Edward Snowden, a well-known whistleblower and privacy advocate, made sharp comments about Solana during the TOKEN2049 conference in Singapore. After delivering his speech, titled “The Next Threat to Speech,” Snowden participated in a Q&A session where he criticized Solana’s structure, expressing concern about its centralized nature and the types of projects it supports.
To answer the question, “How do we design technology from the ground up so we know it’s safe?” Snowden took the opportunity to draw comparisons between Bitcoin’s controversial design and what he saw as Solana’s highly vulnerable, centralized system.
“If you look back at the Bitcoin whitepaper, I think what you see is an anti-system approach. And that’s what you really have to think about,” said Snowden. Without directly naming SOL at first, he quickly changed to criticizing the network, saying, “I don’t want to name names but Solana is taking good ideas and they go, so, what if we put everything in one place? It will be faster, it will be more efficient, it will be less expensive, and yes it is, you are right, but no one is using it except for meme coins and scams.”
Snowden went on to explain his deep concerns, stressing that Solana’s centralization would make him vulnerable to government control or other forms of outside intervention. “If anyone puts something important to it and all the states start moving forward, it will be a system with features that people can just take away from you,” Snowden warned, indicating the potential risk of censorship or blackmail. the future.
His main argument was the need to think differently in the design of decentralized systems, especially given the growing popularity of crypto platforms that he received from governments and regulators around the world. “You have to think about the counter-offense instead of the simple and easy first-off. That means it thinks about how it will be attacked and makes sure that it survives that,” he said.
The Solana Community Responds
Snowden’s comments did not go unnoticed, with key figures in the SOL ecosystem quickly responding. Mert Mumtaz, founder and CEO of Helius Labs, a Solana-based project, took to X to defend the network, refuting Snowden’s claims. “Snowden seems to think Solana is in the middle – while providing zero data to back it up,” Mumtaz wrote.
He asked critics to provide concrete evidence of any vulnerabilities in Solana that would allow a single organization to control the network or put users’ money at risk. “I challenge anyone to show me a specific attack vector that would allow one company to lose money, or more power to the network,” continued Mumtaz, emphasizing the geographical distribution of Solana’s sites and the diversity of their operations. .
He acknowledged that while Bitcoin and Ethereum are more widely distributed, this does not necessarily mean that Solana is vulnerable to the kind of centralized control that Snowden referred to. “Here’s what you might say instead: Ethereum and Bitcoin are more decentralized than Solana – this is fine. Usain Bolt is faster than Lebron James in the 100m dash, that doesn’t mean Lebron is slow. The only single point of failure would be: one customer,” Mumtaz wrote.
He highlighted recent developments in Solana’s client diversity, pointing to the deployment of “frankendancer” on the mainnet, and the upcoming “Firedancer” client, which also splits the network. He concluded his argument by saying, “If the network is so centralized, it’s worth tens of billions—go attack it if you can!”
At press time, SOL traded at $143.
Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com