In the clue shared on X, he described as Cyber Capital's fund and chief investment officer, Justin Bons, who is the oldest cryptocurrency fund in Europe, has made a sharp criticism of the Solana blockchain. He accused Solana of suffering from many flaws, including repeated network outages, concentrated pressure through demanding hardware requirements, and a non-deterministic model that he believes is a sacrifice of speed reliability.
Solana is flawed, but still leads
Bonts acknowledged that over time, Solana showed progress (especially when addressing the disruption) stressed that even in the experimental phase, blockchain “should never fall”. He has attracted attention to the trend of “major congestion events” caused by network scheduling errors and QUIC protocol problems, and also emphasized that sandwich and MEV (maximum extractable value) are still “unsolved issues” for the entire industry.
BONS describes Solana's hardware requirements as particularly heavy: “By far, the biggest hardware cost is RAM, with 256GB of EC memory! That costs thousands of dollars…” Although the high cost of storage further exacerbates these obstacles, Bons acknowledges that it continues to maintain over 1,400 validators.
He criticized him for degrading user experience as a “market of broken local expenses” but optimism that these issues will be addressed this year. Regarding Solana's nondeterministic design, BONS believes it “creates less than 1% chance of TX failure”, but is marked as structurally inefficient and wasteful. He also questioned the continued sponsorship of the Solana Foundation for validators, noting that while it was valuable during Solana's initial growth, “it should be time to stop production… You can stand alone now.”
Even so, Bons made it clear that he had transitioned from a critic to a “supporter”, asserting: “SOL is a permissionless and decentralized enough…BTCÐ cannot provide this service on a large scale. That’s why Sol was having lunch and lunch while doing the Cypherpunk torch.”
These speeches prompted a direct response from Solana community developer João Mendonça, who stressed that blockchain’s frequent pursuit of performance can sometimes lead to near-destructive challenges. Mendonça said: “Solana is pushing every limit known to the industry…its uptime is still >99.9%, with no record of block production for more than one year.”
He believes that until the network has multiple software clients (most of the shares are currently running on one client), but he insists that Solana continues to grow. Mendonça also addresses perceived centralization, emphasizing that high hardware requirements do not necessarily hinder users from running nodes for verification.
According to him, for those who only need to track the chain, node configurations can be removed to more modest requirements, reducing wider barriers to participation. He noted that all major blockchains adopt similar incentives to sponsorship programs funded by the Solana Foundation to help the Bootstrap validator network, and observed that the Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP) has dropped from 20% to about 12% total shares.
Bons stressed that while the presence of multiple customers may indeed reduce future network downtime, such interruptions should not be forgiven. He also reiterated his doubts about Solana's non-deterministic approach, believing that this leads to “an optimistic model, not a deterministic model”, which he believes will reduce transaction reliability.
Mendonça recommends Solana’s design “prioritizes user speed, pain for developers…is exactly how it should be done” and stopping the system will prevent potential state corruption in the event of a major problem, at least with multiple customers being able to ensure Before network redundancy.
At press time, Sol traded at $192.
Featured images from Shutterstock, charts from TradingView.com
