Snowden emphasized that while Solana has technical advantages in speed and efficiency, these advantages come at the cost of decentralization.
Written by: Deep Tide TechFlow
The crypto world is never short of water cooler wars, but it was unexpected that this time Snowden joined the fray.
Indeed, the Snowden referred to here is the former NSA whistleblower, regarded in the crypto industry as a representative of resistance against centralized authority. Recently, at the Token2049 conference held in Singapore, Snowden delivered a speech via video link, unexpectedly criticizing the Solana blockchain network for being highly centralized, stating that the system, due to its centralized structure, is easily manipulated by nation-states and bad actors.
Snowden emphasized that although Solana has technical advantages in speed and efficiency, these advantages come at the cost of decentralization.
“Solana adopted good ideas and proposed, ‘What if we centralize everything? It will be faster, more efficient, cheaper… and besides meme coins and scams, no one will use it,’” Snowden commented.
His criticism quickly sparked intense debate within the crypto community, and the discussion about whether Solana is centralized is not new, especially during the last crypto cycle, where controversies surrounding SBF and the collapse were incessant.
Meanwhile, developers from the Solana ecosystem began to push back against Snowden.
Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Solana's development platform Helius, challenged Snowden on X, questioning his claims and demanding specific data to support his assertions.
“Snowden seems to think Solana is centralized without providing any data to support this view.
I want to see who can provide real evidence to prove that any single entity can act at will on this network, either siphoning off funds or holding power for a long time.
Tell me with real data how you would conquer thousands of full nodes distributed across hundreds of geographical locations in different jurisdictions, countries, and governments.
If you can't do that but still claim Solana is centralized, then you are talking nonsense.”
Additionally, he added:
“You can say that Ethereum and Bitcoin are more decentralized than Solana, and that’s true.
Bolt is faster than LeBron James in the 100 meters, but that doesn’t mean James runs slowly.
The only possible single point of failure is: a single client, but now that Frankendancer is on the mainnet, that argument no longer holds, not to mention the full version of Firedancer and other clients that are about to go live.
If this network is really that centralized, it’s worth several billion now; come and try to attack it if you can!”
Snowden's criticism comes at a time when Solana is gaining attention for its low transaction costs and high processing speeds, with institutions like VanEck predicting that due to Solana's outstanding trading efficiency, its market capitalization could soar, with SOL's price expected to rise to $330.
VanEck stated that Solana's ability to process thousands of transactions per second (far exceeding Ethereum) makes it a strong competitor in the DeFi and payment sectors.
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