Solana has its flaws but remains a leader
Justin Bons acknowledged that Solana has shown improvements over time, particularly in addressing outages, but emphasized that "blockchains should never go down," even in experimental phases. He pointed out the trend of "significant overloads" caused by transaction planning errors and issues with the QUIC protocol, while also highlighting that the "sandwich attack" problem and MEV (maximum extractable value) remains unresolved across the industry.
Bons described Solana's hardware requirements as particularly burdensome:
“The largest expense for hardware is RAM, 256 GB of EC (Error-Correcting Memory). This costs thousands of dollars…”.
Although the high cost of staking further complicates these barriers, Bons acknowledged that the company continues to support over 1,400 validators.
He also criticized what he perceives as a "faulty local fee market," which leads to a poor user experience, but expressed optimism about resolving this issue within the year. Regarding Solana's nondeterministic design, Bons noted that it creates "less than 1% chance of transaction failure," but labeled it as a structural inefficiency and a waste of resources.
He also questioned the continued funding of validators by the Solana Foundation, stating that while this support was beneficial in Solana's early development, "it's time to end this... SOL can now operate independently."
Despite this, Bons emphasized that he has transformed from a critic into a "supporter" of Solana, stating:
“SOL is a decentralized and permissionless blockchain... BTC and ETH cannot provide such scalability. That’s why SOL is ahead of them while staying true to cyberpunk ideals.”