Solana validator decentralization under scrutiny
The decentralization of Solana (SOL) was the center of debate over the weekend after a dubious post about an 84% drop in its validator count went viral.
Incensed, Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko fired back at it and its comments, contesting not only the data itself but its transposition of two markers of decentralization.
The original post claimed participation by Solana validators had dropped 84% over the past 12 months. In fact, the percentage was closer to 20%.
The original post also mixed apples and oranges, Yakovenko wrote. “Validators are not full nodes.”
By Yakovenko’s definition, Solana has approximately 5,000 full nodes, which compares impressively to the 8,300 full nodes operating the 4x more valuable Ethereum blockchain.
Moreover, the slight decline in Solana nodes over the past year was foreseeable due to the Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP). Financially, SFDP was a bootstrap program that covered voting costs for small validators for a single year.
Solana is still working on decentralization
Despite Yakovenko’s corrections, many skeptics of its decentralization remained. Comparisons of its blockchain to a centralized database continued, which have persisted for years.
“Why is solana validator count collapsing?” asked one with an obvious bias, “Because it costs $20M to run a scumlana validator. No one can afford to run one.”
Indeed, the cost of operating a self-hosted, fully validating, Solana node is famously expensive.
Without relying on RPC node providers like Alchemy or Quicknode, costs for hardware alone start in the hundreds of dollars and quickly reach thousands. Voting costs can take the annual bill into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Read more: Solana validators play delay games — Toly wants them punished
Worse, some Solana validators stake millions of dollars worth of SOL and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on operational costs for their node.
Startups have been working for years to allow regular people to verify Solana’s mainnet on modest hardware and home internet.
Proofs of concept for such cost-saving devices are still in alpha releases.
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