In a thread shared on X, Justin Bons—Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Cyber Capital, a fund he describes as Europe’s oldest cryptocurrency fund—set out a pointed critique of the Solana blockchain. He accuses Solana of suffering from numerous flaws, including repeated network outages, centralizing pressures through demanding hardware requirements, and what he views as a non-deterministic model that sacrifices reliability for speed.Bons conceded that Solana had shown improvements over time—especially in addressing outages—yet emphasized that blockchains “should never go down,” even in experimental stages. He drew attention to a trend of “significant congestion events” resulting from network scheduling bugs and issues with the QUIC protocol, while also stressing that sandwiching and MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) remain an “unsolved problem” industry-wide.Bons described Solana’s hardware demands as particularly burdensome: “The biggest hardware cost by far is RAM, with 256GB of EC memory! This costs thousands of dollars…” Although the high cost of staking further compounds these barriers, Bons acknowledged that it continues to maintain more than 1,400 validators.Related Reading: Solana Price Stays Within Ascending Channel — Is $387 Next?He criticized what he regards as a “broken local fee market” leading to degraded user experiences but expressed optimism that these issues would be resolved this year. Regarding Solana’s non-deterministic design, Bons argued it creates “less than a 1% chance of a TX failure,” but labeled it a structural inefficiency and waste. He also questioned the continued sponsorship of validators by the Solana Foundation, noting that while it was valuable during Solana’s initial growth, “the time has come when this should be discontinued… SOL can stand on its own now.”Even so, Bons made it clear that he has moved from being a critic to a “supporter,” asserting, “SOL is a permissionless & sufficiently decentralized blockchain… BTC & ETH cannot provide this service at scale. That is why SOL is eating their lunch & while carrying on the cypherpunk torch.”Related Reading: ‘I Was Wrong’ On XRP And Cardano, Galaxy CEO Novogratz AdmitsThe remarks prompted a direct response from Solana community developer João Mendonça, who highlighted that the blockchain’s frequent pursuit of performance sometimes leads to near-breaking challenges. Mendonça stated, “Solana is pushing every single limit known to this industry… it still has a >99.9% uptime with more than a year record of no stoppage of block production.”He believes additional occasional “accidents” remain possible until the network has multiple software clients—currently, the majority of stake runs on a single client—yet he maintained that Solana has continued to evolve. Mendonça also addressed the perceived centralization, stressing that high hardware requirements do not necessaril
