’s decentralization despite the corrections, with comparisons to centralized databases persisting. One social media consumer claimed working prices of $20 million per validator prevented broader participation, although this determine couldn’t be independently verified.
Working a self-hosted, absolutely validating Solana node requires substantial monetary assets, based on business stories. {Hardware} prices start within the tons of of {dollars} and might attain hundreds, whereas voting prices can push annual bills into the tens of hundreds of {dollars}, based on node operators.
Some Solana validators stake hundreds of thousands of {dollars} price of tokens and spend tons of of hundreds of {dollars} on operational prices, based on business contributors. A number of startups have been growing options to allow community verification on consumer-grade hardware and residential web connections, although such merchandise stay in alpha testing phases.
