Headline: Solana founder pushes back on viral “84% validator collapse” claim — says real drop closer to 20%, tied to subsidy ending A weekend social-media post that went viral claimed Solana had lost 84% of its validators, sparking fresh debate about the network’s decentralization. Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko pushed back publicly, saying the figure was misleading and that validator participation has fallen by roughly 20% over the past 12 months — a decline he attributes to the end of a subsidy program, not a catastrophic network collapse. Key points - Misleading conflation: Yakovenko emphasized that “validators are not full nodes,” arguing the viral post mixed up validator counts with full-node counts. He says Solana runs about 5,000 full nodes versus roughly 8,300 full nodes on Ethereum — a chain whose market cap is roughly four times larger than Solana’s. - Subsidy program effect: The drop in validator numbers, Yakovenko explains, largely reflects the winding down of the Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP), a one-year bootstrapping initiative that covered voting costs for many small validators. When the subsidy ended, some smaller operators stopped validating. - Ongoing decentralization concerns: Even with Yakovenko’s clarification, critics continue to question how decentralized Solana really is. Comparisons to centralized databases persist on social channels, and skepticism about participation costs remains widespread. - Cost debates and verification efforts: One social-media post even claimed operating costs of $20 million per validator — a number that can’t be independently verified. Industry reporting and node operators indicate running a self-hosted, fully validating Solana node can be resource-intensive: hardware can range from hundreds to thousands of dollars, and voting/operational costs may push annual expenses into the tens of thousands. Some professional validators stake millions of dollars in tokens and report spending hundreds of thousands annually on operations. - Solutions in development: Several startups are working on tools to let users verify Solana’s network from consumer-grade hardware and home internet connections, but those products are still in alpha testing. Bottom line: The viral “84%” figure appears to overstate the situation, according to Solana’s founder, who attributes most of the recent drop in validator participation to the end of a temporary subsidy program. Nevertheless, questions about costs and decentralization remain active topics in the community, and technical and product efforts to broaden participation are still under development. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news

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