A viral post claimed that Solana had lost 84% of its validators, but Anatoly Yakovenko said the actual decrease was up to 20% and was related to the end of the subsidy program rather than the network collapse.
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- A social post claiming that Solana’s validators have plummeted by 84% has raised new centralization concerns. sol to a “centralized database”.
- Yakovenko countered that after the Solana Foundation delegation program ended, validator participation had dropped to nearly 20%.
- He highlighted the difference between validators and full nodes, claiming that Solana has approximately 5,000 full nodes compared to 8,300 for Ethereum, despite ETH’s much larger market capitalization.
The fight over Solana (sol) The decentralization of the number of validators and the network emerged over the weekend after a post claiming an 84% reduction in validators went viral on social media.
Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko disputed this claim, saying in his official response that the actual decline in validator participation was nearly 20% over the past 12 months.
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Yakovenko also took issue with the post’s confusion of validators and full nodes, writing that “validators are not full nodes.” According to Yakovenko, Solana operates about 5,000 full nodes, compared to 8,300 full nodes on the Ethereum blockchain, and its market capitalization is four times that of Solana.
Yakovenko explained that the decline in Solana nodes was due to the end of the Solana Foundation Delegated Program (SFDP), a one-year bootstrap initiative that covered voting costs for small validators.
Despite the revisions, critics continued to question Solana’s decentralization and comparisons to centralized databases persisted. One social media user claimed that operating costs of $20 million per validator were preventing widespread participation, although this figure could not be independently verified.
According to industry reports, operating a self-hosted, fully verified Solana node requires significant capital. Node operators say hardware costs start in the hundreds and sometimes reach thousands of dollars, while voting costs can push annual expenses into the tens of thousands of dollars.
According to industry insiders, some Solana validators are staking millions of dollars worth of tokens and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in operating costs. Several startups are developing solutions that enable network validation on consumer hardware and home Internet connections, but such products are still in alpha testing.
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