- Dogecoin inventor Billy Markus criticized the Solana blockchain as useless and centralized in a recent tweet.
- Markus claimed that blockchains that suffer from high transaction fees and cannot scale are broken and essentially garbage.
Dogecoin inventor, Billy Markus, criticized the Solana (SOL) blockchain on Twitter, calling it a decentralized project without utility. Markus considers blockchains that cannot scale and suffer from high transaction fees as useless. However, he did not name any names and wrote in a general statement about popular cryptocurrencies that are essentially broken garbage if they cannot scale.
— MAӾ (@Pilsner_Maxwell) May 3, 2023
In response to Markus’ claim, users in the community provided various replies, with one user sharing a meme of NANO, a cryptocurrency from 2017’s bull run that was massively hyped for its high scalability but never caught on due to a lack of use cases. However, Markus dismissed NANO as not a valid answer, stating that he was only referring to popular blockchains.
When someone in the comment thread mentioned that Solana fixes the gas fees and limited speed issue, Markus slammed the blockchain as a “centralized database.” However, despite the criticism, Solana remains popular with high scalability and ranks second among blockchains with the most active addresses.
Which chains had the most on-chain active addresses in April & how did they compare to March?
BNB Chain: 10.9M (-11%)
Solana: 5.1M (-12%)
Ethereum: 4.9M (-7.9%)
Polygon: 4.2M (+6%)
Arbitrum: 2.4M (+7.8%)And what were these addresses doing?
Let's take a look on-chain… pic.twitter.com/mjrBPgbmif
— Nansen 🧭 (@nansen_ai) May 3, 2023
The centralization question has been a point of criticism against Solana for quite some time. Although the SOL blockchain is known for being one of the best and most popular blockchains in terms of transaction fees and processing speed, it is much closer to Amazon Web Services (AWS) than to Ethereum, and it is much more centralized. According to Web3 investor Ryan Berckmans, Solana’s change management is “very centralized,” lacking specifications, a research community, and customer diversity.
What are the arguments against Solana from the Ethereum community*? I've seen the "its centralized" argument online, but curious to know the specifics.
*genuinely asking & not tryna have people argue under my tweet, just want to know the basis of the arguments
— cami (@camiinthisthang) May 1, 2023
At press time, the SOL price stood at $21.48. Given the current market situation, SOL is still holding strong and trying to defend a multi-month ascending trend line. However, a daily close above $22 is crucial today.