In a thread shared on X, Justin Bons—Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Cyber Capital, a fund he describes as Europe’s oldest cryptocurrency fund—set out a pointed critique of the Solana blockchain. He accuses Solana of suffering from numerous flaws, including repeated network outages, centralizing pressures through demanding hardware requirements, and what he views as a non-deterministic model that sacrifices reliability for speed.
Solana Has Flaws, But Is Still Leading
Bons conceded that Solana had shown improvements over time—especially in addressing outages—yet emphasized that blockchains “should never go down,” even in experimental stages. He drew attention to a trend of “significant congestion events” resulting from network scheduling bugs and issues with the QUIC protocol, while also stressing that sandwiching and MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) remain an “unsolved problem” industry-wide.
Bons described Solana’s hardware demands as particularly burdensome: “The biggest hardware cost by far is RAM, with 256GB of EC memory! This costs thousands of dollars…” Although the high cost of staking further compounds these barriers, Bons acknowledged that it continues to maintain more than 1,400 validators.
He criticized what he regards as a “broken local fee market” leading to degraded user experiences but expressed optimism that these issues would be resolved this year. Regarding Solana’s non-deterministic design, Bons argued it creates “less than a 1% chance of a TX failure,” but labeled it a structural inefficiency and waste. He also questioned the continued sponsorship of validators by the Solana Foundation, noting that while it was valuable during Solana’s initial growth, “the time has come when this should be discontinued… SOL can stand on its own now.”
Even so, Bons made it clear that he has moved from being a critic to a “supporter,” asserting, “SOL is a permissionless & sufficiently decentralized blockchain… BTC & ETH cannot provide this service at scale. That is why SOL is eating their lunch & while carrying on the cypherpunk torch.”
The remarks prompted a direct response from Solana community developer João Mendonça, who highlighted that the blockchain’s frequent pursuit of performance sometimes leads to near-breaking challenges. Mendonça stated, “Solana is pushing every single limit known to this industry… it still has a >99.9% uptime with more than a year record of no stoppage of block production.”
He believes additional occasional “accidents” remain possible until the network has multiple software clients—currently, the majority of stake runs on a single client—yet he maintained that Solana has continued to evolve. Mendonça also addressed the perceived centralization, stressing that high hardware requirements do not necessarily impede users’ ability to run nodes for verifiability.
According to him, node configurations can be stripped down to more modest requirements for those who only need to track the chain, reducing barriers to broader participation. He noted that all major blockchains employ incentives similar to Solana’s Foundation-funded sponsorship program in order to help bootstrap validator networks, observing that the Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP) already declined from around 20% to about 12% of total stake.
Bons replied by underscoring that, while the presence of multiple clients might indeed reduce future network downtime, such outages should not be excused. He also reiterated skepticism about Solana’s non-deterministic approach, arguing it leads to an “optimistic model instead of a deterministic one,” which he believes reduces transaction reliability.
Mendonça pushed back by suggesting that Solana’s design “prioritizes speed to the user, pain to the developer… just how it should be,” and that halting the system prevents potential state corruption when significant issues arise, at least until multiple clients can secure network redundancy.
At press time, SOL traded at $192.
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