No doubt that you have read in forums, media about Solana’s haters, mocking the continuous crashes of the network and its centralisation. The design of a tokenomics that aims to be inflationary, and of course in recent months, the extreme participation that #FTX and #Alameda had of #SOL. With this article I do not intend to dismantle anything, nor to support or motivate anyone, I only seek to show the 2 sides of the same coin.
Bitcoin puts us on a boat where we are in a continuous process of experimentation until we make a safe landing. Where entrepreneurs, leaders and thinkers cohabit with a clear mission: to work to provide interesting features to a blockchain, in a frantic race to be the first to show something that dazzles the world. But history has shown that in a technological race, the winner is almost never decided with the first or the second successful technology.
SOLUTIONS
As for downtime, work is underway to give validators more control over how many transactions they can receive by limiting the flow to #1GB, rather than trying to process large amounts of data. But a blockchain does not live by transactions alone, having particular access points with unique tariffs for those accesses and their activities, neither mixing nor increasing the cost per use is a brilliant solution that is being worked on (e.g. Defi with its access point and tariff, NFT with its access point and tariff, insurance with its access point and tariff, metaverses, oracles, etc.). Reducing downtime therefore means giving the network a high weighting in participation and tariffs, not forgetting the integration they want to do with a second validation client.
Solving centralisation problems (i.e. making the network resistant to censorship) is more a matter of philosophy and ideology than technology. It is very important to move away from the standard set by previous blockchains and to give value to new concepts that networks like #Solana do not provide, such as execution, consensus, efficiency, scalability, plasticity, etc.
Lowering the cost to acquire a node helps its decentralization, because it means that there are a greater number of nodes, ensuring that there is an independent copy of the ledger and can be retrieved to restart the system. #Solana has 3,474 full nodes currently (Ethereum has 9340 nodes), where the cost to run a node starts at $350/month (+ hardware costing $3.5k approx.) and where you can start validating from <1 SOL (ETH requires 32 ETH to participate in consensus, with a nakamoto coefficient of 2).
Solana’s initial parameters in its tokenomics do not reflect or represent other factors that may subsequently affect the total supply of #SOL, such as rate burns, blockades or other events. Therefore, relying on having an initial inflation rate of 8% and a long term inflation rate of 1.5% ($156,000 per day in participation rewards) is not being aware of the reality that may shake Solana in the medium/long term.
YES or YES, #Solana must significantly increase its revenue as a business to offset the effects of inflation. This revenue can be improved and increased by the use of the network, by requiring or needing a priority in the execution of a transaction (in games or NFTs mining), or by the validator’s part in terms of a higher daily arbitrage in settlement transactions.
To finalize, it is true that the founders and the #Solana team worked independently on the design of FTX in the past, with a closer approach at the beginning of the ‘DeFi summer’ (2020), but as much as one would like to link them, #Solana was always a completely separate and decentralized network (nothing to do with the model that Binance maintains with the Binance Smart Chain, where Binance has total control over the chain).
I ask you objectively to look at the next 2 years, so that you can detect what the key catalysts might be that will drive #Solana forward again, this time organically with activity and users, not as speculative as its episode with Alameda and FTX. For me, the main catalyst for success is work and innovation, towards facilitating user-friendly on-ramps. Powerful mobile applications for web 3 are coming in the “Solana Mobile” or “Mobile Stack”, which will also allow the management of private keys, encouraging many people to integrate into their ecosystem.
Another important point will be hybrid or mixed tools, which offer a good experience for both the user and the developer, allowing both to align towards a common goal, especially when it comes to finance, NFT’s and games. After that, there will be a whole world to discover in social networking, messaging, payments…..
Link´s:
https://etherscan.io/nodetracker