Solana has its drawbacks but remains a leader
Justin Bons acknowledged that Solana has shown improvements over time, particularly in addressing outages, but emphasized that "blockchains should never fail," even during experimental phases. He pointed out the trend of "significant overloads" caused by transaction scheduling errors and issues with the QUIC protocol, and underscored that the problem of "sandwich attacks" and MEV (maximum extractable value) remains unresolved across the industry.
Bons described the hardware requirements for Solana as particularly burdensome:
“The biggest cost for hardware is RAM, 256 GB of EC (Error-Correcting Memory). This costs thousands of dollars…”
While 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 deteriorating 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% transaction failure probability," but called it a structural inefficiency and a waste of resources.
He also questioned the ongoing funding of validators by the Solana Foundation, stating that while this support was beneficial in the early stages of Solana's development, "the time has come to stop this… SOL can now function independently."
Despite this, Bons emphasized that his criticism has turned into "support" for Solana, stating:
“SOL is a decentralized and permissionless blockchain… BTC and ETH cannot provide such scalability. That’s why SOL is ahead of them, remaining true to cyberpunk ideals.”