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 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 phases. He drew consideration to a development of “important 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 downside” industry-wide.
Bons described Solana’s {hardware} calls for as notably burdensome: “The most important {hardware} value by far is RAM, with 256GB of EC reminiscence! This prices 1000’s of {dollars}…” Though the excessive value of staking additional compounds these obstacles, Bons acknowledged that it continues to take care of 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 could be resolved this 12 months. 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 helpful throughout Solana’s preliminary progress, “the time has come when this must 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 not 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 neighborhood 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 recognized to this {industry}… it nonetheless has a >99.9% uptime with greater than a 12 months file of no stoppage of block manufacturing.”
He believes extra occasional “accidents” stay doable till the community has a number of software program purchasers—at present, nearly all of stake runs on a single consumer—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’ means to run nodes for verifiability.
In accordance with him, node configurations may be stripped all the way down to extra modest necessities for individuals who solely want to trace the chain, lowering obstacles to broader participation. He famous that each one main blockchains make use of incentives much like Solana’s Basis-funded sponsorship program to be able to assist bootstrap validator networks, observing that the Solana Basis Delegation Program (SFDP) already declined from round 20% to about 12% of complete stake.
Bons replied by underscoring that, whereas the presence of a number of purchasers would possibly certainly cut back future community downtime, such outages shouldn’t be excused. He additionally reiterated skepticism about Solana’s non-deterministic method, arguing it results in an “optimistic mannequin as a substitute 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 must be,” and that halting the system prevents potential state corruption when important points come up, no less than till a number of purchasers can safe community redundancy.
At press time, SOL traded at $192.
Featured picture from Shutterstock, chart from TradingView.com
