In a thread shared on X, Justin Bons—Founder and Chief Funding Officer of Cyber Capital, a fund he describes as Europe’s oldest cryptocurrency fund—set out a pointed critique of the Solana blockchain. He accuses Solana of affected by quite a few flaws, together with repeated community outages, centralizing pressures by means of demanding {hardware} necessities, and what he views as a non-deterministic mannequin that sacrifices reliability for velocity.
Solana Has Flaws, However Is Nonetheless Main
Bons conceded that Solana had proven enhancements over time—particularly in addressing outages—but emphasised that blockchains “ought to by no means go down,” even in experimental levels. He drew consideration to a pattern of “vital congestion occasions” ensuing from community scheduling bugs and points with the QUIC protocol, whereas additionally stressing that sandwiching and MEV (Maximal Extractable Worth) stay an “unsolved drawback” industry-wide.
Bons described Solana’s {hardware} calls for as notably burdensome: “The most important {hardware} price by far is RAM, with 256GB of EC reminiscence! This prices hundreds of {dollars}…” Though the excessive price of staking additional compounds these obstacles, Bons acknowledged that it continues to keep up greater than 1,400 validators.
He criticized what he regards as a “damaged native charge market” resulting in degraded person experiences however expressed optimism that these points can be resolved this yr. Concerning Solana’s non-deterministic design, Bons argued it creates “lower than a 1% likelihood of a TX failure,” however labeled it a structural inefficiency and waste. He additionally questioned the continued sponsorship of validators by the Solana Basis, noting that whereas it was invaluable throughout Solana’s preliminary development, “the time has come when this ought to be discontinued… SOL can stand by itself now.”
Even so, Bons made it clear that he has moved from being a critic to a “supporter,” asserting, “SOL is a permissionless & sufficiently decentralized blockchain… BTC & ETH can’t present this service at scale. That’s the reason SOL is consuming their lunch & whereas carrying on the cypherpunk torch.”
The remarks prompted a direct response from Solana group developer João Mendonça, who highlighted that the blockchain’s frequent pursuit of efficiency generally results in near-breaking challenges. Mendonça said, “Solana is pushing each single restrict identified to this {industry}… it nonetheless has a >99.9% uptime with greater than a yr report of no stoppage of block manufacturing.”
He believes further occasional “accidents” stay potential till the community has a number of software program shoppers—at the moment, nearly all of stake runs on a single shopper—but he maintained that Solana has continued to evolve. Mendonça additionally addressed the perceived centralization, stressing that prime {hardware} necessities don’t essentially impede customers’ capacity to run nodes for verifiability.
In line with him, node configurations might be stripped all the way down to extra modest necessities for individuals who solely want to trace the chain, decreasing obstacles to broader participation. He famous that every one main blockchains make use of incentives just like Solana’s Basis-funded sponsorship program with the intention to assist bootstrap validator networks, observing that the Solana Basis Delegation Program (SFDP) already declined from round 20% to about 12% of whole stake.
Bons replied by underscoring that, whereas the presence of a number of shoppers may certainly cut back future community downtime, such outages shouldn’t be excused. He additionally reiterated skepticism about Solana’s non-deterministic strategy, arguing it results in an “optimistic mannequin as an alternative of a deterministic one,” which he believes reduces transaction reliability.
Mendonça pushed again by suggesting that Solana’s design “prioritizes velocity to the person, ache to the developer… simply the way it ought to be,” and that halting the system prevents potential state corruption when vital points come up, at the very least till a number of shoppers can safe community redundancy.
At press time, SOL traded at $192.
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