Snowden labels Solana a hub for memecoins and scams – Here’s why!

• Snowden called Solana a centralized chain for meme coins and scams. 
• The community was divided on Solana’s decentralization status.

Solana [SOL] hit the news this week following a raging debate on its decentralization status.

Former NSA intelligence contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden’s comment sparked the discussion.

His address was at the recently concluded Token2049 conference in Singapore. Snowden said Solana has centralized everything to ensure efficiency, but it is only full of meme coins and scams. 

“But nobody is using it, except for memecoins and scams. Because if anybody puts anything significant on it, then the states begin moving towards it.” 

Snowden added, 

‘It (Solana) will be a system with levers that people can simply take from you. You’ve to think for adversarial case, as opposed to the convenient, easy, early case.” 

Mixed views on Solana’s decentralization status

Some top Ethereum community insiders agreed that Solana is ‘centralized.’ In particular, Ryan Berkmans said Snowden’s remark was ‘mostly true,’ citing the network’s validator client and the high cost of running the validator node. 

“Fact check: Mostly True, SOL prefers 10GBit/s upload. <1% has this. It’s a data center chain. Sol has 1 full client, no spec. It’s more of an app than a protocol. Validators pay lots to vote. In ~2.5yr, ~$1.2M stake to break even. Centralized!”

For context, validator execution client and geographical node distribution are just one aspect of evaluating blockchain’s decentralization status. 

For validator execution clients, Solana currently runs on Agave, but it’s deemed a single point of failure compared to Ethereum’s 6 different clients. 

Mert Mumtaz, CEO of SOL-focused Helius Labs, claimed there were about three clients on the platform. 

“SOL has more than one client, Frankendancer is on mainnet, Jito is on mainnet, and Firedancer is on mainnet in non-voting mode (and the spec is there btw), with Sig and Mythril (a home verifying client) on the way.” 

Solana’s co-founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, echoed the same stance but noted that there were only two clients. 

“Firedancer is running on mainnet! Just not voting or building blocks yet by choice. But fully validating all the state transitions. There are now officially two clients.” 

However, David Hoffman of Bankless disagreed with Yakovenko, citing the founder’s recent statement that Agave would be a backup to Firedancer, not a multi-client set-up. 

“It was said that Firedancer was intended to be the main client, with the old client as a secondary fallback client. Not exactly the same as a robust multi-client network.” 

Regarding the geographic distribution of nodes, Chris Remus of Chainflow PoS noted that SOL’s distribution was similar to that of other chains, clustered in the U.S. and Europe and partly in Asia. 

In the meantime, SOL was valued at $141 at press time, down by 5% in the past five days of trading.