Recently, there has been a lot of discussion and panic about the sharp decline in the number of Solana nodes. Let's talk about the causes and consequences of this matter. In fact, the number of Solana nodes has indeed decreased from its peak of 2500 to 826 now. The main reason is that the Solana Foundation has gradually cancelled subsidies for small nodes. In the past few years, the Solana Foundation launched a commission program with the initial goal of increasing the number of small validators and improving the decentralization of the network. Therefore, subsidy assistance is used to attract validators holding less than 100000 Sols. For validators holding less than 100000 Sols, a 1:1 staking match will be provided, which means that if you stake 100000 Sols, the Foundation will stake an additional 100000 Sols for you. This will double your staking income and also help you bear the cost of voting fees. Up to 72% of Solana nodes have received subsidies from the program, but only 19% of the total staking amount, while 420 nodes that do not rely on subsidies account for 81% of the staking amount, as shown in the following figure. Currently, the top 20 Solana staking nodes account for exactly 34% of the total, exceeding one-third of the centralized red line. Here, the nodes with the lowest staking amount have 3.7 million Sol exceeding 500 million US dollars! Equivalent to Solana, most nodes are self funded to maintain their appearance and make their data look better. However, this does not mean that Solana is maliciously falsifying data. After all, spending money to subsidize and attract more nodes to participate in the network is a normal operational strategy, but there are too many nodes now receiving subsidies. So Solana realized that this approach not only makes the data look better, but actually cannot truly improve the degree of decentralization. After all, even if there are only over 800 nodes now, and the first 20 nodes account for one-third of the total, then adding thousands or tens of thousands of small nodes is not very useful, it is just a facade to show that there are many nodes. So in April of this year, the latest policy of Solana's commission program was changed to kick out three old nodes that have long relied on subsidies for every new node that receives subsidies, with one in and three out. The more in, the more out, so it is mandatory to actively reduce the number of nodes. In summary, the significant reduction in the number of Solana nodes is a fact, but this fact is not positively correlated with the decrease in Solana network security, as the number of Solana nodes is already in a state of virtual obesity, and the removal or removal of these nodes does not actually produce any fundamental changes.